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Eurocentrism K – GDI 2013
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1NC Shell
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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.uni-bielefeld.de/wikifarm/fields/ges_cias/field.php/Main/Unterkapitel52, Accessed:
7/3/13, LPS.)
Researchers contributing to the Latin American Modernidad / Colonialidad research programme have
drawn attention to the mythical character of this narrative by arguing that coloniality, understood as a
pattern of European violence in the colonies, and modernity need to be understood as two sides of the
same coin. They also stress the constitutive role of the “discovery” of the Americas which enables
Europe to situate itself at the economic and epistemological centre of the modern world system. The
modern idea of universal history, that is the writing of history of humankind in a frame of progressive
and linear time, has also been criticised as inherently Eurocentric. This is because it construes the
European development as following the normal and necessary course of history and consequently
only accommodates the experience of other world regions in relation to it. The construction of the
Americas through a European lens is epitomised by the fact that for a long time most accounts of
American history started with the arrival of the settlers (Muthyala 2001). Strategies deployed to
challenge this Eurocentric master narrative have involved replacing discovery with disaster to stress the
violence inherent in the process which was a key part of European modernity.
Geopolitics of Knowledge
In contrast to more localised ethnocentrisms, Eurocentrism shapes the production of knowledge and
its proliferation well beyond Europe and the western hemisphere. This is possible, critics argue, due to
an epistemology which pretends that knowledge has no locus. In western thought, Descartes'
proclamation of a separation of body and mind has led to an image of the cognisant subject as
abstracted from all social, sexual and racial realities (Grosfoguel 2006, pp. 20ff, Gandhi 1998: 34ff). In
consequence, analytical categories such as state, democracy, equality, etc., formed against the
background of particular European experience and are declared to be universally valid and applicable,
independent of place (Chakrabarty 2002, p. 288). This leads, according to Edgardo Lander (2002, p. 22),
to a naturalisation of liberal values and a devaluation of knowledge produced outside the prescribed
scientific system. Europe's successful placing of itself at the centre of history also caused universities
outside Europe to teach it from a Eurocentric point of view and include predominantly “northern”
thinkers in their academic canons. Postcolonial scholarship has pointed out that knowledge produced in
the global South is recognised if the respective academics are working in European or US-American
universities (Castro-Gómez 2005, p. 35). As a means to challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric
knowledge, indigenous universities have been founded in various Latin American countries. They
demand that different ways of knowing be recognised as valid and suggest that indigenous knowledge
can inspire new methodologies.
Eurocentrism frames social norms – the normative function of race, gender, sex and
other types identity are reinforced by Eurocentrism, causes inevitable inequality
Baker, University of Rochester, Graduate Student School of Education and Human
Development, 8
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(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_Eurocentrism_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. -- Anglo-American)
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 peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture,
and nation that were, in effect, conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and to
educate the world” (Willinsky, 1989, pp. 2-3). Race, in other words, is a “mental category of modernity”
(Quijano, 2000, p. 536), created along with European colonization of the Americas and the emergence of
capitalism in the Atlantic commercial circuit in the sixteenth century. Modernity/coloniality came
together in the sixteenth century during the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit that
propelled an incipient European capitalism and charted the racial geopolitical map of the world.
Racial classification and the divisions and control of labor are historically intertwined – the two parts
of colonial matrix of power (Quijano, 1999; Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992). Types of work, incomes
earned, and geographical location among the world’s population today profoundly reflect this racial
capitalist hierarchy and domination – the coloniality of power. Coloniality of power has been since the
sixteenth century and is still today an epistemic principle for classifying the non-European world in
relation to Europe on the principle of skin color and brain capacity (i.e., race and rationality). Ethnicities
(local community identities based on shared knowledge, faith, language, memories, tastes etc.) have
been racialized within this modern matrix of power (Sardar, Nandy & Wyn Davies1993).
Multicultural education therefore should be understood and consequently taught within the colonial
horizon of modernity, since the sixteenth century. Racism is a symptom of the persistence of
coloniality of power and the colonial difference.
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One of the achievements of imperial reason was to affirm European or white, Christian, male,
heterosexual, American, as a superior identity by constructing inferior identities and expelling them to
the outside of the normative sphere of the real (Mignolo, 2006). Cultural differences then would be
recognized as part of the colonial difference in the 500-year history of control and domination by the
white, European, heterosexual, Christian, male through the intersection of race, religion, gender, class,
nationality and sexuality. The coloniality of power is a European imposed racial classification system
that emerged 500 years ago and expanded along with (is constitutive of) the modern/colonial world
capitalist-system. Race, class, gender, and sexuality and religion intersect as hierarchical elements
within the modern/colonial capitalist system of classification and power relations.
