Freedom to Know

Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach is Professor of Philosophy and holds the chair for Diversifying Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. She is editor of the Journal of World Philosophies and series editor of the Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies book series and co-series editor of Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies. She is co-author of A Practical Guide to World Philosophies: Selves, Worlds and Ways of Knowing (Bloomsbury, 2021).

The geography of reason has shifted. For decades, W.E.B. Du Bois has been deemed “philosophical” only to the extent that he could be read in relation to American pragmatists or German idealists. Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach’s Freedom to Know refuses this complicity with the limitations of Western philosophy. She reads Du Bois alongside Bhimrao Ambedkar, Pandita Ramabai, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mohammed Iqbal as thinkers striving to reclaim the dignity and humanity denied to the darker races of the world by white supremacy. This marks an exciting turn in Du Bois scholarship and a novel intervention in anti-colonial theory.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Breaking Through Epistemic Silencing1. Setting the Stage2. Rigidified Concept Use and Epistemic Silencing: Deprivileging Dominant Ways of Knowing Then and Now3. Chapter OverviewConceptual Borrowing, Group Positioning and the Making of a New Human Being1. Epistemic Domination and Resistance2. Conceptual Borrowing at the Group Level and Its Risks3. Stabilizing Alternate Conceptual Practices through Pedagogy4. Creating an Alternate Conceptual SpacePandita Ramabai, Epistemic Discrimination and Being Counted as a Knower1. Becoming a Pandita and Epistemic Discrimination2. Knowing as Doing, Epistemic Silencing and Freedom3. Ramabai’s Knowledge as a Learned Woman from Colonial India4. Contextualising Ramabai’s Account of KnowingKnowing the Self and the World through an Iqbalian Īmān1. Knowing Through Īmān.2. Affirming the External World through Īmān3. Affirming the Internal World through Īmān4. Khudī and ‘Ishq5. Working toward Khudī with the Ego6. Working with Self-Possession after Khudī7. Contextualizing Iqbal’s ImānThe Making of a Tagorean Samāj Through Rasa1. Truth, Beauty and Experts2. Yearning for Freedom and Appeasing It3. Rasa and Subjectivity4. Tagore’s Rasa Retrieval Under Conditions of Coloniality5. Contextualizing Tagorean RasaLine-Smudging, Self-Consciousness and Freedom in Dark Princess1. African American Selves in a Segregated World2. Dark Princess: A Romance.3. Love, Common Humanity, and Remaking Ideals through Negotiations4. Love, Common Humanity, and Remaking Ideals through Kali5. Love, Common Humanity, and Remaking Ideals through Krishna and Radha6. Contextualizing Du Bois’s Dark PrincessCreating a Community Based on Ambedkarian Maitrī1 Opportunity Equity and the Contingency of Birth2 The Hindu Social Order in Comparison to a Free Social Order3 Making a Community in India4 Making a New Community in India5 Contextualizing Ambedkar’s Meta-PlanConclusion: Resisting the Coloniality of Being, Then and NowBibliography