Knowledge as Decolonization

Sor Juana engaged with multiple intellectual traditions—indigenous Mexican thought, African diasporic knowledge, European theology, female scholarship—refusing the colonial narrative that positioned Spanish Catholic orthodoxy as the only legitimate knowledge. By weaving these sources together, she performed decolonization through intellectual practice. Knowledge as decolonization recognizes that colonialism operates not just through military or political domination but through epistemic control—deciding what counts as knowledge, who gets to produce it, and which traditions are rendered invisible. Across cultures, restoring suppressed knowledge systems becomes an act of political resistance and identity recovery. Indigenous communities reclaiming traditional ecological knowledge, African diaspora recovering ancestral wisdom, women recovering female intellectual histories—all practice decolonization. This concept matters profoundly in multicultural societies where education systems often marginalize non-dominant knowledge traditions. By studying how Sor Juana integrated multiple epistemologies, we learn how political identity strengthens when communities maintain access to their own intellectual resources. Decolonized knowledge transforms not what we know but whose knowing is counted and valued.