I think I've finally found the concept I've been trying to come up with for the last year and half: "segregated knowledges." I intend to use the word to talk about the colonial processes by which various peoples' (Indigenous peoples, for my present purposes) intellectual traditions are excluded from either the dominant canon or from academic discussions all together.
So basically, I intend the term to provide a critique of two things: multiculturalist scholarship that "silos" scholarship into Africana Studies, Latin American Studies, Women's/Gender Studies, etc. While this has been an important and transformational history, it is not a social organization that with the capacity to house a decolonized world. More importantly, the other critique is of intellectual traditions that are still silenced through academic discourse - for example, Native people's oral histories and symbolic traditions. In the rare occasions in which these traditions are included in scholarship, it is either through the radical methods of community-based scholars or it through people who extract these ideas without challenging the colonial materialities in which this extraction is made possible and desirable.
One concern I have is that segregation is a term used for Black peoples' experiences of colonialism - so I'm not sure what happens when I stretch the term. It brings up the question, what does integrating knowledges look like? Is it more like assimilation or is it more like sovereignty? I'm worried that the historical implications of these terms would lead to a push towards mere inclusion, when I think what is needed is a more radical transformation of how and where we organize scholarship. Community empowerment!
