'Eurocentrism' tag archive

In 1983, Toni Morrison’s classic interview-turned-essay ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’ was published in Mari Evans’s anthology Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. 1 In the piece, Morrison concerns herself with the figure of the ancestor in African American literature. For her, the ancestor is a ‘distinctive element of African American writing’, and because […]

‘Savages’ were invented in the Old World but encountered in the New. J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion It is imperative to accept the idea that negation does not signify nothingness; that when the mirror does not reflect our own likeness, it does not prove there is nothing to perceive. Pierre Clastres, ‘Copernicus and the Savages’ […]

Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement, not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where […]

Primordial Being Enlightenment, Schopenhauer and the Indian subject of postcolonial theory Chetan bhatt century Enlightenment philosophers – others could have been chosen – considered the place of ʻIndiaʼ and some of its religions and philosophies in their grand civilizational, cultural and philosophical chronographies. This is a difficult area whose complexities can be elided by the […]

Going Back Heidegger, East Asia and ‘the West’ Stella sandford Heideggerʼs influence on some important strands of modern East Asian, and particularly Japanese, philosophy is well known. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a number of scholars who would become major figures in Japanese philosophy (such as Miki Kiyoshi and Nishitani Keiji) visited Heidegger and attended […]

Europe, thatʼs the Bible and the Greeks. It has come closer to the Bible and to its true fate. Everything else in the world must be included in this. I donʼt have any nostalgia for the exotic. For me Europe is central. Emmanuel Levinas, 1986 [1] Those who have sought resources in Levinas for a […]

Marx’s Eurocentrism Postcolonial studies and Marx scholarship Kolja lindner The English jackasses need an enormous amount of time to arrive at an even approximate understanding of the real conditions of … conquered groups. Karl Marx, 1879A great deal of ink has already been spilled on the question of Marx’s Eurocentrism. The debate turns on his […]

Who needs postcoloniality? A reply to Lindner Harry harootunian In Marx’s articles for the New York Tribune on British colonialism in India and the events leading to the Second Anglo-Chinese War (Opium War), critics have caught sight of a double mission attributed by him to British imperialism and colonialism to tear down the structure of […]