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Eurocentrism Kritik
Eurocentrism Kritik
Eurocentrism Kritik
Eurocentrism K
1NC Shell
1NC Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism shapes traditional policymaking knowledge
production the state, and democratic processes are
universalized and spread with policies like the plan
Frankzi, University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law,
Graduate Student, 12
(Hannah, Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld University, Universitat
Bielefeld, Eurocentrism, http://elearning.unibielefeld.de/wikifarm/fields/ges_cias/field.php/Main/Unterkapitel52, Accessed:
7/3/13, LPS.)
The Other School would be oriented around an alternative framework for knowledge
and understanding that we might call the decolonial paradigm, since its central aim
is to decolonize thinking and being, in part, through dialogue (not just the study of
cultures as objects of knowledge) with the diversity of ways of knowing and being
that have been devalued and eclipsed in Eurocentric education. The decolonial
paradigm of education would focus on concepts of culture and power. Culture is not
separate from politics and economics, contrary to the taken-for-granted disciplinary
divisions. .political and economic structures are not entities in themselves, but
are imagined, framed and enacted by individuals formed in a certain type of
subjectivity; a subjectivity that is also framed in the dominant structure of
knowledge (Mignolo, 2005, p. 112). The cultural group (in the U.S. -- AngloAmerican) with the most money and the most political power is also the dominant
culture reproduced in the school curriculum. Most of us (particularly if we not white)
recognize that a racial hierarchy exists and is maintained by the dominant cultural
group (for example, see Huntington, 2004). Cultural diversity in multicultural
education is often more a way to manage or contain difference while maintaining
the racial hierarchy. Multiculturalism only became an issue and concept in
education during the unsettling 60s, when ethnic groups labeled racial minorities
raised their voices demanding that the promises of modernity be made available to
them as well as to whites. Racism is not simply the result of individual prejudice
and hateful expressions, but the consequence of the relations of power that are
historical and structural. The power side of culture can be conveniently neutralized
in the classroom as teachers and students learn about diversity without
examining how these differences have been constructed, how they are reproduced
What do decoloniality and decolonial education mean? Where does this movement
come from? What are the key ideas that underlie and comprise decolonial
education? What does decolonial education look like in practice? My presentation
will introduce a decolonial perspective on modernity and sketch the implications of
this perspective for rethinking modern education beyond the epistemological
boundaries of modernity. The overall argument can be seen as an attempt to
reveal, critique, and change the modern geopolitics of knowledge, within which
modern western education first emerged and remains largely concealed.
Decoloniality involves the geopolitical reconceptualization of knowledge. In order to
build a universal conception of knowledge, western epistemology (from Christian
theology to secular philosophy and science) has pretended that knowledge is
independent of the geohistorical (Christian Europe) and biographical conditions
(Christian white men living in Christian Europe) in which it is produced. As a result,
Europe became the locus of epistemic enunciation, and the rest of the world
became the object to be described and studied from the European perspective. The
modern geopolitics of knowledge was grounded in the suppression of sensing and
the body, and of its geo-historical location. The foundations of knowledge were and
remain territorial and imperial. The claims to universality both legitimate and
conceal the colonial/imperial relations of modernity (Mignolo, 2011). Decolonial
education is an expression of the changing geopolitics of knowledge whereby the
modern epistemological framework for knowing and understanding the world is no
longer interpreted as universal and unbound by geohistorical and bio-graphical
contexts. I think therefore I am becomes I am where I think in the body- and
geo-politics of the modern world system (Mignolo, 2011). The idea that knowledge
and the rules of knowledge production exist within socio-historical relationships
between political power and geographical space (geopolitics) shifts attention from
knowledge itself to who, when, why, and where knowledge is produced (Mignolo,
2011). The universal assumptions about knowledge production are being displaced,
as knowledge is no longer coming from one regional center, but is distributed
globally. From this recognition of the geo and body politics of knowledge, education,
including the various knowledge disciplines that comprise education and knowledge
of education, can be analyzed and critiqued with questions such as: who is the
subject of knowledge, and what is his/her material apparatus of enunciation?; what
kind of knowledge/understanding is he/she engaged in generating, and why?; who is
benefiting or taking advantage of particular knowledge or understanding?; what
institutions (universities, media, foundations, corporations) are supporting and
encouraging particular knowledge and understanding? (Mignolo, 2011, p. 189).
Decolonial thinking and writing first emerged in the initial formations of modernity
Links
Topic Links
Knowledge Production
Eurocentrism shapes traditional policymaking knowledge
production the state, and democratic processes are
universalized and spread with policies like the plan
Frankzi, University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law,
Graduate Student, 12
(Hannah, Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld University, Universitat
Bielefeld, Eurocentrism, http://elearning.unibielefeld.de/wikifarm/fields/ges_cias/field.php/Main/Unterkapitel52, Accessed:
7/3/13, LPS.)
As I am arguing, every aspect of the act of producing knowledge has influenced the
ways in which indigenous ways of knowing have been represented. Reading, writing,
talking, these are as fundamental to academic discourse as science, theories,
methods, paradigms. To begin with reading, one might cite the talk in which Maori
writer Patricia Grace undertook to show that 'Books Are Dangerous'.21 She argues
that there are four things that make many books dangerous to indigenous readers:
(1) they do not reinforce our values, actions, customs, culture and identity; (2) when
they tell us only about others they are saying that we do not exist; (3) they may be
writing about us but are writing things which are untrue; and ( 4) they are writing
about us but saying negative and insensitive things which tell us that we are not
good. Although Grace is talking about school texts and journals, her comments
apply also to academic writing. Much of what I have read has said that we do not
exist, that if we do exist it is in terms which I cannot recognize, that we are no good
and that what we think is not valid.
Leonie Pihama makes a similar point about film. In a review of The Piano she says:
'Maori people struggle to gain a voice, struggle to be heard from the margins, to
have our stories heard, to have our descriptions of ourselves validated, to have
access to the domain within which we can control and define those images which
are held up as reflections of our realities.' 22 Representation is important as a
concept because it gives the impression of 'the truth'. When I read texts, for
example, I frequently have to orientate myself to a text world in which the centre of
academic knowledge is either in Britain, the United States orWestero Europe; in
which words such as 'we' 'us' 'our' 'I' actuall exclude me. It is a text world in which
(if what I am interested in rates 6l AiMAlii'BA) I Aoua leosgsd d.lat 1 he'ons Par#?' jp
the Third \XlgrJd Pa!#J' in the 'Women of Colour' world, part!J in the black or African
world. I read myself into these labels part!J because I have also learned that,
Epistemology
The Eurocentric worldview of the Aff compromises their
epistemology because it is a hegemonic and dominating lens.
It precludes the possibility of rational analysis.
Quijano, Peruvian Sociologist, 2k
(Anibal, Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed the
concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been influential in the fields
of post-colonial studies and critical theory, 2000, Duke University Press, Coloniality
of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,
http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
Research
Research is directly linked to European imperialism ensures
the suppression of indigenous peoples
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples, pg. 1-2, JZ)
From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose
to privilege, the term 'research' is inextricably linked to European imperialism and
colonialism. The word itself, 'research', is probably one of the dirtiest words in the
indigenous world's vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it
stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and
distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about
research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses
of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's
colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our
humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our 'faculties' by filling the skulls of
our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the
capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are.1 It galls us
that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible
to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us
that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our
imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the
people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further
opportunities to be creators of their own culture and-own nations. It angers us
when-practices linked to the last century, and the centuries before that, are still
employed to deny the validity of indigenous peoples claim to existence, to land and
territories, to the right of self-determination, to the survival of our languages and
forms of cultural knowledge, to our natural resources and systems for living within
our environments.
This collective memory of imperialism has been perpetuated through the ways in
which knowledge about indigenous peoples was collected, classified and then
represented in various ways back to the West, and then, through the eyes of the
West, back to those who have been colonized. Edward Said refers to this process as
a Western discourse about the Other which is supported by 'institutions, vocabulary,
scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles'.2
According to Said, this process has worked partly because of the constant
interchange between the scholarly and the imaginative construction of ideas about
the Orient. The scholarly construction, he argues, is supported by a corporate
institution which 'makes statements about it [the Orient], authorising views of it,
describing it, by teaching about it, settling it, ruling over it'.3 In these acts both the
formal scholarly pursuits of knowledge and the informal, imaginative, anecdotal
Research ensures the divide between the West and the Other
as a tool of imperialism
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples, pg. 7-8, JZ)
Part of the project of this book is researching back in the tradition of 'writing back'
or 'talking back', that characterizes much of the post-colonial or anti-colonial
literature.10 It has involved a 'knowing-ness of the colonizer* and a recovery of
ourselves, an analysis of colonialism, and a struggle for self-determination.
Research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism and
colonialism is both regulated and realized. It is regulated through the formal rules of
individual scholarly disciplines and scientific paradigms, and the institutions
that support them (including the state). It is realized in the myriad of
representations and ideological constructions of the Other in scholarly and 'popular'
works, and in the principles which help to select and recontextualize those
constructions in such things as the media, official histories and school curricula.
Ashis Nandy argues that the structures of colonialism contain rules by which
colonial encounters occur and are 'managed'.11 The different ways in which these
encounters happen and are managed are different realizations of the underlying
rules and codes which frame in the broadest sense what is possible and what is
impossible. In a very real sense research has been an encounter between the West
and the Other. Much more is known about one side of those encounters than is
known about the other side. This book reports to some extent on views that are held
and articulated by 'the other sides'. The first part of the book explores topics around
the theme of imperialism, research and knowledge. They can be read at one level as
a narrative about a history of research and indigenous peoples but make much
more sense if read as a series of intersecting and overlapping essays around a
theme.
Resolution
The topic itself poses the wrong question
Besse, CUNY City College Professor, 4
(Susan K., Professor in the City College division of the CUNY agency, 2004, Hispanic
American Historical Review 84.3 (2004) 411-422, Placing Latin America in Modern
World History Textbooks,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hispanic_american_historical_review/summary/v084/84.
3besse.html, Accessed 7/5/13, NC)
The recent trend in world history to prioritize the theme of technology and
environment is not one that will give us tools to integrate better the history of Latin
American societies into the global narrative. Nor will big history. I find it
interesting and stimulating to ask the sorts of questions that underlie big history,
but these should not be the ones that frame world history curricula. The search by
two of the leading proponentsFred Spier and Jared Diamond for a single, allencompassing theoretical framework that can unify all knowledge is illusory and
dangerous. Moreover, the answers to the big questions they posewhich falsely
claim greater scientific merit by drawing on hard data and subordinating culture to
the realm of the epiphenomenalare not ones that can help us in the contemporary
world to explain such short-term phenomenon as racism, sexism, religious
fundamentalism, rapidly shifting patterns of imperial power, and so on. In short,
these frameworks of analysis do not contribute to our understanding of our near
and distant neighbors nor to imagining how to build stable and just societies.22 We
need to ask questions that will make inquiry into the histories and cultures of all the
worlds peoples including Latin Americansrelevant. The historical experience of
Latin America since 1492 mirrors the global present, in which the multiple pasts of
Native Americans, Europeans, Africans, and Asians have collided and intertwined,
producing increasingly integrated, yet heterogeneous, modern societies. That Latin
America cannot be neatly defined as either Western or non-Western should not be
seen as a problem. Rather, the problem lies in paradigms that naturalize and
universalize the experiences of Europe and that rank the societies of the world
according to the degree to which they achieved the technological advancement and
social and political modernity of Europe. Only when we frame new questions that
move beyond strongly materialist and developmentalist measures of historical
influence and significance will Latin America seem relevant. No amount of pressure
for equal attention can substitute for a paradigm shift that charts intellectually
compelling paths for how to write a culturally sensitive, socially inclusive world
history: one that asks how major global transformations have been experienced by
people whose impact has been deemed insignificant and that gives priority to
analyzing gender, race, racial mixture, and cultural syncretism. As we move in this
direction, Latin American voices will begin to count for more than a few distracting
passages.
USFG
State representations distance us from real world
representations of politics the policymaking paradigm
guarantees imperialism
Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor
Communication, 8
[Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Rhetoric PhD & Prof @ Pitt, and the most competitively
successful black woman in CEDA history, The Harsh Realities Of Acting Black:
How African-American Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial
Performance And Style, http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf, accessed 7/7/13)
Mitchell observes that the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a
sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture.115 In other words, its
participants are able to engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from
the events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around terms like
torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations can only
serve to distance the debaters from real world participation in the political
contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks:
the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered
irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were .
The relationship was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such.
When we blithely call for United States Federal Government policymaking,
we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that establishes our place on
this continent. We cannot wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated
everyday in our name simply by refusing to acknowledge these
implications (emphasis in original).116
The objective stance of the policymaker is an impersonal or imperialist
persona. The policymaker relies upon acceptable forms of evidence, engaging in logical discussion,
producing rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters note, such a stance is
integrally linked to the normative, historical and contemporary practices
of power that produce and maintain varying networks of oppression . In
other words, the discursive practices of policy-oriented debate are
developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege. Thus,
these practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony .
Economic Engagement
Economic engagement demonstrates a drive to control
uncivilized countries this justifies further attempts to
Americanize already independent countries
Peoples Daily, 63
(Peoples Daily, October 22, 1963, Foreign languages Press, Apologists Of NeoColonialism,
http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/polemic/neocolon.htm, Accessed
7/5/13, IGM)
The facts are clear. After World War II the imperialists have certainly not given up
colonialism, but have merely adopted a new form, neo-colonialism. An important
characteristic of such neo-colonialism is that the imperialists have been forced to
change their old style of direct colonial rule in some areas and to adopt a new style
of colonial rule and exploitation by relying on the agents they have selected and
trained. The imperialists headed by the United States enslave or control the colonial
countries and countries which have already declared their independence by
organizing military blocs, setting up military bases, establishing federations or
communities, and fostering puppet regimes. By means of economic aid or other
forms, they retain these countries as markets for their goods, sources of raw
material and outlets for their export of capital, plunder the riches and suck the
blood of the people of these countries. Moreover, they use the United Nations as an
important tool for interfering in the internal affairs of such countries and for
subjecting them to military, economic and cultural aggression. When they are
unable to continue their rule over these countries by peaceful means, they
engineer military coups detat, carry out subversion or even resort to direct armed
intervention and aggression. The United States is most energetic and cunning in
promoting neo-colonialism. With this weapon, the U.S. imperialists are trying hard to
grab the colonies and spheres of influence of other imperialists and to establish
world domination. This neo-colonialism is a more pernicious and sinister form of
colonialism.
The global idea of Latin America being deployed by imperial states today (the US
and the imperial countries of the European Union) is of vast territory and a resource
of cheap labor, full natural resources, exotic tourism, and fantastic Caribbean
beaches wanting to be visited, invested in, and exploited. These images developed
during the Cold War when Latin America became part of the Third World and a top
destination for neo-liberal projects, beginning in Chile under General Augusto
Pinochet (1973) and followed up by Juan Carlos Menem in Argentina (1989) and
Snchez Gonzlo de Losada (1993) in Bolivia. Thus, for example, today many of the
major technological corporations are shifting production to Argentina (post-crash)
where they can hire technicians for around ten thousand dollars a year while the US
salary plus benefits for ten thousand dollars a year while the US salary plus
benefits, for the same type of job, could be as high as fifty or sixty thousand dollars
a year.
In Europe, the process that brought the formation of structures of power later
configured as the modern nation-state began, on one hand, with the emergence of
some small political nuclei that conquered their space of domination and imposed
themselves over the diverse and heterogeneous peoples, identities, and states that
inhabited it. In this way the nation-state began as a process of colonization of some
peoples over others that were, in this sense, foreigners, and therefore the nationstate depended on the organization of one centralized state over a conquered space
of domination. In some particular cases, as in Spain, which owes much to the
conquest of America and its enormous and free resources, the process included
the expulsion of some groups, such as the Muslims and Jews, considered to be
undesirable foreigners. This was the first experience of ethnic cleansing exercising
the coloniality of power in the modern period and was followed by the imposition of
the certificate of purity of blood. 28 On the other hand, that process of state
centralization was parallel to the imposition of imperial colonial
domination that began with the colonization of America, which means that
the first European centralized states emerged simultaneously with the
formation of the colonial empires. The process has a twofold historical
Toward
Toward describes a relationship that is aid from one to an
irrational other. This entrenches paternalism, which reflects
innate Eurocentric practices and discourses
Baaz Gothenburg University, PhD Peace and Development
Research, 5
(Maria Eriksson, Zed Books, The Paternalism of Partnership, Google book, p.153-155,
accessed 7-6-13 KR)
The Americas continue to contain the legacy of classical colonialism and remain tied
to the economic dependencies of neocolonialism, so that the "post" of
postcolonialism reflects more of a wish than a reality for too many of the Western
Hemisphere. Since the time of Columbus, colonial agendas and policies have
engendered their own rhetorics of justification and explanation. European modernity
presumed a universal hegemony over political ideology, cultural meanings, and
historical narrative. This legacy can be heard today in the discourses of "advanced/
primitive," "development/underdevelopment," "modern/premodern," or
"citizen/alien," terms that organize geopolitical locations by their purported
relationship to the vanguard narrative of Occidentalism. But rhetorical traditions of
the Americas and the Caribbean evidence a rich discourse of critique of Anglo- and
Eurocentric ideologies. In a real sense, modernity begins with the encounter of the
"New World" and the creation of a new "Other Within," so that rhetorical practices of
the Americas stand in a unique position vis-a-vis the development of that modernity
and its concomitants of colonialism, of racialized subjectivities, of the crisis of
European reason, and of late global capitalism. Argentine liberation philosopher
Enrique Dussel points out that the more recent metanarratives of Western thought
postmodernism, transnationalism, and globalizationare themselves still mired in
an Occidental teleology that imagines European and Anglo-American cultures to be
the sources of historical advance, theoretical transformation, and literary vision.1
Conversations in Rhetoric and Composition Studies that engage in these topics need
to take notice and understand this critique.
