Modernity, Epistemicide, and Other Knowledges

or Dialogues between Frankenstein, Sinners, and Differences

Abstract

This essay critically examines Western modernity through the notion of epistemicide and the geopolitics of knowledge, articulating literature, sociology, and decolonial thought. Taking Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an inaugural metaphor, I argue that modernity projected its own “monstrosities” outward, defining a restrictive ideal of humanity and relegating the Other to a nonhuman or subhuman condition. Drawing on Ramón Grosfoguel’s contributions, the text analyzes the four genocides/epistemicides foundational to modernity—against Muslims and Jews, Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and women—highlighting how epistemic racism and sexism structured the canon of the social sciences. In dialogue with W.E.B. Du Bois, Raewyn Connell, Susan Buck-Morss, Silvia Federici, and Gayle Rubin, the essay demonstrates how race, gender, and sexuality were systematically marginalized in the production of sociological knowledge. The film Sinners (2025) is mobilized as a contemporary language to update the experience of the “color line” and cultural erasure. Finally, the text presents the Indigenous thought of Ailton Krenak as an ontological alternative to Western modernity, arguing that listening to other knowledges is a necessary condition for imagining less violent forms of coexistence.