Editorial erasure and epistemological manipulation: a fetish of mineral capital over the book Black Canada

Abstract

Considering that Sociology is the science of the social, whose object is diverse, alive, historical and in permanent movement, and that conflicts constitute a privileged locus for analyzing the social, since it is in them that contradictions appear most explicitly, this article discusses the legitimacy of a process of editorial erasure by withdrawing from circulation a book published and produced as a result of scientific research in Critical Theory. The book focuses on conflicts in African countries expropriated by Canadian mining projects. The analysis is based on the case of the 2008 book Noir Canada, translated into Spanish as Negro Canada in 2012, whose authors and publisher were sued by two large Canadian mining companies, which used epistemological manipulation of the social sciences as one of their strategies to disqualify the book and criminalize its authors through judicial and extrajudicial proceedings in Canada.