The good-left/bad-left thesis may seem more enlightened and progressive than
classic racist or imperialist rhetoric in that it does not lump all Latin Americans
together, but in fact the clever colonizer has always distinguished between good
and bad members of the subordinate group. When Columbus sailed through the
Caribbean in the 1490s, he contrasted the peaceful Arawaks of Cuba to the
aggressive, allegedly cannibalistic Caribs to the southeast (Hulme, 1994: 169171,
190). European and U.S. imperialists, as well as Latin American elites, employed
similar discursive strategies over the following centuries.2 In the early twentieth
century, both the jingoists led by Theodore Roosevelt and the Wilsonian idealists
contrasted the unruly children of Central America and the Caribbean with the more
responsible leaders in the bigger Latin American countries. Woodrow Wilson and his
appointees pledged to replace the naughty children of Latin America with good
men, whom they would teach the South American republics to elect (Schoultz,
1998: 244, 272, 192197; Kenworthy, 1995: 30; cf. Johnson, 1980: 209, 217; Black,
1988). Later, following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, U.S. policy came to focus on
assisting the good Latins while isolating, and often exterminating, the bad; many of
the tropes used to characterize Hugo Chvez in the past decade have clear
precedents in government and press depictions of Fidel Castro starting four decades
earlier (Platt et al., 1987; Johnson, 1980: 113, 241; Landau, 2006; Chomsky, 2008).
Similar binary depictions have long characterized Orientalist discourse toward Asian
and African peoples, particularly Muslims (Mamdani, 2004).
Historically these distinctions have helped to justify outside intervention in the
name of protecting the good from the bad, and today the benevolent
interventionist frame often accompanies the good-left/bad-left frame. Just as
Columbus was protecting the peaceful Arawaks from the savage Caribs, the U.S.
government promotes democracy through its relations with the good left, protecting
those countries from the bad left. By definition, all such interventions are
undertaken with noble and humanitarian intent. This paternalistic discourse has
remained remarkably consistent throughout the history of imperialism and internal
colonialism, albeit with new rhetorical demons and pretexts in each successive
epoch: corruption, endemic revolts, and European intervention in Wilsons day,
Communism during the Cold War, and autocrats, populists, terrorists, and drug
cartels since the Soviet Unions collapse. The main demons are typically external to
Latin Americaoften associated with the Old World, the Soviet Union, or, more
recently, various Asian and Middle Eastern countriesbut there are usually internal
demons, too (Kenworthy, 1995: 1837).
Press coverage of right-wing coups against Venezuelas Hugo Chvez in 2002 and
Hondurass Manuel Zelaya in 2009, and of the U.S. governments role in and after
those coups, offers stark examples of media support (open or tacit) for recent U.S.
interventionism. In both cases the U.S. response was accompanied by reports and
opinion pieces about legitimate U.S. security concerns and honest regard for
democracy. In addition to praising U.S. motives, news reports, opinion pieces, and
Mexico
Our actions towards Mexico depict a deep-seated Eurocentric
mindset, ignoring the cultures and rights of the people there.
Mexicomatters, 4
(MexicoMatters, Racism or Eurocentrism? How the U.S. Views Mexico
http://www.mexicomatters.net/mexicousrelations/04_racismoreurocentrism_howthe
usviewsmexico.php, accessed 7-4-13 , KR)
In a recent interview on BBC television, Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa,
criticized U.S. foreign policy. His criticism is hard to refute: that the U.S. did not
react to the genocidal conflicts in Rowanda and Somalia with the same intensity,
interest and direct intervention that Bosnia and Kosovo received.
Is it racist? I think the racist card is played too often in the States and white folks,
understandably react with a "here we go again" attitude. So if it isn't racist what is
it? I believe a primary cause of Euro centrism is our public education system. Most
of us were "educated" to believe the lie that the birth of civilization occurred on the
European continent.
It wasn't until I traveled to the southern most state of Mexico - Chiapas, did I realize
that the Olmec and Mayan cultures predated the Greeks and Romans. A civilization
whose astronomers knew the world was round and understood the planetary and
solar system. Architects whose buildings and pyramids, thousands of years later,
still stand as testament to their quality; like the aquaducts that still carry water
throughout the city. Mathmeticians, politicians, artists and musicians that predated
the ones we studied in our Euro focused history books.
Hiking through the ruins of Palenque I was transfixed by what I saw and
experienced. The ruins are in incredably good condition and spread out over miles
of parkland. Palenque transported me back thousands of years. I felt the energy
that still remains of the highly sophisticated city that once existed in this beautiful,
magical, ancient jungle.
I was transformed as an American in Palenque. I began to see myself as a
descendent of a great and ancient American culture and civilization. No longer was I
shackled with a European bench mark of civility. I could see even more clearly the
historical and cultural blinders that shapes the yankee attitude toward the rest of
the world. A profound arrogance that stems from something I heard from anglos in
my youth: "if you white you all right, if you brown stick around, but if you black-stay
back".
For me, U.S. foreign policy has always been and still is morally bankrupt. We cannot
be proud of our international human right's policies. If we can accept the obvious
hipocracy of doing business with the Chinese while maintaining a boycott against
Cuba we must reject any claims of moral objectivity.
Venezuela
Venezuela is in a battle of fighting against Eurocentrism, any
increase in engagement would distrust the fight
Augusto Baldi, advisor to the Brazilian regional federal court,
12 (Csar, 2-6-12, Critical Legal Thinking, New Latin American Constitutionalism:
Challeneging Eurocentrism & Decolonizing History
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/02/06/new-latin-american-constitutionalismchallenging-eurocentrism-decolonizing-history/ accessed 7-4-13 KR).
According to Viciano Pastor and Dalmau Martinez, this new constitutionalism would
be characterized by: a) the substitution of constitutional continuity for a break with
the previous system, while strengthening, in a symbolic sense, the political dimension of the Constitution; b) the innovative potential of the texts, seeking national
integration and a new form of institutionalism; c) foundations based on principles,
rather than rules; d) the extension of the constitutional text itself, as a consequence
of the constitutional past as well as of the complexity of the subject matter, but
communicated in accessible language; e) a ban on constituted powers controlling
their own capability for constitutional reform and, therefore, a greater degree of
rigidity, dependent on the new constituting process; f) seeking instruments that
rebuild the relationship between sovereignty and government, with participatory
democracy complementing the system of representation; g) an extensive bill of
rights, incorporating international treaties and integrating marginalized sectors; h)
breaking with the predominance of diffuse control of constitutionalism in favour of
focused control, including mixed formulas; i) a new model of economic constitutions, alongside a strong commitment to Latin American integration, not just in economic terms.
The two authors analysis appears on occasions to identify the Colombian Constitution (1991) as the start of the cycle, but in other instances declares it to be that of
Venezuela (1999). As a con sequence, they end up placing within a single process
three distinct cycles of pluralist constitutionalism, described well by Raquel
Yrigoyen: a) multicultural constitutionalism (19821988), which introduces the
concept of cultural diversity and recognizes specific indigenous rights; b) pluricultural constitutionalism (19882005), which develops the concept of a multiethnic
nation, and pluricultural State, incorporating a wide range of indigenous rights, for
those of African origin and other groups, especially in response to ILO Convention
169, while at the same time implementing neoliberal policies, with fewer social
rights and more market flexibility; c) plurinational constitutionalism (20062009), in
the context of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and which proposes the re-founding of the State, with explicit
recognition of the thousand-year-old roots linking indigenous groups to the land,
and discussing the end of colonialism. And it is precisely the establishment of a new
constitutional paradigm, following the examples of Ecuador and Bolivia, that the
Conceptions of space were articulated through the ways in which people arranged
their homes and towns, collected and displayed objects of significance, organized
warfare, set out agricultural fields and arranged gardens, conducted business,
displayed art and performed drama, separated out one form of human activity from
another. Spatial arrangements are an important part of social life. Western
classifications of space include such notions as architectural space, physical space,
psychological space, theoretical space and so forth. Foucault's metaphor of the
cultural archive is an architectural image. The archive not only contains artefacts of
culture, but is itself an artefact and a construct of culture. For the indigenous world,
Western conceptions of space, of arrangements and display, of the relationship
between people and the landscape, of culture as an object of study, have meant
that not only has the indigenous world been represented in particular ways back to
the West, but the indigenous world view, the land and the people, have been
radically transformed in the spatial image of the West. In other words, indigenous
space has been colonized. Land, for example, was viewed as something to be
tamed and brought under control. The landscape, the arrangement of nature, could
be altered by 'Man': swamps could be drained, waterways diverted, inshore areas
filled, not simply for physical survival, but for further exploitation of the
environment or making it 'more pleasing' aesthetically. Renaming the land was
probably as powerful ideologically as changing the land. Indigenous children
in schools, for example, were taught the new names for places that they and their
parents had lived in for generations. These were the names which appeared on
maps and which were used in official communications. This newly named land
became increasingly disconnected from the songs and chants used by indigenous
peoples to trace their histories, to bring forth spiritual elements or to carry out the
simplest of ceremonies. More significantly, however, space was appropriated from
indigenous cultures and then 'gifted back' as reservations, reserved pockets of land
for indigenous people who once possessed all of it.
Unlike Tasman, who visited only one coastline, Cook circumnavigated New Zealand
and proceeded to rename the entire country at will. This renaming was at one level
entirely arbitrary, responding to the fortunes or misfortunes of those on board the
ship and to the impressions gained from out at sea of the land they were observing.
Other names, however, recalled the geography and people of Britain. These names
and the landmarks associated with them were inscribed on maps and charts and
thus entered into the West's archive as the spoils of discovery. The renaming of the
world has never stopped. After the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1 840 and
settlement by British settlers became more intensive, townships, streets and
regions were renamed after other parts of the British Empire. Some towns took on
names which reflected Britain's battles in other parts of its Empire, such as India, or
Britain's heroes from its various conquests of other nations. Naming the world
has been likened by Paulo Freire to claiming the world and claiming those
ways of viewing the world that count as legitimate.10
Energy Development
US self-interest has always been the driver of Latin American
policy, energy development is just a new round of imperialism
Leonard, Professor of History at the University of North
Florida, 86
(Dr. Thomas M., Central America: A Microcosm of U.S. Cold War Policy
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1986/julaug/leonard.html, date accessed 7/5/13 IGM)
Oil Development
Oil development is part of the Eurocentric logic that ignores
indigenous pleas to leave them alone and exploits the entirety
of Latin America
Stetson, Boise State Assistant Professor, 11
(George, PhD, Assistant Professor, Boise State University, 2011, Ethnicity from
Various Angles and Through Varied Lenses: Yesterday's Today in Latin America,
Indigenous Resistance to Oil Development, Google Books, Page 225, Accessed
7/10/13, NC)
Oil/Resource Link
Mass scale expansion of natural resource exploitation was
started by Eurocentrism and continues to be fueled by that
same epistemology today; the end point of this is empirically
slavery and racism.
Kellecioglu, International economist, 10
(Deniz, International economist, Real-World Economics Review, issue no. 52, Why
some countries are poor and some rich a non-Eurocentric view,
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue52/whole52.pdf, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
Western European kingdoms went imperial because they needed to - at the end of
the fifteenth century Europe was in less good shape than other parts of the world.
The continent had had its population size halved through long periods of epidemics
like the socalled Black Death (Crosby 1999). Before this time period, poverty and
richness seem to have been about at the same levels between societies (Maddison
2001). Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that imperial ambitions and
hegemony are not exclusive to Europeans. World history reveals that human groups
have for long gone imperial against each other all over the world. In more recent
times we have had the English, French, Dutch, Russian and others going imperial
from Europe; in Asia we have had the Mongols, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Arabs
and many others going imperial; in Africa there have been the empires of Egypt,
Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Ashanti, Zulu and several others. In America there were the
Aztecs, Inca and the Maya civilizations in particular, waging imperial wars and rule.
In our context, this means European colonizers are not particularly vicious or
intelligent, since every set of ethnic groups have been involved in colonial
endeavour. In parallel, colonised people are not particularly kind or less intelligent,
since every set of ethnic groups has been subject to colonial rule.
However, the expansion of Western Europe became significantly different
from other colonial processes. In relevance to our context, the process
particularly included:
Global proportions,
Ecological imperialism,
Mass permanent settlements,
Slaves embodied solely by darker skinned people, and
Colour-coded racism.
Considering the first point listed above, before the outreach of the Iberian
kingdoms, most imperial ambitions where continental or regional. Perhaps it was
not a coincidence that it was the Spanish and the Portuguese who initiated this
Science Cooperation
Marginalization of local scientific traditions
Cueto Professor in the School of Public Health at the Universidad
Peruana Cavetano, and Esguerra, Ph.D History Professor at The
University of Texas at Austin, 9
(Marcos, an historian and a professor in the School of Public Health at the
Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Per. and Jorge Caizares, s the
Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin,
2009, History of Science Society, Latin America,
http://www.hssonline.org/publications/NonWesternPub/Latin_America.html,
Accessed: 7/3/13, LPS.)
Marginality, traditional values, scarce demand from local economic forces, and
foreign dependence are considered factors that contribute to the meager societal
support for or appreciation of scientists in contemporary Latin America. But during
the past fifty years, a number of countries have demonstrated that science can
evolve under adverse conditions. For example, during the 1950s, Argentina and
Brazil created national councils of science and technology. In the following decade,
Venezuela founded a major center for scientific research called the Instituto
Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientficas. Argentina has had a consistent nuclear
policy since the 1950s and developed a nuclear power potential in the region. Yet
Latin America still must struggle to overcome isolation, lack of international
visibility, and absence of a continuous scientific tradition. The public largely fails to
appreciate that research is needed to achieve development. Administrative and
political structures that encourage scientists to accomplish their work are
undeveloped. Moreover, a significant proportion of scientists continue to depend on
training abroad, which encourages a brain drain and disrupts the continuity of
research. Another important theme addressed in this section will be the response of
Latin American physicians and scientists to the challenges of pandemics of Cholera
and AIDS.
Development
Their model of economics leads to abuses of power that cause
unending exacerbations of impoverishment and poverty.
Trainer, U of New South Wales Conjoint Lecturer, 9
(Ted, Dr. Ted Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences,
University of New South Wales, 2009, Social Work, University of NSW, THE SIMPLER
WAY: WORKING FOR TRANSITION FROM CONSUMER SOCIETY TO A SIMPLER, MORE
COOPERATIVE, JUST AND ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/OUREMPIRE.htm, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
"The impoverished and long abused masses of Latin Americawill not stay quietly
on the farms or in the slums unless they are terribly afraidthe rich get richer only
because they have the guns. The rich include a great many US companies and
individuals, which is why the United States has provided the guns." Chomsky and
Herman, 1979, p.3. "No socialist or communist government giving top priority to the
needs of its people would, if it had any choice in the matter, willingly sell natural
resources, especially the produce of its soils, at such very low returns to the
common people as the typical Third World government does now. '. . . no
democratic government could permit its country's resources to be developed on
terms favourable to American corporate and government interests." Katsnelson and
Kesselman, 1983, p. 234. To repeat, the essential evil within the system is to do with
the extremely uneven shares of wealth received. For instance, the bulk of the
wealth generated by coffee production now goes to plantation owners, transnational
corporations, and consumers in rich countries. Coffee pickers often receive less than
1% of the retail value of the coffee they pick. Any genuinely "socialist" or
"nationalist" government would drastically redistribute those shares, or convert the
land to food production, if it could, meaning that people in rich countries would then
get far less coffee etc., or pay much higher prices. Hence we again arrive at the
basic conclusion: a more just deal cannot be given to the people in the Third World
unless rich countries accept a marked reduction in the share they receive from
wealth generated in the Third World. Any genuinely socialist government would
certainly clamp down on the bonanza terms now granted to transnational
corporations, such as long tax-free periods, few restrictions on transfers of funds,
repressive labour laws, low safety standards, controlled or banned unions, and weak
environmental laws. Even more important is the taken for granted doctrine that
development can only be of what people with capital will make most profit from, not
of the industries that will benefit most people. (See on appropriate development,
Trainer 2000.)
Advantage links
War Impacts
All their impacts are sabre-rattling and seek to justify the
same colonial mindset we criticize. Their model of threat
construction should be rejected.
Said, Columbia University English and Comparative Literature,
3
(Edward, Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature, author
Orientalism, AUGUST 05, 2003, Orientalism 25 Years Later Worldly Humanism v.
the Empire-builders, http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/05/orientalism/,
Accessed 7/5/13, IGM)
Democracy
Attempts to expand democracy to non- democratic nations are
rooted in Orientalism
Sadowski, associate professor, Political Studies and Public
Administration Beirut University, 97
(Yahya, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/52818/william-b-quandt/politicalislam-essays-from-middle-east-report Political Islam: Essays from Middle East
Report, date accessed 7/4/2013 IGM)
The collapse of communism in 1989 and the victory over Iraq in 1991 sparked a
wave of triumphal declarations by Western pundits and analysts who believed that
all viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism had now been exhausted
and discredited. Some then tried to sketch foreign policy appropriate to the new
world order. A consistent theme of this new thinking was that the peoples of the
developing countries must now acknowledge that liberal democracy is the only
plausible form of governance in the modern world. Accordingly, support for
democratization should henceforth be a central objective of US diplomacy and
foreign assistance. This trend was not welcomed by all. Autocrats in the Arab world,
particularly the rules of the Gulf states, were appalled t the thought that
Washington might soon be fanning the flames of republican sentiment. The
prevailing democratic system in the world is not suitable for us in this region, for our
peoples composition and traits are different from the traits of that world, declared
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia in March 1992. The kings stance suits many US policy
makers just fine. Former secretary of defense and CIA chief James Schlesinger spoke
for more than himself recently when he asked whether we seriously desire to
prescribe democracy as the proper form of government for other societies. Perhaps
the issues is most clearly posed in the Islamic world. Do we seriously want to
change the institutions in Saudi Arabia? The brief answer is no- over the years we
have sought to preserve those institutions, sometimes in preference to more
democratic forces coursing throughout the region.
Regional Instability
The Latin American war impacts that they read come from a
flawed understanding of the politics in Latin America and what
has necessitated those politics. Their authors look at Latin
America from a Western Perspective and jump at any chance to
make Latin America look barbaric and uncivil.
