Abstract

Metaphors and allegories, storytelling and poetic language can serve a noble purpose in philosophy. In this vein, I focus on the role of rebellious poiesis (making), creative/imaginative works, and tactful praxis (doing) in helping the oppressed and immiserated escape from the intervening background assumptions (the episteme), the system that tacitly sets the boundaries and limitations of rational discourse in our present epoch. The claim is that we, in the West, dwell within socio-political geographies ordered by colonial and capitalist projects designed to benefit bourgeois Eurodescended (racially white) men (homoeconomicus, or Man2). Aimé Césaire, Sylvia Wynter, and Katherine McKittrick seek means to challenge the episteme, to step outside the self-replicating hegemonic (racist) Euroamerican techno-industrial order of things, into “demonic grounds”—indeterminant grounds in which alternative systems of knowledge and new conceptions of “being human” can be fashioned. Ultimately, I argue that Dionysian poiesis and radical scholarly praxis (method-making) are tools and levers that can be deployed to stoke imagination, access demonic grounds, and conjure new systems of knowledge in the liberatory praxis of the oppressed.