Intertexts

2020 saw the devastating Covid-19 pandemic that has been disrupting human lives and global societies. This crisis has, on the one hand, redefined the ontological significance of material things (e.g., medical devices) and immaterial things (e.g., online infrastructure)—the categorical boundaries between national borders and securities—and on the other, challenged our epistemology of viruses and their impacts on humanity in the new millennium—what we know and do not know about viruses to humans or vice versa. Right after the first outbreaks in 2020, catastrophic natural disasters such as the exacerbated downstream flooding in China, large wildfires in North America, and frequent mega hurricanes and typhoons on the globe have resulted in more environmental migrants and drastic capital redistribution. These anthropogenic explanations of climatic and geological changes require us to put global histories of humanity in conversation with the species history. The rethinking about shifting paradigms responds in a time quite directly to this special issue on epistemology as border(land)s in the age of globalization. The philosophical reflections usher us to a fundamental connectedness of epistemology and borders, the former concerning the study of knowledge and its relevance to questions of truth and belief, and the latter concerning new forms of knowledge reframed and relocated in symbolic borderlands. Thus, this special issue is highly relevant to the ongoing pandemic as all the collected essays attempt to recast epistemic borders and feature the intimate relationship between Western and Eastern epistemologies and borders among discursive and disruptive categories and taxonomies. From Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera poetics (1987)¹ of [End Page vii] articulating reformulations and provisional syntheses, to new technological pathways for infinite distribution across different borders (e.g., social media, online gaming), to the recent epistemological rupture in the Anthropocene, epistemology as border(land)s in the age of globalization thus provides powerful discursive and aesthetic strategies for cultural relationality and transcultural subjectivity.

The five essays collected in this edition of Intertexts respond to the central inquiry of how literature and other art forms render legible these transformative processes of epistemic reproduction and pedagogic adaptation. While writing "globally" about Europe (Acadia), Ireland (Hennessey), Sri Lanka (Gavin), India (Dwivedi), Nigeria (Gavin), and US (Herrera), the writers in this collection primarily elucidate the concept of borderlands as epistemology (or vice versa) in various manifestations ranging from post-Enlightenment Europe, to post-colonial Africa and Asia, and to post-racial USA. They bring up a host of such quotidian yet pivotal issues as religion (Acadia), race/ethnicity (Herrera), global market (Dwivedi), and technology (Herrera). Each writer addresses the conundrum of how the borders/borderlands of (un)translatability and (un)inscription reiterate Spivak's untranslatability as "one mode of discourse in dispute to another."² Their interventions attempt to challenge how knowledge as truth and belief is construed and proliferated: what we know (or not), how we know (or not), who makes us know (or not). In these writers' views, epistemology as border(land)s in the age of globalization opens up ground-breaking interpretive approaches and directions.

Lilith Acadia's essay "'Only your labels split me': Epistemic Privilege, Boundaries, and Pretexts of 'Religion'" centralizes religion as an epistemology that substantiates powerful borders between people. Acadia argues that religion has often served as an almost unassailable justification for violence on the basis of its epistemic privilege in political discourse from the proto-Globalization of European imperialism to contemporary neo-imperialism. In her view, the framing of religion as an epistemology strengthens the borders it creates due to a conception of epistemology as more universal, implicit, and constitutive. Drawing on historical and contemporary sources from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama on religion as a justificatory knife creating boundaries around people, [End Page viii] places, and rights, this essay raises the taxonomical problematic of the persistent colonial mentality that still echoes European Enlightenment imperial ideology conceptualizing "religion" as a universal institution upon which to define the "civilized" one in contradistinction to a barbarian other, a division that then justifies the noblesse oblige extension of imperial borders.

Michael Gavin's comparative article "Literature among the Social Sciences: Representations of Ethnic...