Amir H. Payberah - 2025-10-10

Spivak, in "Can the Subaltern Speak?", discusses the idea of epistemic violence, the harm caused when marginalized voices and ways of knowing are silenced or dismissed by dominant Western, male-centered systems of knowledge. This includes the disregard for Indigenous knowledge and the control over what is seen as "valid" knowledge. Faced with such dominance, how can we challenge it and find ways to speak?

Take the English language, for example. Its dominance in everyday life and academia has made it a language of power and control, used historically to erase the voices and languages of colonized and enslaved peoples. For Africans brought to America, losing their native languages was deeply painful; English was forced upon them, sounding both foreign and frightening. Yet it became the only available medium for communication, a painful paradox of having to use the very tools of domination in order to be heard. As Adrienne Rich wrote, "This is the oppressor's language, yet I need it to talk to you."

However, as bell hooks explains in "Teaching to Transgress", over time, Black communities challenged this dominance by claiming and reshaping English, turning it from a tool of oppression into a language of resistance and solidarity. By bending its grammar, adding new rhythms, and creating new meanings, they made the language their own, one that could speak truth from the margins. This act of linguistic rebellion lives on today in Black vernacular, rap, and popular culture, which continue to challenge and transform dominant narratives.

Inspired by this, we should ask: how might we challenge the dominance of technology and AI, and turn these same tools into instruments of resistance, care, and justice? Just as "broken" or "different" English became a form of creativity and defiance, we, as academics and scholars, must find our own ways of speaking back. We must reclaim and reshape the very systems that try to silence us, using them not to reproduce power, but to create spaces of care, shared voice, and co-liberation.