Epistemologies of Darkening

Black Women’s Thought Toward an Ethics of the Night

Abstract

The essay proposes understanding and recognizing “darkening” as an epistemic, ethical, and political operation forged above all by Black women thinkers. Drawing on a situated vignette and a theoretical debate that engages, among others, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Helena Theodoro, Leda Maria Martins, Jota Mombaça, Saidiya Hartman, and Zélia Amador de Deus, it shifts knowing from the ocular regime of “enlightenment” to a relational cosmoperception. The animal metaphor (owl/spider/guineafowl/alligator) functions as a grammar of deviation: from retrospective overflight to the ground of relations; from transparency to opacity; from evidence to trace-presence. The article weaves together non-linear temporalities, diversified protocols of presence, and a politics of the underground to assert an ethics of the night that does not deny visibility but thwarts its capture. In doing so, it redefines who counts as a subject of knowledge, what qualifies as intelligible, and to whom discourse and thought are addressed, proposing a philosophical endeavor grounded in proximity, sharing, and safeguard.