Abstract
The crisis of representation debated by philosophers, feminists and postcolonial theorists calls into question the possibility of mimesis and raises doubts about our ability to 'see it and tell it like it is.' Epistemic privilege is the privilege of embodied insider knowledge and epistemic violence is what postcolonial theorists regard as the violently appropriative practices of Western textual production. I discuss the writings of several authors in order to highlight the effects of their textual practice. I argue that despite the complex dilemmas and paradoxes that academics, researchers and writers encounter, we can engage in two sorts of practices. Firstly we can support the struggle to get real non-white 'others' into the spaces marked by their absence and secondly we can scrutinise the limits of what we can know.