Aesthetic Resistance: Reimagining Critical Epistemology and the Grammars of Silence

This article argues that critical epistemology should aim at centering the voices and perspectives of those who have been excluded and silenced, proposing a way of doing that by combining Black feminist standpoint theory and Latina feminist theory as they converge in María del Rosario Acosta López’s philosophy of radical listening. The article also argues for the crucial significance of aesthetic interventions for creating epistemic friction that can transform our sensibilities so that we can start to listen to silences. The author offers an analysis of the subversive potential in Doris Salcedo’s public art as an illustration of how aesthetic resistance can be used in practices of epistemic activism that resist insensitivity and promote new ways of listening to silenced voices and liminal sites.