We challenge the frequent, recurrent political framing of today’s momentous, often distressing social, political, and ecological events as ‘exceptional, unprecedented crises.’ We resituate this framing within the academic discourse about epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression, recentering critical voices that have repeatedly called attention to the “death path” of Western Civilization – to borrow the apt expression of Basic Call to Consciousness ([1977] 2005, 90). We follow these thinkers in understanding contemporary ‘crises’ as ongoing manifestations of the colonial processes and lifeways that have brought destruction to Indigenous and colonized peoples over the past 500 years.

We contend that the plausibility of the ‘crisis’ framing requires an unwarranted narrow focus on the present, a high level of selective attention to the experience of the privileged few, and historical amnesia about, and contemporary disqualification of the political discourses of the marginalized, oppressed, and colonized ‘others.’ An emphasis on ‘crisis’ as unprecedented and exceptional should therefore be understood as a manifestation of an epistemology of ignorance: a feature of oppressive and dominating social structures that serves to exculpate and normalize the status quo by disowning its intrinsic negative consequences and preventing those who reproduce it through their normal(ized) conduct from recognizing these consequences.

We explain how Western Civilization has repeatedly been framed by Indigenous and colonized peoples as following a ‘death path,’ but that this framing has been disavowed, so that the critiques directed towards Western Civilization and its nefarious consequences have been largely forgotten, sidelined, and disqualified. To support this argument, we offer a survey of claims made over the centuries to indict Western Civilization and denounce the catastrophes to which it leads. Far from being novel or unprecedent crises, these catastrophes are the expected, arguably typical, outcomes of Western Civilization’s normal practices. Our contention is ultimately that the normative political actors of the Global North need to stop being gobsmacked by apparent crises and pay closer attention to what the peoples of the world have been clamoring for centuries: these catastrophes are likely features, not exceptional nor unprecedented.

About the speaker

Yann Allard-Tremblay is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University and a Senior Research Associate of the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg. He is a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Universities of St Andrews and Stirling. As a member of the Huron-Wendat First Nation, his work is committed to the decolonization and Indigenization of political theory. His forthcoming book, Disjunctures, explores irreconcilable political differences between Indigenous and dominant Euro-Modern lifeways.