Epistemological Eurocentrism is terminally unsustainable. Intellectual content and property is ontologically framed against the image of the Native. The aff’s attempt to reincorporate Indigenous knowledge within the system of Eurocentric knowledge production renders coloniality invisible and is hollow hope for Indigenous peoples. This invisible form of coloniality is white ignorance that disenfranchises them further from relationalities of land and space and causes processes of death-worlding that ultimately beget slow death for Natives.

One way in which structural hierarchisation of humanity and space– time within evolving frames of Euro- modern legal knowledge is invisibilised from within legal knowledge, is through the apparent nescience and persistent absence within it, of the significance of racialisation to the emergence of intellectual content, value, and method. Bhambra calls this ‘methodological whiteness’. This is a study of the world that does not ‘acknowledge the role played by race in the very structuring of that world, [which] treats a limited perspective – that deriving from white experience – as a universal perspective’ (Bhambra 2017: webpage). Similarly, Mills describes ‘white ignorance’ as both a false belief and absence of belief held by people racialised white, a worldview and racial frame, about racially othered people in the world (2007: 26– 31; 2014b: 18; 2015: 217– 27). This white ignorance underwrites the production of the racial contract, underpinning the global political structure of white supremacy, but also makes its production invisible, unquestioned, immutable, and immovable, especially within and by legal intellectual knowledge systems. Consequently, through methodological whiteness and white ignorance, a significant amount of Euro- modern legal epistemological production has not been designed to understand the world but is a continuing unsuccessful attempt to remake and regulate the world in Europe’s image – a white patriarchal, property- owning image. Anything that does not fit is exploitable or disposable … or both. This powerful hidden structure requires/ required a technology of reproduction. So, Maeso and Araújo indict the law in their definition of Eurocentrism as ‘interpreting a (past, present, and future) reality that uncritically establishes the idea of European and Western historical progress/ achievement and its political and ethical superiority, based on scientific rationality and the construction of the rule of law’ (2015: 1). Epistemological Eurocentrism, relying on Euromodern legal knowledge, produces a world out of itself that never existed, does not exist, and cannot exist on its own. It cannot exist without a trail of bodies in its wake. And it does not count the bodies that through this worldview do not count. Thus, our disciplinary divisions are unable to truly understand the world or provide useful solutions to its problems. This futility is a condition described by Gordon in his conceptualisation of disciplinary decadence in academia. Disciplinary decadence, according to Gordon, arises when a discipline, rooted in colonial practices, considers itself complete, self- created, entirely method- dependent, immortal, and omniscient about all other disciplines (2011: 98; 2014: 86; 2015a: 4– 5; 2018: 241). Any critique of such discipline can therefore only be acceptably justified by reference to the discipline itself. Hence, this decadence specifically exposes a methodological lacuna for disciplines in the Euro- modern academy, in respect of populations objectified at the time the discipline’s method and thought was formulated. ‘Problem people’ will not ‘fit’ into disciplines’ purportedly universal and objective method. So, we try in vain, using diversity measures, to fit such people into the strict dictates of the discipline, yet the field keeps on spitting them out, across space– time. In other words, within this intractable adherence to colonial method and logics, ‘non- normative people, become problems, instead of people who face problems’ (Gordon 2014: 81– 92). It seems easier to question the legitimacy of people whose ‘problems’ fall outside the sacred method of our discipline, than to question the method and presumptions that underpin the discipline – the soul of the discipline itself. Because to question the discipline is to question the (vision of the) world (it has created). In other words, we fall back on colonial logics of hierarchisation and delegitimisation of humanity to excuse the outcomes of the discipline – the necropolitical creation of death- worlds. This is what de Sousa Santos defines as abyssal thinking that relies on hierarchised binaries of life and death, of which he indicts Euro- modern legal knowledge as being particularly guilty (2016: 120). Within the academy, Euro- modern legal knowledge production has mostly ignored the effects of long histories of unfree labour and appropriation of indigenous land on the legal meanings of seemingly universal concepts and methods. For example, land justice for the coloniser is not the same as land justice for the colonised. Euro- modern justice for the coloniser is often actual injustice to the colonised. The coloniser’s right to private land historically relied on dispossession of indigenous land. But who those lands pass on to by succession and inheritance is determined, not by a universal understanding of justice, but by law’s adherence to order and authority. The law emerging from colonialism is thus subordinated to norms more protective of itself and the aims of the capitalist- colonial- enslavement project, than of life on the planet. True justice requires rethinking the norms of legal knowledge and not merely increasing the membership and demographics of our discipline (Gordon 2020: 38). Therefore, adherence to decadent method means that we are unable to adapt our epistemologies for different futures that do not follow on from the necropolitics of the colonial. This is what Gordon means by decay – turning from living thought. By trapping our discipline in thought that crystallised during a time when race science was used to abstract property out of humanity, through the legalised processes of racialised enslavement and colonial dispossession, we trap our world into reproducing the accompanying injustices of those modes of extraction and epistemologies along those hierarchised and geopolitical lines. This is because, disciplinary decadence operates along colonial lines, creating zones of closure, settlement, and negation of human possibility (Gordon 2018: 238). This is what I mean by the necropolitical production of death- worlds. Colonial logics and metrics produce especially narrow and limiting visions of humanity, including the space– time within which humanity exists, existed, will exist. So, the universalisation of a specific ‘particular’, results in the slow death of all other ‘particulars’ and the loss of utility of the chosen ‘particular’. Consequently, by trapping human possibility within rigid disciplinary dictates, transformation is rendered almost unachievable. Rather than justice, anything that exists on the other side of Grosfoguel’s ‘dividing line’, beyond the abyssal line, in the zone of non- being, is either eliminated or partly transformed to resemble this side of the line (Fanon 2008: 2; de Sousa Santos 2016: 120; Grosfoguel 2016: 9– 15). This stark division and negation of copresence is what makes ‘the claim of the universal translatability of the English word “justice” … an extraordinarily presumptive one’ (Gordon 2013: 70). Neutrality and universality are insufficient here, as epistemic injustice that arises through the obscuring of racialised knowledge cannot be assuaged by further obscuration of racialised knowledge. To mean anything at all, our quest for enduring justice through legal knowledge must be preceded and accompanied by an exploration of how the law’s present ontology was produced through colonial epistemologies, including language and spatial- temporal use and practices. To prevent further disciplinary decay, we must unpack colonial logics – their methods as well as the fundamental building blocks of their assemblage. Thus, in relation to legal knowledge, we must ask ourselves where the law has been, what it has done and if there is enough left of the discipline to ensure that all humans are law’s humans, that all of space– time is legible to legal knowledge. We must even be able to contemplate the destruction of the discipline for the benefit of humanity. In other words, let us ask, even if only hypothetically, if we are willing to let the discipline die, if it dies in service of the destruction of death- worlds and the creation of life- worlds? Is the law that has brought us this necropolitical death- scape, able to provide the design for flourishing future life- worlds?