Ain’t I an academic? On coloniality,silence,refusal,and epistemic (in)justice

Abstract

“Ain’t I an Academic?” reworks Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” as a contemporary provocation addressed to the colonial-modern-patriarchal university. The essay examines how ideals of merit, excellence, and neutrality operate as seemingly objective criteria that continue to privilege Western epistemologies, institutions, and academic subjects, while marginalising and bestialising scholars and knowledges from the Global South, that is, rendering them less-than-fully human within academic hierarchies. It interrogates who is authorised to count as an academic when neutrality itself functions as a colonial-modern-patriarchal fiction. Drawing on feminist and decolonial scholarship, the piece frames speaking from—and with—the Global South as an act of epistemic disobedience, foregrounding embodied experience as both method and critique. It further develops refusal as a situated and unevenly distributed practice, shaped by precarity, positionality, and risk. In doing so, it argues that struggles over academic legitimacy are inseparable from broader, unfinished projects of epistemic emancipation.