Politics of knowledge and the voice (or silence) of a scholar

This paper is a reply to the commentaries on “Kant on public reason and the linguistic Other.” The author uses the occasion to reflect on the politics of knowledge production and the voice or silence of a scholar in an unjust world. She reaffirms her suspicion that Kant’s theory of public reason is too restrictive and conservative to facilitate struggles against injustices, especially the historically rooted and structurally entrenched ones. Assuming that a scholar does her work from a standpoint that is shaped, knowingly or unknowingly, by her social positionality in a given historical context, she argues that it is important for scholars to cultivate a meta-awareness of the social, political, and historical forces that influence their work. In light of the current political climate, she urges those who have bought into the (illusory) norms of scholarly neutrality to engage in critical reflections on their methodology to avoid being complicit in ideas and practices that perpetuate injustices. She uses Kant’s racialization of Blacks, coupled with his normative silence about the institution of colonial slavery, to illustrate that point.