The alternative is to reject the aff - key to ‘decolonize’ education
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_Possiblities, 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 geopolitics 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
¶
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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 from the experiences of and responses to European colonization in
the Andean regions during the sixteenth century. The colonial context created a betweeness of
cosmologies for the colonized. This consciousness of being between cultures within a dominant culture
is the central feature of decolonial thought -- thinking from the borders created by a totalizing
cosmology associated with European modernity. For example, the sixteenth century writings of Waman
Puma de Ayala focused on ways to preserve Aymara and Kechua knowledge cultures and co-exist within
the new world order (Mignolo, 2005). Today, decolonization is used among indigenous intellectuals
around the world, where a variety of models of decolonial education have emerged. Decolonial
thinking about education is rooted in the violent occlusion of ways of knowing and being among
indigenous civilizations in the Americas within the imposition of a new world order. The conquest of
the Americas meant the demolition of indigenous education and economic systems. European
Renaissance universities, for example, were soon transplanted across the Atlantic that had no relation to
the languages and histories of the native peoples.
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Links
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Topic Links
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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.uni-bielefeld.de/wikifarm/fields/ges_cias/field.php/Main/Unterkapitel52, Accessed:
7/3/13, LPS.)
Researchers contributing to the Latin American Modernidad / Colonialidad research programme have
drawn attention to the mythical character of this narrative by arguing that coloniality, understood as a
pattern of European violence in the colonies, and modernity need to be understood as two sides of the
same coin. They also stress the constitutive role of the “discovery” of the Americas which enables
Europe to situate itself at the economic and epistemological centre of the modern world system. The
modern idea of universal history, that is the writing of history of humankind in a frame of progressive
and linear time, has also been criticised as inherently Eurocentric. This is because it construes the
European development as following the normal and necessary course of history and consequently
only accommodates the experience of other world regions in relation to it. The construction of the
Americas through a European lens is epitomised by the fact that for a long time most accounts of
American history started with the arrival of the settlers (Muthyala 2001). Strategies deployed to
challenge this Eurocentric master narrative have involved replacing discovery with disaster to stress the
violence inherent in the process which was a key part of European modernity.
Geopolitics of Knowledge
In contrast to more localised ethnocentrisms, Eurocentrism shapes the production of knowledge and
its proliferation well beyond Europe and the western hemisphere. This is possible, critics argue, due to
an epistemology which pretends that knowledge has no locus. In western thought, Descartes'
proclamation of a separation of body and mind has led to an image of the cognisant subject as
abstracted from all social, sexual and racial realities (Grosfoguel 2006, pp. 20ff, Gandhi 1998: 34ff). In
consequence, analytical categories such as state, democracy, equality, etc., formed against the
background of particular European experience and are declared to be universally valid and applicable,
independent of place (Chakrabarty 2002, p. 288). This leads, according to Edgardo Lander (2002, p. 22),
to a naturalisation of liberal values and a devaluation of knowledge produced outside the prescribed
scientific system. Europe's successful placing of itself at the centre of history also caused universities
outside Europe to teach it from a Eurocentric point of view and include predominantly “northern”
thinkers in their academic canons. Postcolonial scholarship has pointed out that knowledge produced in
the global South is recognised if the respective academics are working in European or US-American
universities (Castro-Gómez 2005, p. 35). As a means to challenge the hegemony of Eurocentric
knowledge, indigenous universities have been founded in various Latin American countries. They
demand that different ways of knowing be recognised as valid and suggest that indigenous knowledge
can inspire new methodologies.
How we read, write, and speak are important – it shapes the way we view ourselves
and the world – when we focus on solely Western modes of thought we inevitably see
indigenous peoples as the Other
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
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(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, pg. 35-36, JZ)
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, although there may be commonalities, they still
do not entirely account for the experiences of indigenous peoples.
So, reading and interpretation present problems when we do not see ourselves in the text. There are
problems, too, when we do see ourselves but can barely recognize ourselves through the
representation. One problem of being trained to read this way, or, more correctly, of learning to read
this way over many years of academic study, is that we can adopt uncritically similar patterns of writing.