Remmer, U of Chicago PhD, 91
(Karen L. Remmer, PhD University of Chicago, Specialties: Comparative Politics,
Political Economy, Political Institutions, 1991, Comparative Politics, Vol. 23, No. 4,
pp. 479-495, New Wine or Old Bottlenecks? The Study of Latin American
Democracy, http://www.utexas.edu/law/journals/tlr/sources/Issue
%2089.7/Negretto/fn113.remmer.pdf, Accessed 7/5/13, NC)
Regional Leadership
Regional hegemony is a reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine
dictating that the region is ours to own and keep, reinforcing
the worst forms of a Eurocentric paradigm
Thornton, Director of the North American Congress on Latin America
08
(Christy, 10/1,The Monroe Doctrine is Dead; Long Live the Monroe Doctrine! The
United States' "New" Approach to Latin America, Left Turn,
http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/1249, accessed 7/7/13, sbl)
And it's the attempt to get "back in the game"-on the part of both the Bush
Administration and the two major candidates vying to succeed him-that should be
cause for concern among activists here in the US. The argument that the United
States has neglected Latin America and has therefore lost its influence in the
region-that while we were looking away, Chvez and his friends squatted our
backyard-misses two obvious realities. First, more and more Latin Americans, not
just Chavistas but citizens from Argentina to Mexico, have actively rejected policies
that marry representative democracy to neoliberal economics, and have begun to
construct alternatives, from the community to the national and regional level.
Second, the US has made very real interventions during the Bush administration, in
the name of "democracy promotion" and the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror."
It seems highly unlikely that the people of Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Colombia,
or Mexico-just to name a few-feel that they've been "neglected" by a United States
that is actively funding right-wing movements and arming military, paramilitary,
and police forces.
Of course, the very idea that the US could be losing Latin America implies that the
region is Washington's to lose in the first place: explicit in the Monroe Doctrine,
which says that the US will never allow a rival power to challenge its hegemony in
Latin America, is a paternalistic disbelief that Latin America might have the ability
to run its own affairs-in Shannon's term, to occupy its own space. And this is the
most crucial point in understanding the "losing Latin America" debate: even within
the fairly reasonable framework of the CFR task force report, which argues that
"Latin America's fate is largely in Latin America's hands," the inherent challenge
being put forth is how to reoccupy that space-how to bolster the United States'
rapidly diminishing sphere of influence. But in more and more cases across the
region, the Latin American people have risen to defend their own space through
powerful social movements and through electing leaders as diverse as Evo Morales
of Bolivia, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Cristina Fernndez
de Kirchner of Argentina, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and, yes,
Hugo Chvez of Venezuela. Despite their differences, these leaders have all made
independence from the United States part of their agenda in an assertion of
economic and political sovereignty, regardless of Washington's interests. As Latin
with a change of administration looming here in the United States, it should not be
surprising that Washington is suddenly turning to Latin America, once again, to
assert itself in the world. From the announcement of the Mrida Initiative to the
redeployment of the Navy's Fourth Fleet, from the publication of the CFR task force
report to Obama's recent speech at the right-wing Cuban American National
Foundation-it is clear that the foreign policy establishment, from center to right,
intends to rejuvenate an ailing Monroe Doctrine (or perhaps more appropriately,
rejuvenate the Roosevelt Corollary to that doctrine, which asserts the right of the
United States to intervene when Latin American nations become too unruly) and
reclaim the backyard. After Russia invaded Georgian territory in August, President
Bush sternly rebuked Russia, saying that the "days of ... spheres of influence are
behind us." Behind us, that is, unless you've got some "social justice" for sale .
Hegemony
Hegemonic discourse obscures otherization and human rights
violations the only answer is to challenge the foundational
logic of hegemony
Miguel, U of Glasgow Masters in Human Rights and
International Politics, 10
(Vinicius Valentin Raduan, Masters in Human Rights and International Politics,
University of Glasgow, 2010, World Forum for Alternatives, THE UNIVERSAL
JURISDICTION OF THE FEAR: ORIENTALISM, IMPERIALISM AND INTERNATIONAL LAW,
http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/en/the-universal-jurisdiction-of-the-fearorientalism-imperialism-and-international-law, Accessed 7/5/13, IGM)
Lastly, the other is coached as immeasurable human rights violator, facing our fury, the privileged caste of those
populations than to military apparatuses, as is well known. However, deaths of civilians belonging to the other army
those impacts, according to the imperial speeches, in spite of being justifiable, the colonial army has not dolus and
therefore cannot be held accountable. Arab and, generally, savage civilians killed are part of the game.
existing civilians sacrifice would be a necessary price to be paid in order to overthrow their brutal regime and
persistent aggression against us. It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.
If it is true that EuropeanNorth American modernity has had economic and military
hegemony over other cultures (Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hindustani, Islamic,
Realism/Hegemony
American Realism and Liberalism are empirically racist
western interventionist policies rooted in a Eurocentric
model of international relations
Hobson, University of Sheffield politics and international
relations professor, 12
John M. Hobson Professor of Politics and International Relations University of
Sheffield, Cambridge University Press, Published March 29 2012, The Eurocentric
Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760-2010, Pg. 258-9,
JB)
Terror
Concepts of cultural heterogeneity and terror are inherently
Eurocentric
Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University
and Stam, French University Professor at New York University,
97
(Ella, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University, and has taught, lectured
and written extensively on issues having to do with Eurocentrism and Orientalism,
and Robert, Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University, where he
teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on
French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and
film theory, 1997, Routledge, Unthinking Eurocentrism,
http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAB&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings
%2FUnthinkingEurocentrismIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjC
NGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6WnFAZPF8pes3AW7uuHLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, par. 3, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
Discourse links
Calling US America
The term America has its roots in indigenous languages the
use of it reinforces imperialisms ability to homogenize culture
Forbes, late Professor Emeritus and Chair, Native American
Studies, UC Davis, 95
(Professor Jack D. Forbes, Powhatan-Delaware, What Do We Mean By America and
American, http://descendantofgods.tripod.com/id111.html, accessed 7/8/13)
Our hemisphere has for quite some time now been known as "America", being
subdivided into North America, Central America, South America, etcetera.
Indigenous peoples have a bit of a problem, however, in that: (1) the United States
and its dominant European-origin citizens have attempted to pre-empt the terms
America and American; and (2) there has been a strong tendency, especially since
the 1780's, to deny to Indigenous Americans the right to use the name of their own
land. As a matter of fact there is a strong tendency to also deny Native People the
use of the name of any land within America, such as being Brazilian, Mexican,
Canadian, and so on, unless the term "Indian" is also attached, as in "Brazilian
Indian"(as "American Indian" is used instead of "American").
Some people believe that America as a name stems from the mountain range
known as Amerique located in Nicaragua. Others believe that it stem from a word
common to several American languages of the Caribbean and South America,
namely Maraca (pronounced marac, marca, and maraca). This word, meaning
rattle or gourd, is found as a place name in Venezuela (Maracapana, Maracay,
Maracaibo), Trinidad (Maracas), Puerto Rico (Maracayu, etc.), Brazil (Maraca,
Itamaraca) and elsewhere.
Many very early maps of the Caribbean region show an island located to the
northwest of Venezuela (where Nicaragua is actually located) called "Tamaraque"
which has been interpreted as T. amaraque standing for tierra or terra (land) of
Amaraque. All of this is before America first appeared as a name on the
mainland roughly in the area of Venezuela. Most of us have probably been
taught that America as a name is derived from that of Amerigo Vespucci, a
notorious liar and enslaver of Native people.
Strangely enough, Vespucci's first name is more often recorded as Albrico rather
than Amerigo. It may well be that the name America is not derived from his name
but we know for sure that it was first applied to South America or Central America
and not to the area of the United States.
From the early 1500's until the mid-1700's the only people called Americans were
First Nations People. Similarly the people called Mexicans, Canadians, Brazilians,
Peruvians, etcetera, were all our own Native People.
Latin America
The history of the term Latin America is one grounded in
European imperialism and subordination of indigenous
peoples.
Mignolo, Duke Professor of English, 6
(Walter D., 2006, The Idea of Latin America, pg. 57-59, accessed 7/3/13, JZ)
Emancipation belonged to the rise of a new social class (the bourgeoisie) whose
members were mostly White, educated in Christian cosmology and in the curriculum
of the Renaissance university, soon to be transformed with the advent of the
Kantian- Humboldtian university of the Enlightenment. One of the consequences of
such ideas of emancipation was that while celebrating the economic and political
emancipation of a secular bourgeoisie from the tutelage both of the monarchy and
of the church (particularly in France, where the separation of the church and the
state was greater than in Germany and England), that same bourgeoisie and its
intelligentsia appointed themselves to take into their hands the emancipation of
non-European people in the rest of the world. In general, these new directions
worked in two different manners: colonialism and imperialism, direct or indirect .
The emergence of Latinidad and of Latin America, then, is to be
understood in relation to a European history of growing imperialism
grounded in a capitalist economy and the desire to determine the shape of
emancipation in the non-European world.
Latinidad: From the Colonial Creole Baroque Ethos to the National Creole Latin
American Ethos
Latin America is actually a hyphenated concept with the hyphen hidden under the
magic effect of the ontology of a subcontinent. By the mid-nineteenth century, the
idea of America as a whole began to be divided, not so much in accordance with the
emergent nation-states as, rather, according to their imperial histories, which
placed an Anglo America in the North and a Latin America in the South in the new
configuration of the Western Hemisphere. At that moment, Latin America was the
name adopted to identify the restoration of European Meridional, Catholic, and Latin
civilization in South America and, simultaneously, to reproduce absences (Indians
and Afros) that had already begun during the early colonial period. The history of
Latin America after independence is the variegated history of the local elite,
willingly or not, embracing modernity while Indigenous, Afro, and poor Mestizo/a
peoples get poorer and more marginalized. The idea of Latin America is that sad
one of the elites celebrating their dreams of becoming modern while they slide
deeper and deeper into the logic of coloniality.
The idea of Latin America that came into view in the second half of the nineteenth
century depended in varying degrees on an idea of Latinidad Latinity,
Latinite that was being advanced by France. Latinidad was precisely the
The global idea of Latin America being deployed by imperial states today (the US
and the imperial countries of the European Union) is of a vast territory and a
resource of cheap labor, full natural resources, exotic tourism, and fantastic
Caribbean beaches waiting to be visited, invested in, and exploited. These images
developed during the Cold War when Latin America became part of the Third
World and a top destination for neo-liberal projects, beginning in Chile under
General Augusto Pinochet (1973) and followed up by Juan Carlos Menem in
Argentina (1989) and Snchez Gonzlo de Losada (1993) in Bolivia. Thus, for
example, today many of the major technological corporations are shifting
production to Argentina (post-crash) where they can hire technicians for around ten
thousand dollars a year while the US salary plus benefits, for the same type of job,
could be as high as fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year.
The section on Latin America in the CIAs report Global Trends 2015 relies on the
same idea of Latin America, which originated in the imperial designs of
nineteenth-century French ideologues in complicity with Creole elites. The CIA
forecasts that:
by 2015, many Latin American countries will enjoy greater prosperity as a result of
expanding hemispheric and global economic links, the information revolution, and
lowered birthrates. Progress in building democratic institutions will reinforce reforms
and promote prosperity by enhancing investing confidence. Brazil and Mexico will
be increasingly confident and capable actors that will seek a greater voice in
hemispheric affairs. But the region will remain vulnerable to financial crises because
of its dependence on external finance and the continuing role of single commodities
in most economies. The weakest countries in the region, especially in the Andean
region, will fall further behind. Reversals of democracy in some countries will be
spurred by a failure to deal effectively with popular demands, crime, corruption,
drug trafficking, and insurgencies. Latin America especially Venezuela, Mexico and
Brazil will become an increasingly important oil producer by 2015 and an
important component of the emerging Atlantic Basin energy system. Its proven oil
reserves are second only to those located in the Middle East.1
However, from the perspective of many who are being looked at and spoken at (not
to), things look a little bit different. The CIAs report cites many experts on Latin
America but not one person in Latin America who is critical of the neo-liberal
invasion to the South. For instance, the articles published by Alai-Amlatina, written
in Spanish in the independent news media, do not exist for a world in which what
The term Latin America is rooted in the history of AngloSaxon exploitation of indigenous people
Holloway, UC Davis history professor, 8
(Thomas, Ph.D., Latin American History, UW-Madison, 1974; MA, Ibero-American
Studies, UW-Madison, 1969; BA, Hispanic Civilization, UC Santa Barbara, 1968,
2008, Academia.edu, Latin America: Whats in a Name?,
http://academia.edu/202121/Latin_America_Whats_in_a_Name, accessed 7/4/13, JZ)
These considerations lead to a question central to the label itself: What is Latin
about Latin America? There are several historical and cultural issues that, in fact,
make the term quite problematic. The language of the Iberian groups engaged in
conquest and colonization was not Latin, despite the roots of the Spanish and
Portuguese languages in the Roman occupation of Iberia in ancient times. While
Latin remained the language of the Roman Catholic Church so central to the Iberian
colonization project, there is no apparent connection between Church Latin and the
label Latin America. Christopher Columbus himself, mistakenly insisting until his
death in 1506 that he had reached the eastern edge of Asia, used the term Indias
Occidentales, or the Indias to the West. That term lingers today, after being
perpetuated especially and perhaps ironically by British Colonials, in the West
Indies, the conventional English term for the islands of the Caribbean Sea eventually
colonized by Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
It is commonly known that the more general term America derives from the name
of Amerigo Vespucci (1451?-1512), another navigator of Italian origin who made
Political and social thought regarding Latin America has been historically
characterized by a tension between the search for its specific attributes and an
external view that has seen these lands from the narrow perspective of European
experience. There has also been an opposition between the challenge of the rich
potentialities of this New World and distress over its difference, which stands in
contrast with the ideal represented by European culture and racial composition.
Nonetheless, external colonial views and regrets because of the difference have
been widely hegemonic. A brief revision of the texts of the first republican
constitutions is enough to illustrate how liberals, in their attempt to transplant and
install a replica of their understanding of the European or North American
experience, almost completely ignore the specific cultural and historical conditions
of the societies about which they legislate. When these conditions are considered, it
is with the express purpose of doing away with them. The affliction because of the
differencethe awkwardness of living in a continent that is not white, urban,
cosmopolitan, and civilizedfinds its best expression in positivism. Sharing the
main assumptions and prejudices of nineteenth-century European thought
(scientific racism, patriarchy, the idea of progress), positivism reaffirms the colonial
discourse. The continent is imagined from a single voice, with a single subject:
white, masculine, urban, cosmopolitan. The rest, the majority, is the other,
[End Page 519] barbarian, primitive, black, Indian, who has nothing to
contribute to the future of these societies. It would be imperative to whiten,
westernize, or exterminate that majority.
K Affs
Race
Eurocentric colonialism is the root cause of identity binaries
and Otherization
Quijano, sociologist and humanist thinker, 2000
(Anibal, a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed
the concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been influential in the
fields of post-colonial studies and critical theory 2000, Coloniality of Power,
Eurocentrism, and Latin America, P. 533,
www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the
constitution of America and colo- nial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new
global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social
classification of the worlds population around the idea of race, a mental
construction that ex- presses the basic experience of colonial domination and
pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific
rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it
has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it
was established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic today
presupposes an element of coloniality. In what follows, my primary aim is to open up
some of the theoretically necessary questions America was constituted as the first
space/time of a new model of power of global vocation, and both in this way and by
it became the first identity of modernity. Two historical processes associated in the
production of that space/time converged and established the two fundamental axes
of the new model of power. One was the codification of the differences between
conquerors and conquered in the idea of race, a supposedly different bi- ological
structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the others. The
conquistadors assumed this idea as the constitutive, found- ing element of the
relations of domination that the conquest imposed. On Nepantla: Views from South
1.3 Copyright 2000 by Duke University Press 533 534 Nepantla this basis, the
population of America, and later the world, was classified within the new model of
power. The other process was the constitution of a new structure of control of labor
and its resources and products. This new structure was an articulation of all
historically known previous structures of control of labor, slavery, serfdom, small
independent commodity pro- duction and reciprocity, together around and upon the
basis of capital and the world market. 3 Race: A Mental Category of Modernity The
idea of race, in its modern meaning, does not have a known history before
the colonization of America. Perhaps it originated in reference to the phenotypic
differences between conquerors and conquered. However, what matters is that soon
it was constructed to refer to the supposed differ- ential biological structures
between those groups. Social relations founded on the category of race produced
new historical social identities in AmericaIndians, blacks, and mestizos and
redefined others. Terms such as Spanish and Portuguese , and much later European ,
Hybridization
Attempts to apply multi-culturism to the region lead to further
Americanization of culture through cross-pollination
Cueto, Professor in the School of Public Health at the
Universidad Peruana Cavetano, and Esguerra, Ph.D History
Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, 9
(Marcos, an historian and a professor in the School of Public Health at the
Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Per. and Jorge Caizares, s the
Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin,
2009, History of Science Society, Latin America,
http://www.hssonline.org/publications/NonWesternPub/Latin_America.html,
Accessed: 7/3/13, LPS.)
As the first colonial outpost of the early-modern European world, Latin America has
long witnessed complex processes of cultural cross-pollination, suppression, and
adaptation. Beginning in the fifteenth century, millenarian Amerindian civilizations,
heirs to rich local "scientific" traditions, seemingly gave way to European
institutions of learning and to new dominant forms of representing the natural
world. What happened to the earlier modes of learning? How do subordinate
cultures resist and adapt to new forms of knowledg e? Latin America has long
been a laboratory where the "West" has sought to domesticate and civilize
"non-Western" forms of Amerindian and African knowledge. Given Latin
America's rich history of cultural adaptations, suppressions, and hybridizations, it
cannot be labeled non-Western without serious qualifications. From the fifteenth
century, Western modes and styles of apprehending the natural world have
influenced all learned elite institutions in the region. Latin America has witnessed
different periods of Western scientific dominance; Iberian, French, British, German
and USA scientific traditions and institutions have left indelible marks.
