That recreates the narcissistic gaze of imperialism which ruins the permutation.

Perhaps what has been lost in this movement, then, is the consideration of epistemic justice as a first-order problem of intellectual inquiry into the (post)colonial world. I would even suggest that the subaltern has become part of an academic disposition – postcolonial studies, broadly conceived - that shares much with the narcissistic "gaze" of the imperial world map, famously illustrated by John Charles Ready Colomb in 1886.

The map features an array of peripheral others – subalterns – looking only towards Britannica, the masterful self who occupies the centre. Universal knowledge is dispensed at the point of Britannica’s centred perspective, and from there all are named and defined. Upon closer inspection, none of the peripheral figures (not even white settlers) are making sideways glances; all roads lead to Rome: crop, mineral, goods, bodies, value, narrative, concept, Jesus. Hawaiki and Ethiopia-Zion could never connect. This disposition of "critical thought" that I am describing situates the Western self as the only entity that is critically knowable. The peripheral others, even if considered morally worthy, nevertheless serve only to reflect and refine the Western self.

But if the subaltern has become a philosophical category of limitation it cannot be, at the same time, a lived experience. For when a lived experience is auto-ethnographically named as subaltern (“I am a subaltern”) it does not complete the philosophical category of the same name (“the subaltern marks the limit of modern knowledge”); it runs beside that category instead, on a distinctly different track. Concerned with epistemic justice rather than a modernist – and I would argue narcissistic - philosophy of limits, my book travels these tracks besides the subaltern. The book's arguments dwell in living knowledge traditions that address global injustices in ways other-wise to the colonial science of the gaze, living knowledge traditions that make the task of relating seminal to their cosmologies. Philosophies of limit defer the moment of relating. My book works with deep relation in the pursuit of epistemic justice.