We begin to write about ourselves as indigenous peoples as if we really were 'out there', the 'Other',
with all the baggage that this entails. Another problem is that academic writing is a form of selecting,
arranging and presenting knowledge. It privileges sets of texts, views about the history of an idea,
what issues count as significant; and, by engaging in the same process uncritically, we too can render
indigenous writers invisible or unimportant while reinforcing the validity of other writers. If we write
without thinking critically about our writing, it can be dangerous. Writing can also be dangerous
because we reinforce and maintain a style of discourse which is never innocent. Writing can be
dangerous because sometimes we reveal ourselves in ways which get misappropriated and used
against us. Writing can be dangerous because, by building on previous texts written about indigenous
peoples, we continue to legitimate views about ourselves which are hostile to us. This is particularly
true of academic writing, although journalistic and imaginative writing reinforce these 'myths'.
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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)
The intellectual conceptualization of the process of modernity produced a perspective of knowledge
and a mode of producing knowledge that gives a very tight account of the character of the global
model of power: colonial/modern, capitalist, and Eurocentered. This perspective and concrete mode
of producing knowledge is Eurocentrism.19 Eurocentrism is, as used here, the name of a perspective of
knowledge whose systematic formation began in Western Europe before the middle of the seventeenth
century, although some of its roots are, without doubt, much older. In the following centuries this
perspective was made globally hegemonic, traveling the same course as the dominion of the European
bourgeois class. Its constitution was associated with the specific bourgeois secularization of European
thought and with the experiences and necessities of the global model of capitalist (colonial/modern)
and Eurocentered power established since the colonization of America. This category of Eurocentrism
does not involve all of the knowledge of history of all of Europe or Western Europe in particular. It does
not refer to all the modes of knowledge of all Europeans and all epochs. It is instead a specific
rationality or perspective of knowledge that was made globally hegemonic, colonizing and
overcoming other previous or different11 conceptual formations and their respective concrete
knowledges, as much in Europe as in the rest of the world. In the framework of this essay I propose to
discuss some of these issues more directly related to the experience of Latin America, but, obviously,
they do not refer only to Latin America.
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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 constructions of the Other are
intertwined with each other and with the activity of research. This book identifies research as a
significant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and
ways of resisting of the Other. In this example, the Other has been constituted with a name, a face, a
particular identity, namely indigenous peoples. While it is more typical (with the exception of feminist
research) to write about research within the framing of a specific scientific or disciplinary approach, it is
surely difficult to discuss research methodology and indigenous peoples together, in the same breath,
without having an analysis of imperialism, without understanding the complex ways in which the pursuit
of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices.
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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 selfdetermination. 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.
Only using Western research is simply racist – it conveys the sense of innate
superiority
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, pg. 56, JZ)
Research 'through imperial eyes' describes an approach which assumes that Western ideas about the
most fundamental things are the only ideas possible to hold, certainly the only rational ideas, and the
only ideas which can make sense of the world, of reality, of social life and of human beings. It is an
approach to indigenous peoples which still conveys a sense of innate superiority and an
overabundance of desire to bring progress into the lives of indigenous peoples - spiritually,
intellectually, socially and economically. It is research which from indigenous perspectives 'steals'
knowledge from others and then uses it to benefit the people who 'stole' it. Some indigenous and
minority group researchers would call this approach simply racist. It is research which is imbued with
an 'attitude' and a 'spirit' which assumes a certain ownership of the entire world, and which has
established systems and forms of governance which embed that attitude in institutional practices.
These practices determine what counts as legitimate research and who count as legitimate
researchers. Before assuming that such an attitude has long since disappeared, it is often worth
reflecting on who would make such a claim, researchers or indigenous peoples? A recent attempt
(fortunately unsuccessful) to patent an indigenous person in the New Guinea Highlands might suggest
that there are many groups of indigenous peoples who are still without protection when it comes to
the activities of research.24 Although in this particular case the attempt was unsuccessful, what it
demonstrated yet again is that there are people out there who in the name of science and progress still
consider indigenous peoples as specimens, not as humans.
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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 proponents—Fred Spier and Jared Diamond— for a single, all-encompassing
theoretical framework that can unify all knowledge is illusory and dangerous. Moreover, the answers
to the big questions they pose—which falsely claim greater scientific merit by drawing on hard data and
subordinating culture to the realm of the epiphenomenal—are 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 world’s peoples— including Latin Americans—relevant. 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.
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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/reid-brinkley_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 .
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Economic Engagement
Economic engagement demonstrates a drive to control ‘uncivilized’ countries – this
justifies further attempts to Americanize already independent countries
People’s Daily, 63
(People’s Daily, October 22, 1963, Foreign languages Press, “Apologists Of Neo-Colonialism”,
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 d’etat, 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.
Interventionist US engagement reinforces the dominant, Eurocentric frame of
knowledge
Frankzi, University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law, