We must change the world while constantly reinterpreting it; as much as change itself, the reinterpretation of the world is a collective endeavor...The imagination of the end [of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy] is being corrupted by the end of imagination.

(Santos, 2018: viii, x).

                                                                  وأنت تفكر بالآخرين البعيدين، فكِّر بنفسك  
                                                                     قُلْ: ليتني شمعةُ في الظلام

And when you think of others far away, think of yourself,
Say: I wish I were a candle in the darkness.

(Mahmoud Darwish, 2005)

The decades of prolific and influential work by Boaventura de Sousa Santos can hardly be accounted for in a short essay. Activist, intellectual, poet, and scholar, Professor de Sousa Santos is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as well as Emeritus Director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. Internationally known and often cited, Santos has published widely on the sociology of law, globalization, participatory democracy, the state and reform, epistemology, social movements, the World Social Forum, and higher education. Santos’ many books, as well as those co-authored with colleagues, and his numerous articles and essays have been translated into Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, Danish, Romanian, Polish, Arabic, Korean, and Greek. His accomplishments also include regular newspaper articles, essays, interviews, videos, books of poetry, and even rap lyrics.

Boaventura Santos is the recipient of a long list of prestigious awards, including most recently the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022. In bestowing that honor, the Caribbean Philosophical Association characterized the person and work of Boaventura Santos. An intellectual proud of his humble beginnings among the Portuguese peasantry and well-aware of the struggles against fascism, Professor de Sousa Santos has dedicated his life to fighting against all forms of oppression while advocating for the affirmation of livable life. His work on southern epistemologies directly resonates with the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s project of shifting the geography of reason and with Fanon’s call to build new concepts in the struggle to create a better world.

So, no, a short essay can do little justice to that long, diverse, and illustrious career. Instead, I will focus on three central critical formulations by Santos that most speak to the urgent demands of our time, that most speak to reinterpreting the world while simultaneously striving to change it, that speak to the work of attending to the stories, practices, understandings of others, and imagining otherwise, that are a story of the effort at thinking beyond oneself to collective others (Darwish’ فكِّر بغيركَ / “Think of Others [those who are not you]” which, interestingly, in the concluding lines of his poem becomes the more familiar تفكر بالآخرين). That point to what we might call a “collective endeavor” of ‘participatory seeing and listening and doing.’

The three central critical concepts of Boaventura Santos’ work that are the focus here are those of “epistemologies of the South,” the “abyssal line,” and the “sociology of absences.” These three, deeply intertwined, have resonated far beyond the borders of his native Portugal or, in fact, Europe. They are engaged with work in India, Latin America, South Africa, Senegal, Mozambique, and other parts of Africa, and West Asia. His careful and detailed critique of the interdependent oppressions of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy, and his pointing to the resistances to them with their alternative ways of knowing, explaining, and changing the world are fierce lines running through these three formulations, as in fact through all his work.

The concept of the “epistemologies of the South” that informs much of Santos’ work is not a simple geographic indicator of divisions and oppositions, nor a dualistic construct. Rather, as Santos formulated it in an address delivered just prior to the 2011 World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, epistemologies of the South signal a South:

...That is not geographical, but metaphorical: the anti-imperial South. It is the metaphor of the systematic suffering produced by capitalism and colonialism, as well as by other forms that have relied on them, such as patriarchy. It also encompasses the South that exists in the North, what we used to call the inner third world or fourth world: the oppressed, marginalized groups of Europe and North America. There is also a global north in the South; it is the local elites who benefit from global capitalism (2010: 16).

Nor does specifying “epistemologies of the South” signal ignorance of the historic – albeit largely exhausted – efforts of the North to theorize and enact not just liberal bourgeois but also revolutionary change. This change, named universal, had two potential ends in the North – one regulatory, the other emancipatory. But it was a vision and a practice always already local, located, and imperial.

For the epistemologies of the South, European universalism is a particularism that, through forms of power, often military, managed to transform all other cultures into particulars" (2010: 20). "In the conditions of the Western capitalist world-system, what we call globalization is always the successful globalization of a given localism (2015: 89, emphasis added).

Attending to epistemologies of the South involves the deliberate and careful recognition of the ways in which already existing alternatives can be seen and heard, engaging in dialogue including with Europe or the North. They offer a formidable antidote to the ignorances of our moment and locations.