Western Philosophy
Eurocentrism permeates much of Western philosophy
Wood, advisory editor of Solidarity.org 1
(Ellen Meiksins, an advisory editor of Against the Current, Solidarity.org, A new,
revised and substantially expanded edition of Wood's latest book, The Origin of
Capitalism, was be published by Verso in 2001, May-June, 2001, Solidarity,
Eurocentric Anti-Eurocentric, http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/993, Accessed:
7/5/13, LPS.)
THE QUESTION OF "Eurocentrism" is a vexing problem not only for academia but for
the left. In the broadest sense, Eurocentrism can be understood as the implicit view
that societies and cultures of European origin constitute the "natural" norm for
assessing what goes on in the rest of the world. Within this vast area of debate, one
particular subtopic has been an object of intense scrutiny among scholars: the realor-alleged centrality of Europe in preparing the explosion of economic development,
science and technology, the Enlightenment and the expansion of the role of the
individual-as well as intensified exploitation and colonial conquest-that heralded the
modem world. All these things, taken together, are commonly taken to be
synonymous with capitalism. It is precisely this identification that is challenged in
this essay by Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood, along with the notion that
ascribing European agrarian origins to capitalism entails a view of Europe as a
civilizing vanguard. Other writers, including the late J.M. Blaut, have argued that
Eurocentric assumptions have permeated the left's theorization of the origins of
modernity as thoroughly as they have dominated conventional "modernization"
theory. A wide range of scholars of color and Third World writers have contributed to
the discussion. The editors of Against the Current hope that Ellen Wood's
contribution will kick off an exchange taking up a number of issues, relating
particularly to the theoretical and historical debate on capitalist origins-but also
connecting this scholarly inquiry to some of the questions for the left in today's
global capitalist system. While this discussion is only one part of developing a fuller
understanding of the dynamics of liberation struggles and anti-capitalist
movements, historically and today, we believe it can be a worthwhile one.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is Eurocentric irony, cynicism, and the
questioning of intrinsic value or reality all have no application
to all cultures attempts to construct them as a better
foundation obscures indigenous cultures
Munck, Dublin City University Sociology Professor and
OHearn, University of Wisconsin Sociology Professor, 99
(Ronaldo Munck and Denis O'Hearn, April 15, 1999, Critical Development Theory:
Contributions to a New Paradigm, pg. 44-45 accessed July 5, 2013, Google Books,
EK)
The real power of the West is not located in its economic muscle and technological
might. Rather, it resides in its power to define. The West defines what is, for
example, freedom, progress and civil behavior; law, tradition and community;
reason, mathematics and science; what is real and what it means to be human. The
non-Western civilizations have simply to accept these definitions or be defined out
of existence. To understand Eurocentrism we thus have to deconstruct the
definitional power of the West. Eurocentrism is located wherever there is the
defining influence of Europe, or more appropriately, the generic form of Europe 'the West'. Wherever there is the West, there is Europe, and Eurocentrism is not
usually that far behind. So, where is the West?
As a civilization, the West is, of course, everywhere: the Western civilization is not
located in a geographical space but in these days of globalization it envelops the
globe with its desires, images, politics, and consumer and cultural products. As a
worldview, the West is the dominant outlook of the planet. Thus, Eurocentrism is not
simply out there - in the West It is also in here - in the non-West. As a concept and a
worldview, the West has colonized the intellectuals in non-European societies.
Eurocentrism is thus just as rampant and deep in non-Western societies as in Europe
and the USA: intellectuals, academics, writers, thinkers, novelists, politicians and
decision-makers in Asia, Africa and Latin America use the West, almost instinctively,
as the standard for judgments and as the yardstick for measuring the social and
political progress of their own societies. The non-West thus promotes Eurocentrism,
both wittingly and unwittingly, and colludes in its own victimization as well as in
maintaining the global system of inequality.
But Eurocentrism is 'in here' in another way. And it is related to my second question:
when was the West? As a conceptual and instrumental category, the West is located
in the history of colonization, from Columbus's 'discovery' of the 'New World' to the
present day. Rampant Eurocentrism is easily recognizable in colonial constructions
of the 'lazy native', the licentious and barbaric Muslim, the shifty, effeminate and
untrustworthy Hindu and other representations of the non-West in Orientalist fiction,
travel literature and scholarly explorations. But the time dimension of the West
These debates create possibilities for new intellectual strategies to address the
challenges posed by the crisis of modernity for Latin American critical theory. In
view of the fact that we are at a point in our work where we can no longer ignore
empires and the imperial context of our studies (Said 1993,6),it is absolutely
necessary to question whether postmodern theories offer an adequate perspective
from which to transgress the colonial limits of modern social thought. Some of the
main issues of postcolonial perspectives have been formulated and taken anew at
different times in the history of Latin American social thought of the late-nineteenth
Agamben
Agamben participates in an unquestioned worship of
Eurocentric philosophy with disregard to the chattel slavery
that was required to make it possible
Chanter, State University of New York Professor, 11
(Tina, Professor, Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2011, Whose
Antigone?: The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery, Google Books, Page 121,
Accessed 7/8/13, NC)
Impacts
Coloniality
Accepting a criticism of Eurocentrism that starts from the point
of race is pivotal as the stepping off point for discussions of
control over labor, sex, collective authority and intersubjectivity
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy
Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of
Comparative Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of
Philosophy and of Women's Studies at Binghamton University in New York, Spring
2008, The Coloniality of Gender, http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wpcontent/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf, Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of
the population of the planet in terms of the idea of "race." (Quijano, 2001-2, p.1)
The invention of "race" is a pivotal turn as it replaces the relations of superiority and
inferiority established through domination. It re-conceives humanity and human
relations fictionally, in biological terms. It is important that what Quijano provides is
a historical theory of social classification to replace what he terms the Eurocentric
theories of social classes. (Quijano, 2000b, 367) This move makes conceptual room
for the coloniality of power. It makes conceptual room for the centrality of the
classification of the worlds population in terms of races in the understanding of
global capitalism. It also makes conceptual room for understanding the historical
disputes over control of labor, sex, collective authority and inter-subjectivity as
developing in processes of long duration, rather than understanding each of the
elements as pre-existing the relations of power. The elements that constitute the
global, Eurocentered, capitalist model of power do not stand in separation from
each other and none of them is prior to the processes that constitute the patterns.
Indeed, the mythical presentation of these elements as metaphysically prior is an
important aspect of the cognitive model of Eurocentered, global capitalism.
In constituting this social classification, coloniality permeates all aspects of social
existence and gives rise to new social and geocultural identities. (Quijano, 2000b,
342) America and Europe are among the new geocultural identities. European,
Indian, African are among the racial identities. This classification is "the
deepest and most enduring expression of colonial domination." (Quijano, 2001-2, p.
1) With the expansion of European colonialism, the classification was imposed on
the population of the planet. Since then, it has permeated every area of social
existence and it constitutes the most effective form of material and inter-subjective
social domination. Thus, "coloniality" does not just refer to "racial" classification. It
is an encompassing phenomenon, since it is one of the axes of the system of power
and as such it permeates all control of sexual access, collective authority, labor,
Colonialism/Imperialism
Eurocentrism separates the world into West and the Rest in
which the world is literally constructed from the European lens
outward. Multiculturalism grew as a response to these
practical and linguistic binaristic hierarchies
Shohat, New York University Cultural Studies Professor, Stam,
New York University film theory and study Professor, 97
(Ella, Robert, Published by Routledge 1997, UNTHINKING EUROCENTRISM, Pg. 1-2,
JB)
The epistemological legitimization of Eurocentrism whitewashes history and legitimizes violence, imperialism,
colonialism and genocide
Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University
and Stam, French University Professor at New York University,
97
(Ella, and Robert, Unthinking Eurocentrism, http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAB&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings
%2FUnthinkingEurocentrismIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjC
NGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6WnFAZPF8pes3AW7uuHLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
The evaluation systems currently used for academics and universities, which take
the Mexican experience as a model, are another limited but significative indicator of
these trends, with potentially menacing consequences for the possibility of more
autonomous outlooks. Universalist criteria underlie these systems, according to
which the production of the universities in Latin America should follow the scientific
production of central countries as models of excellence. An expression of this is the
privileged consideration that is given in these systems of evaluation to publishing in
foreign scientific journals. Under the mantle of objectivity, what has in fact been
established is that the intellectual creation of social scientists in Latin American
universities should be ruled by the disciplinary frontiers, truth systems,
methodologies, problems, and research agendas of metropolitan social sciences, as
these are expressed in the editorial policies of the most prestigious journals in each
discipline. These evaluation systems are thus designed to judge performance within
normal northern science. Strictly individualized evaluation systems based on
short-term productivity seem to be purposely designed to hinder both the possibility
Racism/Inequality in General
Eurocentrism frame social norms the normative function of
race, gender, sex and other types identity are reinforced by
Eurocentrism
Baker, University of Rochester, Graduate Student School of
Education and Human Development, 8
(Michael, Teaching and Learning About and Beyond Eurocentrism: A Proposal for
the Creation of an Other School, March 16, 2008,
http://academia.edu/1516858/Teaching_and_Learning_About_and_Beyond_Eurocentr
ism_A_Proposal_for_the_Creation_of_an_Other_School, accessed 7/12/13)
The Other School would be oriented around an alternative framework for knowledge
and understanding that we might call the decolonial paradigm, since its central aim
is to decolonize thinking and being, in part, through dialogue (not just the study of
cultures as objects of knowledge) with the diversity of ways of knowing and being
that have been devalued and eclipsed in Eurocentric education. The decolonial
paradigm of education would focus on concepts of culture and power. Culture is not
separate from politics and economics, contrary to the taken-for-granted disciplinary
divisions. .political and economic structures are not entities in themselves, but
are imagined, framed and enacted by individuals formed in a certain type of
subjectivity; a subjectivity that is also framed in the dominant structure of
knowledge (Mignolo, 2005, p. 112). The cultural group (in the U.S. -- AngloAmerican) with the most money and the most political power is also the dominant
culture reproduced in the school curriculum. Most of us (particularly if we not white)
recognize that a racial hierarchy exists and is maintained by the dominant cultural
group (for example, see Huntington, 2004). Cultural diversity in multicultural
education is often more a way to manage or contain difference while maintaining
the racial hierarchy. Multiculturalism only became an issue and concept in
education during the unsettling 60s, when ethnic groups labeled racial minorities
raised their voices demanding that the promises of modernity be made available to
them as well as to whites. Racism is not simply the result of individual prejudice
and hateful expressions, but the consequence of the relations of power that are
historical and structural. The power side of culture can be conveniently neutralized
in the classroom as teachers and students learn about diversity without
examining how these differences have been constructed, how they are reproduced
in the curriculum, and how these constructions continue to serve the white power
elite. In English classes for example, students read works that movingly depict
personal struggles against discrimination, without gaining any sense of how English
literature was used to teach people their distance from the center of civilization
(Willinsky, 1989, p. ).
Multicultural education needs to include the study of how five centuries of
studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an imperial context gave rise to
Parallel to the historical relations between capital and precapital, a similar set of
ideas was elaborated around the spatial relations between Europe and non-Europe.
As I have already mentioned, the foundational myth of the Eurocentric version of
modernity is the idea of the state of nature as the point of departure for the civilized
course of history whose culmination is European or Western civilization. From this
myth originated the specifically Eurocentric evolutionist perspective of linear and
unidirectional movement and changes in human history. Interestingly enough, this
myth was associated with the racial and spatial classification of the worlds
population. This association produced the paradoxical amalgam of evolution and
dualism, a vision that becomes meaningful only as an expression of the
exacerbated ethnocentrism of the recently constituted Europe; by its central and
Reject Racism
The endpoint of racism is dehumanization, endless military
aggression and environmental destruction, it impacts us all,
but by rejecting every instance of it we can begin to
systemically break it down
Barndt, Author and Co-director of Crossroads, 91
(Joseph R., Author and Pastor in the Bronx in New York City and co-director of
Crossroads, a ministry working to dismantle racism and build a multicultural church
and society, 1991, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White
America, Google Books, Pages 155-156, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences, restraints
and limitations, ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all,
people of color and white people alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as the
victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color and white people separate from each
other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving the human
potential that God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of color
by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and
unjust; the effects of uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed, which are the marks
of our white prison, will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that
the walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable
fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick,
stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and cultural racism
can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join the efforts of those who
know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls of racism. The danger point
of self-destruction seems to be drawing ever more near. The results of centuries of
national and worldwide conquest and colonialism, of military buildups and violent
aggression, of overconsumption and environmental destruction may be reaching a
point of no return. A small and predominantly white minority of the global
population derives its power and privilege from the sufferings of the vast majority of
peoples of color. For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to
continue.
American influence means our racism is globally modeledrejection is key to stop global racism
Robinson, Lawyer, Author and Activist, 2k
(Randall Robinson, African-American lawyer, author and activist, noted as the
founder of TransAfrica, 2000, The Debt: What America owes to Blacks,
http://libgen.info/view.php?id=448737, Page 123, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
Racism Dehumanizing
Racism is the ultimate form of dehumanization and denial of
personal freedom
Feagin, U.S. Sociologist and Social Theorist, 2k
(Joe, U.S. sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on
racial and gender issues, especially in regard to the United States., 2000, Racist
America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations, Google books, Page 20,
Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
The alienation of oppression extends to other areas. In the case of black Americans,
that which should most be their owncontrol over life and workis that which is
most taken away from them by the system of racism. There is a parallel here to the
alienation described by analysts of class and gender oppression. In Karl Marx's
analysis of capitalism, the workers' labor, that which is most their own, is that which
is most taken away from their control by the capitalist employer. The worker is
separated from control over, and thus alienated from, his or her work. In addition,
feminist theorists have shown that at the heart of a sexist society is an alienating
reality of dehumanized sexuality. Women are separated by sexism from control over
how their own sexuality is defined.is To lose significant control over one's own life
choices, body definition, future, and even self is what subordination imposes. Thus,
racial oppression forces a lifelong struggle by black Americans, as a group and as
individuals, to attain their inalienable human rights. Dehumanization is systemic
racism's psychological dynamic, and racialized roles are its social masks.
Recurring exploitation, discrimination, and inequality constitute its structure, and
patterns such as residential segregation are its spatial manifestations.
No Solvency
Eurocentric mirror that distorts the lens in which we view the
world means should be suspect of all aff claims
Quijano, sociologist and humanist thinker, 2000
(Anibal, a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed
the concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been influential in the
fields of post-colonial studies and critical theory, 2000, Coloniality of Power,
Eurocentrism, and Latin America, P. 558,
www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
Furthermore, the new radical dualism was amalgamated in the eighteenth century
with the new mystified ideas of progress and of the state of nature in the human
trajectory: the foundational myths of the Eu- rocentric version of modernity. The
peculiar dualist/evolutionist historical perspective was linked to the foundational
myths. Thus, all non-Europeans could be considered as pre-European and at the
same time displaced on a certain historical chain from the primitive to the civilized,
from the rational totheirrational,fromthetraditionaltothemodern,fromthemagicmythic to the scientific. In other words, from the non-European/pre-European to
something that in time will be Europeanized or modernized. Without con- sidering
the entire experience of colonialism and coloniality, this intellectual trademark, as
well as the long-lasting global hegemon yof Eurocentrism, would hardly be
explicable. The necessities of capital as such alone do not exhaust, could not
exhaust, the explanation of the character and trajectory of this perspective of
knowledge. Eurocentrism and Historical Experience in Latin America The Eurocentric
perspective of knowledge operates as a mirror that distorts what it reflects, as we
can see in the Latin American historical experience. That is to say, what we Latin
Americans find in that mirror is not completely chimerical, since we possess so
many and such important historically European traits in many material and
intersubjective aspects. But at the same time we are profoundly different.
Consequently, when we look in our Eurocentric mirror, the image that we see is not
just composite, but also necessarily partial and distorted. Here the tragedy is that
we have all been led, knowingly or not, wanting it or not, to see and accept that
image as our own and as belonging to us alone. In this way, we continue being what
we are not. And as a result we can never identify our true problems, much less
resolve them, except in a partial and distorted way.
The study revolves around three ideas: 1) mainstream economics has produced
flawed theories of economic development for Third World countries 2) flawed
theories that are imported from the West lack fit and are biased and as such tend to
distort Third World development and 3) western theorists have ignored the basic
flaws in their theories by insisting on models involving perfect competition and
rational (western) behavior.
Throughout the book the author tries to show that the Eurocentricity of economic
theories and economic development based on these theories is nothing more than
an effort to westernize Third World countries. In chapter 1 the author defines the
westernizing problem as arising from the culture-bias of mainstream economics
which favors capital and capita-rich countries. In chapter 2 he dismisses Ricardo's
theory as being objective, claiming instead that Ricardo's theory along with theories
by Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith were designed to expand the wealth of
England. In chapter 3 the author recounts the process of westernization through
"western educated Third World leaders," whom he describes as "admirers of the
mystique of the West," and he also dismisses Arthur Lewis's model as being
beneficial to Third World countries because it depended on capital imported from
the West. In chapters 4 through 6 the author looks at the postwar period and
identifies macroeconomic models as developed from experience and realities in the
West to solve western problems. The author claims that attempts by the New
International Economic Order to bring about economic development were
unsuccessful because there was a lack of unity among countries in the South. In
general, the author felt that because economic development in the Third World is
based on a European centered world-view, the interest of Europeans is often
pursued at the expense of the population in Third World countries.
Generally speaking, Latin America has shown economic growth, although the social
structure imposed colonialism has been perpetuated. The region is extremely
unequal, with one of the worst income distributions of the world.
The explanation for this is that the initial degree of inequality, initiated with the long
process of fragmentation of local pre-capitalist and autonomous societies, followed
by the enslavement of traditional indigenous populations, the transference of
African slaves to the continent and, finally, the hyper-exploitation of the free (or
recently liberated) working class is still affecting the actual development.
The legacy of the colonial times - the concentration of power, wealth and land - led
to a stratified society with an extreme inequality. The discrimination and oppression
present in those hierarchical societies are the main inheritance of the former
colonies and are a persistent tragedy, being part of the unsolved questions of the
recent past.
