Decolonising Political Theory Methods: Epistemological Limits?

This paper takes as its starting point Patricia Hill Collins foundational work, Black Feminist Thought. In it, she describes Black feminist theory as manifesting in ‘music, literature, daily conversations and everyday behaviour’, due to the direct and indirect exclusion of Black women from academia. This paper claims this statement confronts our methods in political philosophy with an existential crisis. Either she is incorrect, and Black feminist theory only emerges when women like PHC actually found a place in academia, or she is correct. If the latter, BF critical theory has an intellectual tradition outside of conventional academic publications, formats and register. Its inclusion therefore implies our methods can take such diverse formats, and indeed should, if we are to decolonise methods in political philosophy. The question is to what extent this has epistemological limits. If ‘music, literature, daily conversations and everyday behaviour’ are manifestations of political philosophy’s foundational question, ‘how should we live?’, then why not myth, oral tradition or story? This paper asks to what extent there are epistemological limitations to any methodological expansion into such realms.