Zero-Point Hubris

Grounded in postcolonial and decolonial thinking, this book argues that European colonial rule did more than seize land and labor. It also inflicted a harm on knowledge itself, which the author calls epistemic violence. The author, Santiago Castro-Gómez, a Colombian philosopher, contends that near the close of the eighteenth century this harm took a specific form in the Spanish Empire, one he names zero-point hubris.

Under this arrangement, different ways of knowing were placed along a timeline. Modern scientific reasoning sat at the summit, while every other system of understanding was treated as an earlier stage that science had left behind. Creole intellectuals who embraced Enlightenment ideas placed the Black, Indigenous and mixed-race peoples of New Granada at the bottom of that scale.

Castro-Gómez shows that in the colonial margins of Spanish America, Enlightenment thinking did two things at once. It separated science from all other forms of knowledge, and it separated the creoles from the castes socially and ethnically. The argument holds that epistemic violence, not only physical violence, lies at the very foundation of Colombian nationhood.