Conclusions
The argument that colonialism as an external imposition is the only determinant for
the actual socioeconomic situation in former colonies is certainly not convincing: we
have to take in account the role of local elites who have benefited from those
exploitative relations.
Colonialism is part of the historical process and formation of these countries. The
contemporary economies are debilitated for the following main reasons:
a) The agro-export oriented economies gave the general contours to the colonized
production, forestalling attempts at industrialization and import substitution;
b) The agrarian structure excluded a majority from the access to the land and
privileged a non-intensive production;
c) Concentration of income, poverty and inequality impeded the creation of internal
consumption; d) the internal dynamics of the ruling classes haven't facilitated
savings, (re)investments and innovation in the national economy.
Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like "us" and
didnt appreciate "our" valuesthe very core of traditional Orientalist dogmathere
would have been no war. So from the very same directorate of paid professional
scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British
armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina
and North Africa, came the American advisers to the Pentagon and the White
House, using the same clichs, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same
justifications for power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only
language they understand) in this case as in the earlier ones. These people have
now been joined in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager
entrepreneurs to whom shall be confided every thing from the writing of textbooks
and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political life and its oil industry.
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others,
that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring
order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still,
there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign
or altruistic empires. Twenty-five years after my books publication Orientalism once
again raises the question of whether modern imperialism ever ended, or whether it
has continued in the Orient since Napoleons entry into Egypt two centuries ago.
Arabs and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the
depredations of empire is only a way of evading responsibility in the present. You
have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modern Orientalist. This of course is
also V.S. Naipauls contribution to literature, that the victims of empire wail on while
their country goes to the dogs. But what a shallow calculation of the imperial
intrusion that is, how little it wishes to face the long succession of years through
which empire continues to work its way in the lives say of Palestinians or Congolese
or Algerians or Iraqis. Think of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the
rise of Oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa, and goes on in similar
undertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and, during the entire twentieth
century in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria,
Palestine, and Afghanistan. Then think of the rise of anti-colonial nationalism,
through the short period of liberal independence, the era of military coups, of
Alts
Rejection Key
Must reject the Aff - Eurocentrism sweeps these impacts under
the rug. Their world becomes self-contained leading to the
forced subjugation of entire populations.
Lander, Central University of Venezuela Professor, 2k
(Edgardo, Sociologist, Venezuelan, professor at the Central University of Venezuela
and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, 2000, Nepantla: Views from South,
Volume 1, Issue 3, Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social
Thought, pp. 519-523,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html, Accessed
7/5/13, JB)
Spivak argues that once the version of a self-contained Western world is assumed,
its production by the imperialist project is ignored (86). Through these visions, the
crisis of European historyassumed as universalbecomes the crisis of all history.
The crisis of the metanarratives of the philosophy of history, of the certainty of its
laws, becomes the crisis of the future as such. The crisis of the subjects of that
history turns into the dissolution of all subjects. The disenchantment of a Marxist
generation that experienced in its own flesh the political and theoretical collapse of
Marxism and socialism and lived through the existential trauma of the recognition of
the gulag evolves into universal skepticism and the end of collective projects and
politics. This justifies a cool attitude of noninvolvement, where all ethical
indignation in the face of injustice is absent. In reaction to structuralism,
economism, and determinism, the discursive processes and the construction of
meanings are unilaterally emphasized. Economic relations and all notions of
exploitation disappear from the cognitive map. The crisis of the political and
epistemological totalizing models leads to a withdrawal toward the partial and local,
rendering the role of centralized political, military, and economic powers opaque.
The Gulf War thus becomes no more than a grand show, a televised
superproduction. For these perspectives, the crisis is not of modernity as such, but
of one of its constitutive dimensions: historical reason (Quijano 1990). Its other
dimension, instrumental reason (scientific and technological development, limitless
progress, and the universal logic of the market), finds neither criticism nor
resistance. History continues to exist only in a limited sense: the underdeveloped
countries still have some way to go before reaching the finish line where the
winners of the great universal competition toward progress await them. It seems a
matter of little importance that the majority of the worlds inhabitants may never
reach that goal, due to the fact that the consumer patterns and the levels of
material well-being of the central countries are possible only as a consequence of
an absolutely lopsided use of the resources and the planets carrying capacity.
Shifting from narratives that emphasize progress toward ones that emphasize crosscultural interactions opens many possibilities; not only does it decenter Europe, but
it also moves beyond narratives that measure significance by traditional standards
of influence and acknowledges the agency (and not just the victimization) of Latin
American societies and peoples. It is not that the traditional themesconquest and
colonization, slavery, racism, wars of independence, nation building, imperialism
and neocolonialism, economic development and dependency, and twentieth-century
revolutions and social movements are misguided. Rather, the challenge is to
rethink how we discuss these themes in ways that include Latin America as more
than a mere appendage of Europe (and later, the United States) and as more than
the hapless victim of conquest and exploitation. Although the spread of European
power was profoundly disruptive and violent, it was never simply imposed from
outside; rather, it always involved complex negotiations with and among local elites
and populations, who pursued their own agendas and formulated their own visions in
their engagement with European actors and culture. The story of Latin Americas
integration into the global sphere is the story of gradual absorption and
contestation of Western power into the fabric of local, daily life. Conversely, as the
work of Anthony Pagden and others has demonstrated, the New World left a deep
and lasting imprint on European culture.6
Unthinking Solvency
Only unthinking Eurocentrism can solve
Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University
and Stam, French University Professor at New York University,
97
(Ella, and Robert, Unthinking Eurocentrism, http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAB&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings
%2FUnthinkingEurocentrismIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjC
NGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6WnFAZPF8pes3AW7uuHLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
Mingling discursive history with textual analysis, speculative theoretical essay with
critical survey, Unthinking Eurocentrism addresses diverse disciplinary
constituencies. While recognizing the specificity of film/media, we also grant
ourselves a "cultural studies"-style freedom to wander among diverse disciplines,
texts, and discourses, ancient and contemporary, low and high. As a disciplinary
hybrid, the book develops a syncretic, even cannibalistic methodology. Its overall
architectonics move from past to future, from didacticism to speculation, from
hegemony to resistance, and from critique to affirmation. (Within "critique," we
would add, there is also "celebration," just as within "celebration" there is buried a
"critique.") Our purpose is not globally to endorse, or globally condemn, any specific
body of texts; the point is only to become more historically informed and artistically
nuanced readers of cultural practices. Unthinking Eurocentrism is therefore not
structured as an inexorable linear movement toward a prescriptive
conclusion. The overall "argument" concerning Eurocentrism is not stated baldly
and explicitly, but worked out slowly, over the course of the book. Diverse leitmotifs
are woven into the various chapters, creating a kind of musical echo effect whereby
the same theme emerges in different contexts. If "The Imperial Imaginary" (chapter
3) stresses the colonialist writing of history, "The Third Worldist Film" (chapter 7)
stresses the "writing back" performed by the ex-colonized. Such themes as the
critique of Eurocentric paradigms, the elaboration of a relational methodology, the
search for alternative esthetics, and the interrogation of the diverse "posts,"
meanwhile, structure the text throughout. Some themes that appear first in a
colonialist register - hybridity, syncretism, mestizaje, cannibalism, magic - later
reappear in a liberatory, anticolonialist register, so that the diverse sections
reverberate together thematically.
Our title, Unthinking Eurocentrism, has a double thrust that structures the book as a
whole. On the one hand, we aim to expose the unthinking, taken-for-granted quality
of Eurocentrism as an unacknowledged current, a kind of bad epistemic habit, both
in mass-mediated culture and in intellectual reflection on that culture. In this sense,
we want to clear Eurocentric rubble from the collective brain. On the other, we want
to "unthink" Eurocentric discourse, to move beyond it toward a relational theory and
practice. Rather than striving for "balance," we hope to "right the balance."
Eurocentric criticism, we will argue, is not only politically retrograde but also
esthetically stale, flat, and unprofitable. There are many cognitive, political, and
esthetic alternatives to Eurocentrism; our hope is to define and illuminate them.
Unthinking Eurocentrism is not a politically correct book. The very word,
"correctness," in our view, comes with a bad odor. On the one (right) hand, it smells
of Crusoe's ledger book, of manuals of etiquette and table manners, and even of the
bookkeeping of the Inquisition and the Holocaust. On the other (left) hand, it has the
odor of Stalinist purism, now transferred to a largely verbal register. The phrase
"political correctness" (PC) evokes not only the neoconservative caricature of
socialist, feminist, gay, lesbian, and multiculturalist politics but also a real tendency
within the left - whence its effectiveness. Amplifying the preexisting association of
the left with moralistic self-righteousness and puritanical antisensuality, the right
wing has portrayed all politicized critique as the neurotic effluvium of whiny
malcontents, the product of an uptight subculture of morbid guilt-tripping. But if
"political correctness" evokes a preachy, humorless austerity, the phrase "popular
culture" evokes a sense of pleasure. Thus an underlying question in Unthinking
Eurocentrism is the following: given the eclipse of revolutionary metanarratives in
the postmodern era, how do we critique the dominant Eurocentric media while
harnessing its undeniable pleasures? For our part, we are not interested in
impeccably correct texts produced by irreproachable revolutionary subjects. Indeed,
a deep quasi-religious substratum underlies the search for perfectly correct political
texts. In this sense, we would worry less about incorrectness (a word suggesting a
positivist updating of "sin"), stop searching for perfectly correct texts (patterned
after the model of the Janonical sacred word), stop looking for perfect characters
Decolonizing Knowledge
Decolonial knowledge production is key to solve
Baker, Professor of Education and Human Development at the
University of Rochester, 12
(Michael, October 31 - November 4, , American Educational Studies Association,
Annual Conference Seattle, Washington, Decolonial Education: Meanings, Contexts,
and Possibilities,
http://academia.edu/3266939/Decolonial_Education_Meanings_Contexts_and_Possibl
ities, Accessed: 7/7/13, LPS.)
What do decoloniality and decolonial education mean? Where does this movement
come from? What are the key ideas that underlie and comprise decolonial
education? What does decolonial education look like in practice? My presentation
will introduce a decolonial perspective on modernity and sketch the implications of
this perspective for rethinking modern education beyond the epistemological
boundaries of modernity. The overall argument can be seen as an attempt to
reveal, critique, and change the modern geopolitics of knowledge, within which
modern western education first emerged and remains largely concealed.
Decoloniality involves the geopolitical reconceptualization of knowledge. In order to
build a universal conception of knowledge, western epistemology (from Christian
theology to secular philosophy and science) has pretended that knowledge is
independent of the geohistorical (Christian Europe) and biographical conditions
(Christian white men living in Christian Europe) in which it is produced. As a result,
Europe became the locus of epistemic enunciation, and the rest of the world
became the object to be described and studied from the European perspective. The
modern geopolitics of knowledge was grounded in the suppression of sensing and
the body, and of its geo-historical location. The foundations of knowledge were and
remain territorial and imperial. The claims to universality both legitimate and
conceal the colonial/imperial relations of modernity (Mignolo, 2011). Decolonial
education is an expression of the changing geopolitics of knowledge whereby the
modern epistemological framework for knowing and understanding the world is no
longer interpreted as universal and unbound by geohistorical and bio-graphical
contexts. I think therefore I am becomes I am where I think in the body- and
geo-politics of the modern world system (Mignolo, 2011). The idea that knowledge
and the rules of knowledge production exist within socio-historical relationships
between political power and geographical space (geopolitics) shifts attention from
knowledge itself to who, when, why, and where knowledge is produced (Mignolo,
2011). The universal assumptions about knowledge production are being displaced,
as knowledge is no longer coming from one regional center, but is distributed
globally. From this recognition of the geo and body politics of knowledge, education,
including the various knowledge disciplines that comprise education and knowledge
of education, can be analyzed and critiqued with questions such as: who is the
subject of knowledge, and what is his/her material apparatus of enunciation?; what
The decolonial idea developed further during the Cold War from the experiences of
political decolonization and in the works of Afro and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals and
activists (Mignolo, 2011, p. 55). During the 1950s and 1960s, a decolonial
movement emerged among leaders and intellectuals from the global south
opposing the reformulation of modern colonialism/imperialism within the capitalistcommunist power struggle. The global political economy was analyzed as an
asymmetrical system of dependency, where the rising standards of living among
the developed countries were the result of resources and surplus extracted from the
underdeveloped countries. These insightful critiques of an interconnected political
economic system of poverty and wealth surfaced with the Bandung Conference of
From this perspective, modern epistemology and the modern knowledge disciplines
and school subjects (modern western educational institutions overall) are
interpreted as participating in a geocultural project of subjugation and control
oriented towards maintaining racialized hierarchical structures linked to the
capitalist system (Baker, 2012). Education in European cultural knowledge under
the guise that it is universal or the most advanced is pedagogical domination.
Despite decades and varieties of multiculturalism in education, modern schooling
continues to involve particular forms of cultural assimilation and intellectual
subjugation within a Eurocentric knowledge culture. Multiculturalism is based on
cultural diversity controlled by a mono-cultural epistemology. The occlusion of nonwestern knowledge traditions in the standardized curriculum make education an
epistemically racist institution. Racism here is not a classification of human beings
according the color of their skin but rather a classification according to a certain
standard of humanity that originated in modern natural law theory. The relevant
argument for education is that the European patterns of knowing and structures for
organizing and learning about the world, which began to develop during the
sixteenth and seventeenth century inventions of humanity, made the world
unknowable beyond this Eurocentric horizon for knowing and being. The modern
versus traditional dichotomy for example is still commonly used in education as well
as the social sciences and humanities. Knowledge of human beings is contained
within a unilateral and oppressive structure that cannot be adequately understood
from within its own conceptual/narrative of the modern Eurocentric intellectual
tradition (Osamu, 2006, p. 270). The control of knowledge and subjectivity through
Eurocentric education and the traditionalizing of non-European knowledges made
both imperial territorial state formation within Europe as well as European colonial
domination possible. This critique of modernity as mutually constituted with
coloniality calls for the epistemic delinking from modernity along with the inclusion
of non-western knowledges in the socialization of subjectivities -- a shift from
universal to pluriversal forms of knowledge and education. Decolonial education
therefore involves opening up the possibilities of teaching and learning subaltern
knowledges positioned on the margins or borders of modernity. Decoloniality is an
epistemic, ethical, political and pedagogical project that involves both the
denaturalization of the modern civilizational cosmology and the inclusion
Two interrelated projects for decoloniality are the re-embodiment and relocation of
thought in order to unmask the limited situation of modern knowledges and their
links to coloniality (Mignolo, 2012, p. 19). A second project involves an-other
thinking that calls for plurality and intercultural dialogue in the building of
decolonial futures. The ultimate aim of this pluriversal movement is the creation of
a transmodern world where many different worlds can coexist without an imposed
assimilation ethos into a dominant culture. A pluriversal education is an alternative
to the current educational system of assimilation/marginalization into a
universalized cultural project. Decoloniality is an epistemic revolution that
seeks to change the foundational concepts and priorities of the modern
western episteme and its main institutions such as education . A central
theme in decolonial education is the equal recognition and democratic and
pragmatic inclusion of the epistemological diversity of the world. Social justice
necessarily requires cognitive justice, while cognitive justice requires dialogue.
Genuine dialogue can only begin with a rearticulated relation with modernitys
Other. Starting from the silenced histories and experiences of the colonized,
decolonial thinking involves both the colonized and colonizers, and the working out
of new kinds of interrelationships that involve dialogue and the creation of
symmetrical power/knowledge relations. Deimperialization and decolonization are
two interrelated sides of the educational processes of transforming the dominant
forms of self-other understanding within modernity (Chen, 2010). The task for
imperializing countries is to examine the conduct, motives, and consequences of
imperialist history that has formed their own self-understandings (Chen, 2010, p. 4).
Deimperialization involves a radical questioning of the mode of living and knowing
implicated in the very idea of European or American. Unlearning imperial privilege
involves authentic dialogue with the subaltern. Authentic dialogue calls for the
Only fifteen years after the discovery (or its conventional date) the term America
makes its appearance. In this moment it emerges next to words as Europe, Asia, and
Africa. Walter Mignolo underlines a central aspect in this process: America, contrary
to Asia and Africa, did not constitute the obvious otherness that in the Christian
map was associated to the three sons of Noah (Sem, Cam, and Japheth). Instead, it
was an extension of Japheth, the extreme west.23 That was its place among the
prevailing world conceptions. Once the denomination of America became
associated almost exclusively with the United States, we find the appellatives of
Ibero-America and Hispano-America. The first is a geographical and cultural term:
it alludes to the countries that were colonized by Spain or Portugal. The second is a
linguistic and cultural concept that refers to the set of countries where Spanish is
spoken and that were colonized by Spain.
Then we have Latin America, a name that can be traced to the nineteenth century.
Its consolidation cannot be understood outside the political and diplomatic practices
of mid-century France.24 This concept has to be seen as part of a French project
towards America that planned to counteract the United States sphere of influence,
and was articulated with the French invasion of Mexico from 1861 to 1867: Napoleon
the Third appealed to the Latinity of its colonies in America as a way to stop the
advances of the United States over the Caribbean. The uses of the term underlined
the racial as a way to fixate the latin character of this part of America. They
constantly claimed that the Latin race had to stand together facing the Saxon
race.25
Finally, it is interesting to recall an episode that took place in a Conference of
History in Madrid around a debate over the name of our continent: Saying that the
name Latin America was a French artifice; the Peruvian delegates objected the
name because it excluded the Indians, so Spaniards accepted that it was fairer to
call the region Indo-iberoamerica. Then, another delegation pointed out that such
a denomination seemed to exclude the African population. Again, Spaniards
recognized that, in fact, a better name would be Afro-indo-iberoamerica. When the
Haitian delegate raised his hand to make another proposition to the Spanish
Perm Debate
It is not the same to assume that the historical patrimony of the social sciences is
merely parochial as to conclude that it is also colonial. The implications arc
drastically different. If our social-science heritage were just parochial, knowledge
related to Western societies would not need any questioning. It would be enough to
expand the reach of the experiences and realities to be studied in other parts of the
world. We could complete theories and methods of knowledge which thus far have
been adequate for some determined places and times, but less adequate for others.