Two basic ideas sustain the epistemologies of the South: the understanding that the world far exceeds the Western understanding of it; and the recognition that the cognitive experience of the world is extremely diverse, with the monopoly on rigorous knowledge granted to modern science having entailed a massive epistemicide (the destruction of rival knowledges deemed non-scientific), which now calls for reparation. As a result, there can be no global social justice without global cognitive justice (2023: 114).

The intellectual and political bases for the concept of epistemologies of the South trace back to Santos’ early work in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s. Though not foregrounded, they thread through his subsequent work on law, the state, and a “new common sense” (1995). What Santos came to call “epistemologies of the South” emerged in the early years of this century, despite earlier skepticism about the role of law and the state. His recognition of the possibilities—no, the already existing alternatives—for seeing, living, and thinking otherwise shifted with the unfolding of the World Social Forum (in which Santos was a central figure), as they shifted with his work in Europe, Brazil, Colombia, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Bolivia, and Ecuador. As Santos listened, watched, and engaged with other ways of knowing, understanding, and acting in relation to human and other beings in the world, as he wrote and co-wrote with others a series of books and articles, he elaborated and engaged with ever greater inclusiveness and care in the epistemologies of the South. His work can be seen as a political and intellectual performance of engagement with those epistemologies. As Santos articulates in his recent work, Law and the Epistemologies of the South:

The epistemologies of the South aim to show that in failing to acknowledge the validity of kinds of knowledge other than those produced by modern science, the dominant criteria for valid knowledge in Western modernity have been responsible for a massive epistemicide – the destruction of an immense variety of ways of knowing that prevail mainly on the other side of the abyssal line in colonial societies and sociabilities. Such destruction disempowered these societies, rendering them incapable of representing the world as their own, on their own terms, and therefore of considering how the world could be changed by their own power and for their own purposes. In this situation, it is not possible to promote social justice without promoting justice among different kinds of knowledge (2023: 96).

Attention to the rich capacity of epistemologies of the South is simultaneously an acknowledgment of what Santos calls the abyssal divide, or the abyssal lines that mark that divide. It is "the radical division between forms of metropolitan sociability and forms of colonial sociability that has characterized the Western modern world since the sixteenth century. This division creates two worlds of domination – the metropolitan and the colonial worlds—that present themselves as incommensurable" (2023: 98–99).

It signals the imperial designation of the irrevocable and inexorably hierarchical separation of metropolitan societies from colonial societies, creating categories of the human, the less-than-human, and the non-human. Following this divide, what holds on the metropolitan side of that abyssal line is not conceivable for the North as holding on the colonial side. There can be no equal dialogue or exchange across that line.

This division was such that the realities and practices existing on the other side of the line, in the colonies, could not possibly challenge the universality of the theories and practices in force on the metropolitan side of the line. As such, they were made invisible.

(If God Were a Human Rights Activist, 2015: 2)

Recognizing and understanding the work of abyssal lines—for they are plural rather than singular—is to unsee or unlearn what was proposed as singularly universal. Yet, understanding the abyssal line includes the proposition that, however fierce that abyssal divide is, it can be interrupted, scaled, folded in on itself, wrinkled, and traversed. (Much of Santos’ recent work attends precisely to the post-abyssal.)

From attending to the destructive work of the abyssal line emerges a “sociology of absences.” This sociology elucidates the limits of representation at work in each situation:

In the first situation, where the alternatives did not occur, we are dealing with silences and unpronounceable aspirations; in the second situation, where the alternatives did occur, we are dealing with silencings, epistemicides, and trashing campaigns (2014: 244).

(To this latter list, one might add what is more recently called “cancel culture," with all the contradictions of that concept and practice.)

The sociology of absences, then, attends to what did not or could not occur, to what was not or could not be said or done. It also addresses the silencing of what was said, the denigration of what was understood and thought, and the violent reframing of what did occur. This proposition about attending to “absences” and “silences” is not ephemeral or poetic, though it has its own poetry. Absences and silences 'speak' in the language of bodies, the lacunae of texts, the histories and present practices that gather around specific places and practices. If only we see and hear them.

Santos summarizes a recent book but, I think, a lifetime of work on epistemologies of the South:

The long intellectual and scientific journey narrated in this book reflects the impact of these vast unfolding processes and seeks to extract renewed critical and constructive energy from them (2023: 673).

And he advises in an earlier work:

Those who struggle against domination cannot rely on the light at the end of the tunnel. They must carry with them a portable light, a light that, however shaky or weak, provides enough light to recognize the path as one’s own and to prevent fatal disasters. Such is the type of light that the epistemologies of the South propose to generate (2018: ix).

Say: I wish I were a candle in the darkness (Darwish).