Knowledge as Decolonial Act

Sor Juana wrote in Spanish while referencing Indigenous Nahuatl traditions, Greek philosophy, and Christian theology—deliberately synthesizing knowledge systems to assert intellectual authority in a colonial context. Her scholarship was decolonial: she claimed the right to interpret texts, produce ideas, and define truth rather than passively receive them from European authorities. This concept shows that how we know things is political, especially across cultures navigating colonial legacies. When marginalized communities reclaim their own knowledge traditions and demand recognition as knowledge producers rather than merely knowledge recipients, they transform political identity. Across cultures, this means indigenous peoples asserting scientific knowledge, women claiming intellectual history, and colonized nations defining their own educational frameworks. Sor Juana demonstrates that intellectual work—careful reading, rigorous thinking, public writing—becomes a decolonial political act when it reasserts the agency and capacity of those systems have deemed incapable of thought.