The problem is a different one when we conclude that our knowledge has a colonial
character and is based upon assumptions that imply and "naturalize" a systematic
process of exclusion and subordination of people based on criteria of class, gender,
race, ethnicity, and culture. This perspective introduces crude distortions not only in
knowing others, but also in the self-understanding of European and northern
societies.
To recognize the colonial character of the hegemonic forms of knowledge in the
contemporary world would imply more difficult and complex challenges than those
identified in The Gtdbenlfian Report. This knowledge is intertwined in complex and
inseparable manners in the articulations of power of contemporary societies. Only a
timid and partial dialogue with other subjects and cultures would be achieved by
incorporating into the social sciences representatives of those subjects and cultures
that were once excluded. As is acknowledged in the report, this requires long
learning and socializing processes in certain truth-systems, at the end of which one
could well expect that only internal criticisms of the discipline would be likely. Given,
for example, the current demarcations of economics, there are limited possibilities
for the formulation, from within that discipline, of radically different alternatives to
mainstream liberal economics. Liberal cosmology (a conception of human nature, of
wealth, of the relationship of man to nature, of progress) is incorporated as a
fundamental metatheoretical premise in the disciplinary constitution of that field of
knowledge.
The achievement of effective intercultural, horizontal democratic communications,
noncolonial and thus free of domination, subordination, and exclusion, requires a
debate beyond the limits of the official disciplines of modern sciences, open to
Recent world history textbooks have been beefed up with additional pages about
peripheral regions in general, and Latin America in particular, but this has not
automatically rescued these areas from irrelevance. Even Peter Stearns, who
includes a lengthy chapter on twentieth-century Latin America in his 2002 edition of
World History in Brief, concludes that the region has always occupied a somewhat
ambiguous place in world history. First, it does not fit neatly into either Western
or non-Western societies, but is better seen as a syncretic civilization. Second,
although Stearns judges that continuing dependency makes Latin America a full
participant in the world economy, it participates not always influentially. Latin
Americans have generated neither dramatic cultural forms nor catastrophic military
upheavals of international impact. Nationalism and literary preoccupation with
issues of Latin American identity follows from a sense of being ignored and
misunderstood in the wider world.2 Somewhat apologetically, Stearns predicts that
the region will have an increasing international impact in the twenty-first century
thanks to its growing population, economic advances, and new cultural selfconsciousness. Indeed, in the United States (where the Hispanic population has
recently surpassed the African American population and continues to grow rapidly),
it is easy to make a case for expanded coverage of Latin America in world history
textbooks on the grounds of academic inclusion. Increasing numbers of Hispanic
students will demand to learn more about their heritage, and other citizens of the
United States will benefit from an awareness of the culture of minority populations
with whom they live and work. These are important, but insufficient, reasons for
increased coverage of the region in world history courses. New chapters that make
up for past omissionscompensatory history will accomplish little. Such additions
are unlikely to convince either skeptical instructors or overburdened students that
the new material is significant and thus worthy of much (or any) attention in a
crowded semester. Like new sections about women pasted into old androcentric
textbooks, such additions do not provoke a reconceptualization of the story; thus,
Finally, it should go almost without saying that theoretical notions retrieved from
the attic of ideas and based on older, simpler understandings of Latin America
have no place in the new agenda. Outstanding theoretical challenges can not be
resolved by treating theory as fashion that can be periodically recycled to dress up
or to package research findings but as otherwise irrelevant. The revival of
frameworks that were rejected in the past for sound reasons will merely
postpone the process of theoretical reconstruction while a new round of
exorcism takes place. If theoretical inspiration is to be sought outside of the
contemporary Latin American context, scholars would do well to expand their
comparative horizons and consider the extensive body of literature on modern
European democracy. This literature directs attention towards extant democratic
realities as distinct from future authoritarian possibilities, structural and
institutional forces as distinct from contingent leadership choices, comparative as
distinct from country-specific patterns of political change and stability, and
theoretical issues that call for rigorous empirical research rather than abstract
theorizing and intuition. Latin America deserves no less. It may even be the case
that the politics of the region resemble European politics more than they resemble
the politics portrayed in older theories about Latin America. The study of Latin
American politics will remain more backward than the realities it attempts to
describe and explain unless and until the theoretical rigor and methodological tools
expected of social science research elsewhere are applied to questions of political
change and stability.
The fact that language, space, time, and history have all been colonized through
the colonization of knowledge must give us pause before we borrow the founding
concepts of Eurocentric thought, such as center/periphery, tradition/modernity, and
primitive/civilized, or the very evaluative binary structure that grounds these.
Mignolo develops Quijanos concept of the coloniality of power, then, as a way to
name that set of framing and organizing assumptions that justify
hierarchies and make it almost impossible to evaluate alternative claims.
Why was it said that there were no pre-Colombian books or forms of writing, when it
was known that the codices had been raided and burned in heaps? How could the
claim that modernity represented an expansion of freedom not be challenged by its
development within the context of colonialism? Why do we continue to
conceptualize rationality as separate from and properly in dominion over the realm
of affect, a distinctly Greek and nonindigenous notion, as Mariategui showed many
decades ago? Why is it considered sufficient, even exemplary, to have one
Latin Americanist in a university history department in the United States,
when 5 or 10 or even 15 Europeanists are required? And in philosophy
departments, it is not necessary to have a single one.
These scholars insist on the need to open a real debate about the imperial, colonial
and racist origins and legacies of the discipline. This means decolonising any
consensus regarding time, knowledge, and being via a thorough confrontation with
these issues. Shilliam in 'The perilous but unavoidable terrain of the non-West"s
affirms that modernity as a debate in IR is "naturalized" by certain issues such as:
the problem of continuity and change -that is assigning different temporalities to
non-Western societies-; the question of secularism -starting with the idea that
certain kinds of religiosities have disappeared with modernity-; and the topic of race
-that the aim to homogenize cultures led to the creation of "meta-racialized
identities". Sankaran Krishna identifies what is the crux of the problem when she
argues that IR theory is quintessential white, "not because race disappears [but
because it] serves as the crucial epistemic silence around which the discipline is
written and coheres."5 in Decolonizing International Relations the main suggestion
is that "to decolonize IR theory is [...] to decolonize all the topics, since the
discipline itself is reproducing a "modern imperial ideology".' As Julian Saurin
argues, "the central historiographical battle is a political battle over ownership of
the means of production of memory and the definition of progress".5 it is necessary
to question not only the "neutrality" of history, but the selection of events,
characters, epochs, what is memorable and what is not. The control over what is to
be remembered is suppressed by what Krishna calls the abstraction of the discipline
"presented as the desire of the discipline to engage on theory building rather than
on descriptive or historical analysis, is a screen that simultaneously rationalizes and
elides the details of these encounters."9 To go beyond that abstraction IR theory not
only needs to deconstruct itself as a reproducer of Western imperialism, colonialism,
and racism, but also as a discipline that continues to insist that '"the rest of the
world" has benefited [...] from the spread of the Wests civilizing values and
institutions [...]""' This natural acceptance of "Wests civilizing values and
institutions" and the "socialization of international norms" is the focus of intense
criticism. Addressing Kathryn Sikkin and Martha Finnemore's International
Organization, Robert Vitalis argues that the "acceptance" of international norms had
to hide that within an IR framework, white supremacy is constitutive of a set of
The argument that colonialism as an external imposition is the only determinant for
the actual socioeconomic situation in former colonies is certainly not convincing: we
have to take in account the role of local elites who have benefited from those
exploitative relations. Colonialism is part of the historical process and formation of
these countries. The contemporary economies are debilitated for the following main
reasons: a) The agro-export oriented economies gave the general contours to the
colonized production, forestalling attempts at industrialization and import
substitution; b) The agrarian structure excluded a majority from the access to the
land and privileged a non-intensive production; c) Concentration of income, poverty
and inequality impeded the creation of internal consumption; d) the internal
dynamics of the ruling classes haven't facilitated savings, (re)investments and
innovation in the national economy. Finally, the geography (or how it was
appropriated by the colonial powers) gave an incentive for easy exploitation of
natural resources (a necessary input to production), shaping the patterns of
occupation and de-population of the colony. The actual development policy of Latin
American countries has focused on the exportation of agricultural products,
repeating old economic patterns. The monoculture is mystified under the label of
diversification of products. The impacts are more environmental destruction and
(re)concentration of land in favor of big and old landowners. Low cost labor is once
more a comparative advantage in international trade, now called "competitive"
costs in the globalized world. Years of development studies demonstrated that there
is not a model or "recipe" for progress and modernization. A diversity of
development policies are needed in order to face these structural problems. The
developmentalists in Latin America are ignoring a very basic premise: any real
attempt of development must focus on the rupture of the old colonial
legacy. Otherwise, social change will purely constitute a perpetuation of
actual unequal conditions.
Reform DA
The affirmative and the alternative are mutually exclusive. The
attempt of trying to combine reformation with American
intervention leads to serial social failure, oppression,
exploitation, and brutalization of populations
Trainer, U of New South Wales Conjoint Lecturer, 9
(Ted, Dr. Ted Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences,
University of New South Wales, 2009, Social Work, University of NSW, THE SIMPLER
WAY: WORKING FOR TRANSITION FROM CONSUMER SOCIETY TO A SIMPLER, MORE
COOPERATIVE, JUST AND ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/OUREMPIRE.htm, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
Most importantly, revolutions can only be made by oppressed people. Anyone who
has the slightest understanding of social movements in general and revolution in
particular realises how extremely difficult it is to get a revolution going. It was
absurd for the Reagan administration to suggest that Russian or Cuban agents could
come into a Central American country and stir up a revolution. It is amazing what
oppressed, exploited and brutalised people will continue to endure without
attempting to hit back. In much of Latin America people have put up with decades,
even centuries, of the most appalling treatment from exploitative and vicious ruling
classes, without mounting any significant threat to those regimes. Many attempts to
initiate revolution among people who have the most clear-cut reasons for hitting
back have failed to win significant support from the oppressed classes. If there is
any move whatsoever towards popular rebellion, let alone a successful people's
revolution, you can be sure that there has been a long history of enormous suffering
at the hands of a brutal and predatory ruling class. As Blasier (1983) says,
American leaders have not understood the fundamental causes of the
revolutions . . . Their most serious misperception has been that the U.S.S.R., acting
throughout the Communist parties or conspiratorial activities, actually caused social
revolution in Latin America. Chomsky and many others would argue that American
leaders understand the situation only too well. The weakness in Blasier's account is
its failure to recognise that these and other aspects of US foreign policy are not
mistakes, but deliberate and essential elements in the defence of the empire. It is
possible for subversive agents to enter a Third World country and organise a coup
without involving the people in general. The USA and the USSR have often been
involved in activities of this sort. But this is entirely different from a popular revolt.
As Blazier says, (p. 153), Governments cannot export revolution. The groups who
made most mileage out of the communist threat were the ruling classes of the
Third World, especially in Latin America. At the slightest hint of a call for social
justice or change that might impinge upon their interests they immediately cried
communists! Dissent of any kind was branded as communist subversion. This was
a marvellous mechanism for destroying challenges to their privileges, especially as
Answers to:
As the report points out, modern social sciences were developed in England, France,
Italy ,Germany ,and the United States and were meant to deal with the social reality
of those countries (Wallerstein 1996,23).From the fact that the rest of the world was
segregated to be studied by other disciplinesanthropology and orientalism (23
28)it is not possible, however, to conclude that those other territories, cultures,
and peoples were not present as an implicit reference in all the disciplines. The
separation between the studies of the modern European North Americans and the
rest is made on the basis of assumptions in relation to others, assumptions that
define them as essentially different. The superiority of modern industrial societies is
defined in contrast with the inferiority of the non-modern.
The problem with Eurocentrism in the social sciences is not only that its
fundamental categories were created for a particular time and place and later used
in a more or less creative or rigid manner to study other realities. The problem lies
in the colonial imaginary from which Western social sciences constructed its
interpretation of the world. This imaginary has permeated the social sciences of the
whole world, making a great part of the social knowledge of the peripheral world
equally Eurocentric.7 In those disciplines, the experience of European societies is
naturalized: Its economic organizationthe capitalist marketis the natural form
of organizing production. It corresponds to an individual universal psychology
(Wallerstein 1996,20). Its political organizationthe modern European nation state
is the natural form of political existence. The different peoples of the planet are
organized according to a notion of progress: on one hand the more advanced,
superior ,modern societies; on the other, backward, traditional, nonmodern
societies. In this sense, sociology, political theory, and economics have not been
any less colonial or less liberal than anthropology or orientalism, disciplines where
these assumptions have been more readily acknowledged. This is the basis of the
cognitive and institutional network of development and of structural adjustment
politics promoted by The Washington consensus.8
The evaluation systems currently used for academics and universities, which take
the Mexican experience as a model, are another limited but significative indicator of
these trends, with potentially menacing consequences for the possibility of more
autonomous outlooks. Universalist criteria underlie these systems, according to
which the production of the universities in Latin America should follow the scientific
production of central countries as models of excellence. An expression of this is the
privileged consideration that is given in these systems of evaluation to publishing in
foreign scientific journals. Under the mantle of objectivity, what has in fact been
established is that the intellectual creation of social scientists in Latin American
universities should be ruled by the disciplinary frontiers, truth systems,
methodologies, problems, and research agendas of metropolitan social sciences, as
these are expressed in the editorial policies of the most prestigious journals in each
discipline. These evaluation systems are thus designed to judge performance within
normal northern science. Strictly individualized evaluation systems based on
short-term productivity seem to be purposely designed to hinder both the possibility
of the collective efforts in the reflective, innovative long-term and the socially
concerned (as opposed to market-oriented) research and debatesfree from
immediate constraints of time or financing pressuresthat would be required in
order to rethink epistemological assumptions, historical interpretations, and present
forms of institutionalization of historic and social knowledge.3 [End Page 522] New
generations of academics are being socialized into a system that values scores, the
accumulation of points in quantitative evaluations, over original or critical thought.
These perspectives do not fully explore the immense potentialities of the
recognition of the crisis of modernity. Radically different ways of thinking about the
world are possible if we assume this historical period to [End Page 524] be the crisis
of the hegemonic pretensions of Western civilization. Different consequences would
arise from an interpretation that recognizes that this is not the end of history, but
the end of the phantasmagorical universal history imagined by Hegel. The
implications for non-Western societies and for subaltern and excluded subjects
around the world would be quite different if colonialism, imperialism, racism, and
sexism were thought of not as regretful by-products of modern Europe, but as part
of the conditions that made the modern West possible. We could assume a different
Colonial Latin America, which lasted for about 300 years for most of the region, was
extraordinarily complex and rich in texture. There are enormous differences
between Mexico, on the one hand, and Brazil on the other. The term "Latin America"
is not only shorthand but also a bit of a misnomer, for much of it was not Latin. It
was Indian or mestizo or African, often with little more than a veneer of Iberian
culture. The degree to which it was any of these are Spanish. Portuguese, African,
Indian, or some combination thereof varies according to place and time.
We have trouble deciding what to call other humans. Some terms are inaccurate;
some are invented to satisfy the politics of the day. Some are acceptable in one era
and unacceptable in another, hi modem parlance, the earlier immigrants are often
called "Native Americans term as inaccurate as the term "Indian" or idnio as the
Iberians called them. They immigrated just like everyone else but not all at the
same time. Nor have we wanted to see the coming of the Europeans and Africans to
the Western Hemisphere as just another episode in the many thousand years of its
immigration history. One is at a loss to decide what terminology would be accurate
and inoffensive. Equally serious, is that most people, even scholars, ignore the DNA
evidence and the reasonable conclusions that are drawn from it. We do not want to
think of all human beings as cousins, which they are, because it forces us to
reconsider all kinds of cherished beliefs. We prefer to be inaccurate because it is
easier and feels better. Similarly, we refer to some people as Spaniards when, in
1500, there was no Spain. Some Latin Americans today point out that it is politically
incorrect for citizens of the United States to expropriate the name "American" for
themselves. They see it as sheer arrogance, which it is. On the other hand, we see
the Mexican people called Aztecs when, in fact, only a fraction were in 1519; that
they are called thusly is imperialism on the pait of those who rule Mexico. We do not
have to look very hard in this pait of the world to find other examples.
AT: Positivism
Positivism isnt neutral. Their attempts at engaging Latin
America are merely one point in a long line of destructive
economics plagued by Eurocentric thought.
Lander, Central University of Venezuela Professor, 2k
(Edgardo, Sociologist, Venezuelan, professor at the Central University of Venezuela
and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, 2000, Nepantla: Views from South,
Volume 1, Issue 3, Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social
Thought, pp. 519-523,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html, Accessed
7/5/13, JB)
Political and social thought regarding Latin America has been historically
characterized by a tension between the search for its specific attributes and an
external view that has seen these lands from the narrow perspective of European
experience. There has also been an opposition between the challenge of the rich
potentialities of this New World and distress over its difference, which stands in
contrast with the ideal represented by European culture and racial composition.
Nonetheless, external colonial views and regrets because of the difference have
been widely hegemonic. A brief revision of the texts of the first republican
constitutions is enough to illustrate how liberals, in their attempt to transplant and
install a replica of their understanding of the European or North American
experience, almost completely ignore the specific cultural and historical conditions
of the societies about which they legislate. When these conditions are considered, it
is with the express purpose of doing away with them. The affliction because of the
differencethe awkwardness of living in a continent that is not white, urban,
cosmopolitan, and civilizedfinds its best expression in positivism. Sharing the
main assumptions and prejudices of nineteenth-century European thought
(scientific racism, patriarchy, the idea of progress), positivism reaffirms the colonial
discourse. The continent is imagined from a single voice, with a single subject:
white, masculine, urban, cosmopolitan. The rest, the majority, is the other, [End
Page 519] barbarian, primitive, black, Indian, who has nothing to contribute to the
future of these societies. It would be imperative to whiten, westernize, or
exterminate that majority.
