Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Latin America

Castro-Gómez argues that in the colonial periphery of the Spanish Americas, Enlightenment constituted not only the position of epistemic distance separating science from all other knowledges, but also the position of ethnic distance separating the criollos from the 'castes'. Epistemic violence--and not only physical violence--is thereby found at the very origin of Colombian nationality.