EPISTEMIC ASPHYXIATION: Whiteness, Academic Publishing, and the Suffocation of Black Knowledge Production

This chapter contributes to the discourse on anti-Black technologies in and beyond higher education, with specific attention to the academic publishing process. Further, it endeavors to draw out otherwise possibilities for existence in the wake of anti-Blackness. The creation of property, norms, and expectations as the enforcement of power is neither ambiguous nor inevitable; instead, it is a specific and intentional move to structure society. Norms, as the creation of laws and practices, set whiteness as the essence of property and personhood. Whiteness, as the arm of academic publishing, is a form of epistemic violence. Dotson discussed epistemic violence as a refusal, intentional or unintentional, of an audience to reciprocate a linguistic exchange owing to pernicious ignorance communicatively. However, tracing the histories of Black literacies and knowledge production testifies that challenging white normativity is to demand breath elsewhere. To pursue an elsewhere is to flee the concealments of whiteness, and more specifically, the comportments and routines.