AT: Realism
Decolonization is key to discussion about IR. Centering our
discussion around Eurocentric policies makes things like
racism, imperialism and colonialism inevitable while
magnifying the West and the Rest mindset
Foneseca and Jerrems, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
graduate students, 12
Melody, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, Ari, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid,
June 2012, Why Decolonise International Relations Theory?, Pg. 2-3,
http://academia.edu/1631024/Why_Decolonise_IR_theory, JB)
AT: Bruckner
Bruckner misunderstands the criticism, it is an indictment of
the centrality of Eurocentrism, not that Europe is source of all
evils
Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University
and Stam, French University Professor at New York University,
97
(Ella, , and Robert, Unthinking Eurocentrism, http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAB&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings
%2FUnthinkingEurocentrismIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjC
NGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6WnFAZPF8pes3AW7uuHLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
To sum up, the discourse termed here literacy as state-of-grace links the appeal to
final causalism 6/23/13 Oscar Guardiola-Rivera - In State of Grace: Ideology,
Capitalism, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge - Nepantla: Views from South 3:1
muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/v003/3.1guardiola-rivera.html#authbio 4/19 as a
philosophy of history to the urgencies of colonization. Indeed, the argument
underlying this essay is that the belief in the purposive character of human action
and the operation of final causes in history lends legitimacy to the colonizing
enterprisethe wholesale (com)modification, overcoming, and/or eradication of
existing social structures and their replacement with rational (Western) new ones
by [End Page 18] making progress internal to and a necessary effect of a
particular arrangement of knowledge and power. A further clarification is in order.
Terms such as globalization, hegemony, or empire correspond to a vocabulary that
is central to partial attempts at explaining the phenomena I have just described.
They are partial insofar as they seem unable to connect the transcendental
philosophy of history and human action, which underlies the promise of progress
through knowledge, to the vast ideological and material operations, often plain
coercion, involved in the process of global colonization. In this article I move toward
making such a connection. In doing so I join the efforts of a group of Latin American
scholars trying to better our understanding of current world trends. Their aim is to
construct a notion of totality that would allow us to explain contemporary
subjectivity in relation to the transformations linking the market, the system of
knowledge production, technology, the rising forms of extractive neocolonialism,
and the social agents responding (by adaptation or resistance) to such
transformations.
The success of Western Europe in becoming the center of the modern world-system,
according to Wallersteins suitable formulation, developed within the Europeans a
trait common to all colonial dominators and imperialists, ethnocentrism. But in the
case of Western Europe, that trait had a peculiar formulation and justification: the
racial classification of the world population after the colonization of America. The
association of colonial ethnocentrism and universal racial classification helps to
explain why Europeans came to feel not only superior to all the other peoples of the
world, but, in particular, naturally superior. This historical instance is expressed
through a mental operation of fundamental importance for the entire model of
global power, but above all with respect to the inter subjective relations that were
hegemonic, and especially for its perspective on knowledge: the Europeans
generated a new temporal perspective of history and relocated the colonized
population, along with their respective histories and cultures, in the past of a
historical trajectory whose culmination was Europe (Mignolo 1995; Blaut 1993;
Lander 1997). Notably, however, they were not in the same line of continuity as the
Europeans, but in another, naturally different category. The colonized peoples were
inferior races and in that manner were the past vis--vis the Europeans. That
perspective imagined modernity and rationality as exclusively European products
and experiences. From this point of view, inter subjective and cultural relations
between Western Europe and the rest of the world were codified in a strong play of
new categories: East-West, primitive civilized, magic/mythic-scientific, irrationalrational, traditional-modern Europe and not Europe. Even so, the only category
with the honor of being recognized as the other of Europe and the West was
Orientnot the Indians of America and not the blacks of Africa, who were simply
primitive. For underneath that codification of relations between Europeans and
non-Europeans, race is, without doubt, the basic category.12 This binary, dualist
perspective on knowledge, particular to Eurocentrism, was imposed as globally
hegemonic in the same course as the expansion of European colonial dominance
I think we have to find sounder bases for being against Eurocentrism in social
science, and sounder ways of pursuing this objective. For the third form of criticism that whatever Europe did has been analyzed incorrectly and subjected to
inappropriate extrapolations, which have had dangerous consequences for both
science and the political world - is indeed true. I think we have to start with
questioning the assumption that what Europe did was a positive achievement. I
think we have to engage ourselves in making a careful balance-sheet of what has
been accomplished by capitalist civilization during its historical life, and assess
whether the pluses are indeed greater than the minuses. This is something I tried
once, and I encourage others to do the same (see Wallerstein, 1992b). My own
balance-sheet is negative overall, and therefore I do not consider the capitalist
system to have been evidence of human progress. Rather, I consider it to have been
the consequence of a breakdown in the historic barriers against this particular
version of an exploitative system. I consider that the fact that China, India, the Arab
world and other regions did not go forward to capitalism evidence that they were
better immunized against the toxin, and to their historic credit. To turn their credit
into something which they must explain away is to me the quintessential form of
Eurocentrism. I would prefer to reconsider what is not universalist in the universalist
doctrines that have emerged from the historical system that is capitalist, our
modern world-system. The modern world-system has developed structures of
knowledge that are significantly different from previous structures of knowledge. It
is often said that what is different is the development of scientific thought. But it
seems clear that this is not true, however splendid modern scientific advances are.
Scientific thought long antedates the modern world, and is present in all major
civilizational zones. This has been magistrally demonstrated for China in the corpus
of work that Joseph Needham launched (Needham, 1954- ). What is specific to the
structures of knowledge in the modern world-system is the concept of the "two
cultures." No other historical system has instituted a fundamental divorce between
science and philosophy/humanities, or what I think would be better characterized as
AT: Euro-narcissism
Even if there is a level of self-reflection in their Eurocentric
epistemology they are still ignorant to the pervasiveness of
their methodology as well as what truly constitutes
multiculturalism
Shohat, New York University Cultural Studies Professor, Stam,
New York University film theory and study Professor, 97
(Ella, Robert, Published by Routledge 1997, UNTHINKING EUROCENTRISM, Pg. 4,
JB)
However, this is not the point I want to stress, although it was necessary to make it
in order to get to the main thread of my argument. Since Zizek sees in
multiculturalism and racism the end of the political, he looks for an argument that
would point out the path for a return to the political. His argument cannot avoid
globalization, and he makes a move to distinguish globalization from universality.
This is precisely where the leftist appropriation of the European legacy takes place.
Zizek alerts us to avoid two interconnected traps brought about by the process of
globalization. First, "the commonplace according to which today's main antagonism
is between global [End Page 87] liberal capitalism and different forms of
ethnic/religious fundamentalism"; second, "the hasty identification of globalization
(the contemporary transnational functioning of capital) with universalization." Zizek
insists that the true opposition today is "rather between globalization (the emerging
global market, new world order) and uni versalism (the properly political domain of
universalizing one's particular fate as representative of global injustice)." He adds
that "this difference between globalization and universalism becomes more and
more palpable today, when capital, in the name of penetrating new markets, quickly
renounces requests for democracy in order not to lose access to new trade
partners." 84 One must agree with Zizek on this point. The problem lies in the
projects that we embark on to resist and to propose alternatives to capitalist
universalism. Zizek has one particular proposal, which is preceded by a lengthy
analogy between the United States today and the Roman Empire. Allow me to
summarize this analogy, since it is a crucial part of Zizek's argument.
Zizek describes the opposition between universalism and globalization, focusing on
the historical reversal of France and the United States in the modern/colonial worldsystem (although of course, Zizek does not refer to world-system theory). French
republican ideology, Zizek states, is the "epitome of modernist universalism: of
democracy based on a universal notion of citizenship. In clear contrast to it, the
United States is a global society, a society in which the global market and legal
system serve as the container (rather than the proverbial melting pot) for the
endless proliferation of group identities." Zizek points out the historical paradox in
the role reversal of the two countries. While France is being perceived as an
increasingly particular phenomenon threatened by the process of globalization, the
Framework
Framework is Eurocentric
The alt is key to deconstruct Eurocentric frameworks
academia is a key starting point
Ucelli, founder, New York Marxist School and ONeil, regular
contributor to Forward Motion, 92 (Juliet and Dennis, Challenging
Eurocentrism http://www.wengewang.org/read.php?tid=19345, date accessed
7/4/13 IGM)
Ongoing battles over the content of social studies classes in public schools and the
canon in liberal arts education are thrusting the term eurocentrism toward the
mainstream of political discourse in the United States. It is a concept which has
been fairly easy for those of us on the left to become comfortable with, but that
sense of ease could actually pose a problem of complacency for revolutionary
socialists. The fact is that the critique of eurocentrism is still in its early stages, and
that the extraordinarily pervasive hold this framework has on the thinking of
everyone raised in Western societies is not fully appreciated. And the problem of
what kind of worldview it is to be replaced with has barely been considered.
The point, then, is that eurocentrism will not be understood, neutralized or
superseded without considerable effort and, as shown by the current counterattack
waged by the bourgeoisie against political correctness, without fierce struggle.
A good starting point in thinking about eurocentrism is the recent spate of books
produced by African, North American and European academics. They have thrown
down the gauntlet inside classics, comparative linguistics, economic history,
sociology and other academic disciplines. This recent scholarship builds on the
pioneering work of African American scholars like C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Dubois,
whose work was marginalized by white supremacist academia, yet studied
continuously over the past fifty years by organic intellectuals of color and some
white leftists. Another foundation is the insistence on the centrality of culture,
psychology and the internalization of oppression coming from African thinkers like
Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and Cheikh Anta Diop.
To some extent, a critique of eurocentrism is implicit in the opposition to
imperialism which (however flawed) has characterized the revolutionary wing of the
socialist movement since the time of Lenin. However, at least until Maos writings
became an influence, European socialists generally grasped more easily the
concepts of the super-exploitation and victimization of non-European peoples and
had more difficulty recognizing their scientific achievements and cultural
contributions. The concept of eurocentrism as currently used pays more attention
to precisely this aspect: the distortion of the consciousness and self- knowledge of
humanity by the insistence of people of European descent that all valid, universal
scientific knowledge, economic progress, political structures and works of art flow
only from their ancestors. Or, in its more subtle form, eurocentrism acknowledges
Concluding Thoughts
Based on what has been said up until now, the phrase by Carmen Bernard referring
to Latin America as a laboratory for the West,38 does not seem exaggerated. Once
we have understood modernity in terms of a world process, the point is not only to
integrate Latin America but to acknowledge its constitutive role in modern world
history.
The problem of Latin Americas heterogeneity and the coexistence and tensions
between what unites us Latin Americans and what separates us is not new, and
world history is not necessarily the only way to approach it. But what can be said is
that it offers a very fertile space to think about this. The field could open new
possibilities to rethink the character of the region not only in comparative terms
with other great areas, but in terms of the interactions within it, between common
areas that transcend national borderlines and the types of representations that
circulate about what falls under the name of Latin America.
Therefore, to turn Latin America into a solid unit, a block that interacts as such
with others such as Europe or Africa, is naf and insufficient, specially given the fact
that it is always necessary to remember that analytical categories are not simply
intellectual tools, but constitute a certain and complex type of social representation
that gives meaning and organizes our interpretation of reality. 39
Finally, it is necessary to underline the fact that the debate over world history
seems to take place in a privileged way among American historians. But this is not
problematic in itself. What we have to acknowledge is that epistemology is
historically and geographically located. For that reason, it is fundamental to
problematize the differentiated character of a world history written in the United
States and one written in China, India, or Colombia. However, instead of posing
counterfactual scenarios about a world history made from the Third World, or
referring to the subrepresentation of Latin America, thematically or in terms of the
number of academics in the field, it is better to see things from another angle. Even
if World History finds as one of its conditions of existence the development of area
AFF ANSWERS
Link Answers
Permutations
Perm - General
Permutation do both an approach will facilitates policy action
is key to re-conceptualize power. The alt alone ensures
cooption, vote aff to use the masters tools to take down the
shed
Park, University of Oklahoma and Wilkins, University of Texas,
5
(Jane, Univ. of Oklahoma, Karin, Univ of Texas @ Austin, Global Media Journal, Reorienting the Orientalist Gaze, http://lass.purduecal.edu/cca/gmj/sp05/gmj-sp05park-wilkins.htm, accessed 7/6/13, IGM)
The main currents in postmodernism have not been able to escape from the limits
of a grand Western, Eurocentric narrative. The recognition of the colonial experience
is essentially absent. 4 According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1994,66),Some
of the most radical criticisms coming out of the West today is the result of an
interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as
Subject....Although the history of 524 Nepantla Europe as subject is narrativized by
the law, political economy and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject
pretends it has no geo-political determinations. Exploring Foucaults and Gilles
Deleuzes contributions, she concludes that their findings are drastically limited by
ignoring the epistemic violence of imperialism, as well as the international division
of labor. Spivak argues that once the version of a self-contained Western world is
assumed, its production by the imperialist project is ignored (86). Through these
visions, the crisis of European historyassumed as universalbecomes the crisis
of all history. The crisis of the metanarratives of the philosophy of history, of the
certainty of its laws, becomes the crisis of the future as such. The crisis of the
subjects of that history turns into the dissolution of all subjects. The
disenchantment of a Marxist generation that experienced in its own flesh the
political and theoretical collapse of Marxism and socialism and lived through the
existential trauma of the recognition of the gulag evolves into universal skepticism
and the end of collective projects and politics. This justifies a cool attitude of
noninvolvement, where all ethical indignation in the face of injustice is absent. In
reaction to structuralism, economism, and determinism, the discursive processes
and the construction of meanings are unilaterally emphasized. Economic relations
and all notions of exploitation disappear from the cognitive map. The crisis of the
political and epistemological totalizing models leads to a withdrawal toward the
partial and local, rendering the role of centralized political, military, and economic
powers opaque. The Gulf War thus becomes no more than a grand show, a
televised superproduction.
Perm - Methodology
Permutation do both. Engaging in one methodology falls
short. Institutional debate about these issues creates the
possibility for difference
Lander, Central University of Venezuela Professor, 2k
(Edgardo, Sociologist, Venezuelan, professor at the Central University of Venezuela
and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, 2000, Nepantla: Views from South,
Volume 1, Issue 3, Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social
Thought, pp. 519-523,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html, Accessed
7/5/13, JB)
These debates create possibilities for new intellectual strategies to address the
challenges posed by the crisis of modernity for Latin American critical theory. In
view of the fact that we are at a point in our work where we can no longer ignore
empires and the imperial context of our studies (Said 1993,6),it is absolutely
necessary to question whether postmodern theories offer an adequate perspective
from which to transgress the colonial limits of modern social thought. Some of the
main issues of postcolonial perspectives have been formulated and taken anew at
different times in the history of Latin American social thought of the late-nineteenth
and twentieth centuries (Mart 1987; Maritegui 1979; Fals-Borda 1970; 526
Nepantla Fernndez Retamar 1976). There have been extraordinary developments
associated with the revitalization of the struggles of indigenous peoples in recent
decades.5 Nonetheless, these issues paradoxically have been of relatively marginal
concern in the academic world, outside anthropology and some areas of the
humanities. Western social sciences, which must be applied creatively to the study
of the realities of Latin America, are still assumed to be the best of universal
thought. Due to both institutional and communicational difficulties, as well as to
the prevailing universalist orientations (intellectual colonialism? subordinate
cosmopolitanism?),6 today the Latin American academy has only limited
communication with the vigorous intellectual production to be found in Southeast
Asia, some regions of Africa, and in the work of academics of these regions working
in Europe or the United States. The most effective bridges between these
intellectual traditions are being offered today by Latin Americans who work in North
American universities (Escobar 1995; Mignolo 1996a,1996b; Coronil 1996, 1997).
Impact Answers
No Internal Link
No internal link-Eurocentrism is merely a knowledge archetype
Solomon, a professor in the Institute of Arts and Humanities,
Shanghai Jiaotong University, 13
(Jon, a professor in the Institute of Arts and Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong
University 2013, TransEuropeennes, The Experience of Culture: Eurocentric Limits
and Openings in Foucault,
http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/voir_pdf/108, P.7-8, Accessed: 7/6/13,
LPS.)
AT-Root Cause
Their root cause claims are false-there is no single cause of
events, rather many different causes
Wallerstein, is an American sociologist, historical social
scientist, and world-systems analyst, 97
(Immanuel, an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems
analyst. His bimonthly commentaries on world affairs are syndicated, 1997,
Binghamton.edu "Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science,"
http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iweuroc.htm, Accessed: 7/6/13, LPS.)
But even if we agree on the definition and the timing, and therefore so to speak on
the reality of the phenomenon, we have actually explained very little. For we must
then explain why it is that Europeans, and not others, launched the specified
phenomenon, and why they did so at a certain moment of history. In seeking such
explanations, the instinct of most scholars has been to push us back in history to
presumed antecedents. If Europeans in the eighteenth or sixteenth century did x, it
is said to be probably because their ancestors (or attributed ancestors, for the
ancestry may be less biological than cultural, or assertedly cultural) did, or were, y
in the eleventh century, or in the fifth century B.C. or even further back. We can all
think of the multiple explanations that, once having established or at least asserted
some phenomenon that has occurred in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries,
proceed to push us back to various earlier points in European ancestry for the truly
determinant variable.
There is a premise here that is not really hidden, but was for a long time undebated.
The premise is that whatever is the novelty for which Europe is held responsible in
the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, this novelty is a good thing, one of which
Europe should be proud, one of which the rest of the world should be envious, or at
least appreciative. This novelty is perceived as an achievement, and numerous book
titles bear testimony to this kind of evaluation.
