Fellow Project
2025–2026
Epistemological Marronage Black Womanhood and Counter-Hegemonic Knowledge in a World in Crisis
In a time of unprecedented global upheaval, this project examines how Black women across Latin America and the Caribbean generate forms of knowledge that offer radical frameworks for reimagining humanity and our collective future.
The research introduces two key concepts: epistemological marronage—reinterpreting historical flight from enslavement as a contemporary intellectual and spiritual departure from hegemonic knowledge systems—and ontological self-birth—the deliberate rejection of imposed identities to craft autonomous modes of existence that transcend Eurocentric worldviews. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter's notion of the “demonic ground,” it traces how Black women transform their historical and ongoing exclusion from dominant definitions of the human into powerful sites of resistance, survival, and world-building.
Integrating literary and visual analysis, archival research, history, and political thought, Epistemological Marronage demonstrates how Black women's creative and intellectual practices constitute vital counter-hegemonic epistemologies. By reshaping relationality, community, and the meaning of being human, their work opens pathways toward more just and livable worlds.