There seems to me little question that the actual historiography of world social
science has expressed such a perception of reality to a very large degree. This
perception of course can be challenged on various grounds, and this has been
increasingly the case in recent decades. One can challenge the accuracy of the
picture of what happened, within Europe and in the world as a whole in the
sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. One can certainly challenge the plausibility of the
presumed cultural antecedents of what happened in this period. One can implant
the story of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in a longer duration, from several
centuries longer to tens of thousands of years. If one does that, one is usually
arguing that the European "achievements" of the sixteenth to the nineteenth
centuries thereby seem less remarkable, or more like a cyclical variant, or less like
achievements that can be credited primarily to Europe. Finally one can accept that
Alternative Answers
AT: Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism falls short on both sides of the methodological
spectrum
Mowitt, University of Minnesota Cultural studies and
Comparative Literature professor, 1
John, is professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, and English at the
University of Minnesota In the Wake of Eurocentrism An Introduction, Cultural
Critique 47 (2001) 3-15,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v047/47.1mowitt.html, Muse,
Accessed July 6 2013, JB)
(2) Universalism. Universalism is the view that there exist scientific truths that are
valid across all of time and space. European thought of the last few centuries has
been strongly universalist for the most part. This was the era of the cultural triumph
of science as a knowledge activity. Science displaced philosophy as the prestige
mode of knowledge and the arbiter of social discourse. The science of which we are
talking is Newtonian-Cartesian science. Its premises were that the world was
governed by determinist laws taking the form of linear equilibria processes, and
that, by stating such laws as universal reversible equations, we only needed
knowledge in addition of some set of initial conditions to permit us to predict its
state at any future or past time. What this meant for social knowledge seemed
clear. Social scientists might discover the universal processes that explain human
behavior, and whatever hypotheses they could verify were thought to hold across
time and space, or should be stated in ways such that they hold true across time
and space. The persona of the scholar was irrelevant, since scholars were operating
as value-neutral analysts. And the locus of the empirical evidence could be
essentially ignored, provided the data were handled correctly, since the processes
were thought to be constant. The consequences were not too different, however, in
the case of those scholars whose approach was more historical and idiographic, as
long as one assumed the existence of an underlying model of historical
development. All stage theories (whether of Comte or Spencer or Marx, to choose
only a few names from a long list) were primarily theorizations of what has been
called the Whig interpretation of history, the presumption that the present is the
best time ever and that the past led inevitably to the present. And even very
empiricist historical writing, however much it proclaimed abhorrence of theorizing,
tended nonetheless to reflect subconsciously an underlying stage theory. Whether
in the ahistorical time-reversible form of the nomothetic social scientists or the
diachronic stage theory form of the historians, European social science was
resolutely universalist in asserting that whatever it was that happened in Europe in
the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries represented a pattern that was applicable
everywhere, either because it was a progressive achievement of mankind which
was irreversible or because it represented the fulfillment of humanity's basic needs
via the removal of artificial obstacles to this realization. What you saw now in
First, so many factors are in play in the debate that all blanket statements about
how far the critique of Eurocentrism has gone or should go are bound to be
reductionist.
Second, knee-jerk anti-Eurocentrism can lead to the writing of bad history.
Sometimes, in rushing to combat any possible overemphasis on Europe, the baby is
indeed thrown out with the bathwater, as Landes claims. And it has become too
easy, as Judt argues, to replace Eurocentric narratives with tales so ungrounded that
they come across as disembodied and passionless.
Third, terms such as "Eurocentrism," "Western-centric," and "Orientalist" are too
often being used now as all-purpose epithets that inhibit rather than launch
meaningful exchanges of ideas. When these terms are employed to challenge the
validity or arguments of specific work's validity, this should be done carefully, with
the critic's understanding of the word in question spelled out. Historians of the TwoThirds World writing in the United States should be particularly sensitive to this
issue. After all, we are often accused of being "Eurocentric" or "Western-centric"
To affirm the historical role that Eurocentrism has played in shaping the
contemporary world is not to endow it with some nor- mative power, but to
recognize the ways in which it continues to be an intimate part of the shaping of the
world, which is not going to disappear with willful acts of its cultural negation. One
aspect of Eurocentrism that infused both earlier revolutionary ideologies and the
accommodationist alternatives of the present seems to me to be especially
important, perhaps more important for the historian than for others because it is
complicit in our imagination of temporalities: developmentalism. The notion that
development is as natural to humanity as air and water is deeply embedded in our
consciousness, and yet development as an idea is a relatively recent one in human
history. As Arturo Escobar has argued forcefully in a number of writings,
development as a discourse is embedded not just in the realm of ideology, but in
institutional structures that are fundamental to the globalization of capital.36
If globalism is a way of promoting these structures by rendering their claims into
scientific truths, postcolonialism serves as their alibi by not acknowledging their
presence. Historians, meanwhile, con- tinue to write history as if attaining the goals
of development were the measure against which the past can be evaluated. That, I
think, is the most eloquent testimonial to the implication of our times in the
continuing hegemony of capital, for which the disavowal of an earlier past serves as
disguise. It also indicates where the tasks may be located for a radical agenda
appropriate to the present: in ques- tioning contemporary dehistoricizations of the
present and the past, and returning inquiry to the search for alternatives to
developmen- talism. However we may conceive such alternatives, they are likely to
be post-Eurocentric, recognizing that any radical alternatives to modernity's forms
of domination must confront not just the cultures, but also the structures of
modernity. At any rate, it seems to me that we need a reaffirmation of history and
historicity at this moment of crisis in historical consciousness, especially because
history seems to be irrelevant-either because of its renunciation at the centers of
power where a postmodernism declares a rupture with the past, unable to decide
whether such a rupture constitutes a celebration or a denunciation of capitalism, or,
contradictorily, because of an affir- mation of premodernity among those who were
the objects of moder- nity, who proclaim in order to recover their own subjectivities
that modernity made no difference after all. A historical epistemology will not
In any case, who would argue that Japan can claim ancient Indic civilizations as its
foreground on the grounds that they were the place of origin of Buddhism, which
has become a central part of Japan's cultural history? Is the contemporary United
States closer culturally to ancient Greece, Rome, or Israel than Japan is to Indic
civilization? One could after all make the case that Christianity, far from
representing continuity, marked a decisive break with Greece, Rome, and Israel.
Indeed Christians, up to the Renaissance, made precisely this argument. And is not
the break with Antiquity still today part of the doctrine of Christian churches?
However, today, the sphere in which the argument about values has come to the
fore is the political sphere. Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia has been very
specific in arguing that Asian countries can and should "modernize" without
accepting some or all of the values of European civilization. And his views have
been widely echoed by other Asian political leaders. The "values" debate has also
become central within European countries themselves, especially (but not only)
within the United States, as a debate about "multiculturalism." This version of the
current debate has indeed had a major impact on institutionalized social science,
with the blossoming of structures within the university grouping scholars denying
the premise of the singularity of something called "civilization." (4) Orientalism.
Orientalism refers to a stylized and abstracted statement of the characteristics of
non-Western civilizations. It is the obverse of the concept, "civilization," and has
become a major theme in public discussion since the writings of Anouar AbdelMalek (1981 [1963]) and Edward Said (1978). Orientalism was not too long ago a
badge of honor (see Smith, 1956). Orientalism is a mode of knowledge that claims
By complaining about the Eurocentrism of the Europeans, as we are doing here, are
we not ourselves directly promoting Eurocentric narratives? There is an implicit
acceptance here of the post-Enlightenment universalist claims of western
narratives. We can be Afro-centric, Arabo-centric or Islamo-centric, or we can speak
for the Third Word. But they cannot be Eurocentric: they speak for humanity as a
whole. So they are cannot be permitted to be Eurocentric, and must live up to their
universalist image and role. So Eurocentrism is built in even in the critical narratives
deploring it.
Of course, in these narratives it is the West that was most successful in removing
such obstacles. The main impediments have been "parasitic" political and legal
forms, like feudalism or certain kinds of monarchy, which were cast off by the West.
There have also been certain external barriers, like the closing of trade routes by
"barbarian" invasions of one kind or another, so that capitalism really took off when
the trade routes were reopened. Other impediments often cited in the conventional
accounts are "irrational" superstitions and certain kinds of religious or cultural
beliefs and practices. So another common corollary of this view is that economic
development in the West was associated with the progress of "reason," which
means anything from Enlightenment philosophy to scientific and technological
advances and the "rational" (i.e., capitalist) organization of production. It tends to
follow from these accounts that the agents of progress were merchants or
"bourgeois," the bearers of reason and freedom, who only needed to be liberated
from feudal obstruction so that they could move history forward along its natural
The multiple forms of Eurocentrism and the multiple forms of the critique of
Eurocentrism do not necessarily add up to a coherent picture. What we might do is
try to assess the central debate. Institutionalized social science started as an
activity in Europe, as we have noted. It has been charged with painting a false
picture of social reality by misreading, grossly exaggerating, and/or distorting the
historical role of Europe, particularly its historical role in the modern world. The
critics fundamentally make, however, three different (and somewhat contradictory)
kinds of claims. The first is that whatever it is that Europe did, other civilizations
AT: Deconstruction/Decolonization
Decolonization requires an encounter with the colonized
simply deconstructing one knowledge base doesnt allow for
any new modes of thought
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance
Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter
2002, The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, Pg. 69-71, The
South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10
2013, JB)
The irreducible colonial difference that I am trying to chart, starting from Dussel's
dialogue with Vattimo, was also perceived by Robert Bernasconi in his account of
the challenge that African philosophy puts forward to continental philosophy. Simply
put, Bernasconi notes that "Western philosophy traps African philosophy in a double
bind. Either African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no
distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different that its
credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt." 45 This double bind is
the colonial [End Page 70] difference that creates the conditions for what I have
elsewhere called "border thinking." 46 I have defined border thinking as an
epistemology from a subaltern perspective. Although Bernasconi describes the
phenomenon with different terminology, the problem we are dealing with here is the
same. Furthermore, Bernasconi makes his point with the support of African
American philosopher Lucius Outlaw in an article titled "African Philosophy':
Deconstructive and Reconstructive Challenges." 47 Emphasizing the sense in which
Outlaw uses the concept of deconstruction, Bernasconi at the same time underlines
the limits of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive operation and the closure of Western
metaphysics. Derrida, according to Bernasconi, offers no space in which to ask the
question about Chinese, Indian, and especially African philosophy. Latin and AngloAmerican philosophy should be added to this. After a careful discussion of Derrida's
philosophy, and pondering possible alternatives for the extension of deconstruction,
Bernasconi concludes by saying, "Even after such revisions, it is not clear
what contribution deconstruction could make to the contemporary dialogue
between Western philosophy and African philosophy." 48 Or, if a contribution could
be foreseen, it has to be from the perspective that Outlaw appropriates and that
denaturalizes the deconstruction of the Western metaphysics from the inside (and
maintains the totality, la Derrida). That is to say, it has to be a deconstruction
from the exteriority of Western metaphysics, from the perspective of the double
bind that Bernasconi detected in the interdependence (and power relations)
between Western and African philosophy. However, if we invert the perspective, we
are located in a particular deconstructive strategy that I would rather name the
decolonization of philosophy (or of any other branch of knowledge, natural sciences,
Decolonization Bad
Colonialism included the colonial expansion of knowledge
regardless of whether it not it was critical of itself means the
alternative links to the K
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance
Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter
2002, The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, Pg. 79-80, The
South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10
2013, JB)
Academic research on Maori became oriented to such debates and obsessed with
describing various modes of cultural decay. The 'fatal impact' of the West on
indigenous societies generally has been theorized as a phased progression from: (1)
initial discovery and contact, (2) population decline, (3) acculturation, (4)
assimilation, (5) 'reinvention' as a hybrid, ethnic culture. While the terms may differ
across various theoretical paradigms the historical descent into a state of
nothingness and hopelessness has tended to persist. Indigenous perspectives also
show a phased progression, more likely to be articulated as: (1) contact and
invasion, (2) genocide and destruction, (3) resistance and survival (4) recovery as
indigenous peoples. The sense of hope and optimism is a characteristic of
contemporary indigenous politics which is often criticized, by non-indigenous
scholars, because it is viewed as being overly idealistic.
While Western theories and academics were describing, defining and explaining
cultural demise, however, indigenous peoples were having their lands and resources
systematically stripped by the state; were becoming ever more marginalized; and
were subjected to the layers of colonialism imposed through economic and social
policies. This failure of research, and of the academic community, to address the
real social issues of Maori was recalled in later times when indigenous disquiet
became more politicized and sophisticated. Very direct confrontations took place
between Maori and some academic communities. Such confrontations have also
occurred in Australia and other parts of the indigenous world, resulting in much
more active resistances by communities to the presence and activities of
researchers.
I have mentioned that Wallerstein, Quijano, and Dussel have dependency theory as
a common reference, and my previous argument suggested that while Wallerstein
brought dependency theory to the social sciences as a discipline, Quijano and
Dussel follow the political and dialectical scope of dependency theory. The epistemic
colonial difference divides one from the other. Of course, this does not place one
against the other but underlines the colonial difference as the limit of the assumed
totality of Western epistemology. That is why to open the social sciences is a
welcome move, but an insufficient one. It is possible to think, as Quijano and Dussel
(among others) have, beyond and against philosophy and the social sciences as the
incarnation of Western epistemology. It is necessary to do so in order to avoid
reproducing the totality shared by their promoters and their critics. In other words,
the critiques of modernity, Western logocentrism, capitalism,
Eurocentrism, and the like performed in Western Europe and the United
States cannot be valid for persons who think and live in Asia, Africa, or
Latin [End Page 85] America. Those who are not white or Christian or who have
been marginal to the foundation, expansion, and transformation of philosophy and
social and natural sciences cannot be satisfied with their identification and solidarity
with the European or American left. Nietzsche's (as a Christian) criticism of
Christianity cannot satisfy Khatibi's (as a Muslim and Maghrebian) criticism of
Christianity and colonization. It is crucial for the ethics, politics, and epistemology of
the future to recognize that the totality of Western epistemology, from either the
right or the left, is no longer valid for the entire planet. The colonial difference is
becoming unavoidable. Greece can no longer be the point of reference for
new utopias and new points of arrival, as Slavoj Zizek still believes, or at least
sustains. 76
If Wallerstein, Quijano, and Dussel have dependency theory as a common reference,
they also share a critique of Eurocentrism. 77 However, their motivation is different.
Quijano's and Dussel's critiques of Eurocentrism respond to the overwhelming
celebration of the discovery of America, which both scholars read not only as a
AT: Quijano
Quijanos theory relies on coloniality being constitutive
history proves the two existed independent of each other
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance
Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter
2002, The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, Pg. 81-82, The
South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10
2013, JB)
Eurocentrism Inevitable
General
Eurocentric Framing is inevitable human nature
Zahrai, Ethics Journalist, 8
(Koorosh Zahrai, March 18, 2008, Control Structures Review, Eurocentrism: The
basis of our society, culture, and source of our problem coexisting with nature,
http://controlstructures.spheerix.com/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=19:eurocentrism-the-basis-of-our-societyculture-and-source-of-our-problem-coexisting-with-nature&catid=5:digitalculture&Itemid=6, accessed July 6, 2013, EK)
The Eurocentric worldview permeates every aspect of our lives, as we are all
products of the system of the United States. Whether at home or abroad, in our
relationships with each other and nature, each of us participates in and replicates
these notions of Western society and culture, as we are all indoctrinated through the
education system and communal socialization. Creating new living experiences and
narratives free of these constraining and altered states of being begins with
liberation of our selves, minds, and actions and becoming harmonious in our
relations with nature and each other. More positive present and future experiences
will shape our paths so that we can all join together to work on attaining a more
meaningful relationship with our surroundings.
Unthinking Eurocentrism focusses on Eurocentrism and multiculturalism in popular
culture. It is written in the passionate belief that an awareness of the intellectually
debilitating effects of the Eurocentric legacy is indispensable for comprehending not
only contemporary media representations but even contemporary subjectivities.
Endemic in present-day thought and education, Eurocentrism is naturalized as
"common sense." Philosophy and literature are assumed to be European philosophy
and literature. The "best that is thought and written" is assumed to have been
thought and written by Europeans. (By Europeans, we refer not only to Europe per
se but also to the "neo-Europeans" of the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere.)
History is assumed to be European history, everything else being reduced to what
historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (in 1965!) patronizingly called the "unrewarding
gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe."1
Standard core courses in universities stress the history of "Western" civilization, with
the more liberal universities insisting on token study of "other" civilizations. And
even "Western" civilization is usually taught without reference to the central role of
European colonialism within capitalist modernity. So embedded is Eurocentrism in
everyday life, so pervasive, that it often goes unnoticed. The residual traces of
centuries of axiomatic European domination inform the general culture, the
everyday language, and the media, engendering a fictitious sense of the innate
superiority of European-derived cultures and peoples.
Eurocentrism inevitable
Dirlik, Former Duke University History Professor, 99
(Arif Dirlik, Spring 1999, Is There History after Eurocentrism?: Globalism,
Postcolonialism, and the Disavowal of History, pg. 3-4, JSTOR, accessed July 7,
2013, EK)
I suggest by way of conclusion that a radical critique of Euro- centrism must rest on
a radical critique of the whole project of modernity understood in terms of the lifeworld that is cultural and material at once. Modernity in our day is not just
EuroAmerican, but is dispersed globally, if not equally or uniformly, in transnational
structures of various kinds, in ideologies of development, and the practices of
everyday life. It does not just emanate from EuroAmerica understood
Epistemology Specific
Eurocentric epistemological reproduction is inevitable
OBrien, Professor of Economic History, London School of
Economics, 10
(Patrick Karl, Centennial Professor of Economic History, London School of Economics,
Fellow of the British Academy and Academia Europaea,. Doctorates honoris causa
from Carlos III University Madrid and Uppsala University, Sweden; Fellow of the
Royal Historical Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, President of British
Economic History Society, 9/7/10, Global History for the London School of
Economics, How Do You Study Global History? Comparisons, Connections,
Entanglements and Eurocentrism,
http://globalhistoryatlse.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/how-do-you-study-globalhistory-comparisons-connections-entanglements-and-eurocentrism/, Accessed:
7/6/13, LPS.)
How do we learn the past? We learn the past by being taught it by someone else,
whether orally or by reading. History is also invented by peoples, tribes, religions
who need a common past as a means to define and establish themselves. They
need a common (sometimes mythical) common origin to give the group a common
destiny. This is done through a process of othering. We can only know something we
dont know through comparison with something we do know. The other is alien, it is
foreign. Everyone is ethnocentric so some extent, it is unavoidable in the
way we have been brough up to define others in terms of their differences
to you. Identity is a narrative of yourself established in relation to the other. French
versus English. Argentinian versus Brazil. Protestant versus Catholic. Hindu versus
Muslim. West versus Rest. This is both a historical and Epistemology process.
Eurocentrism Good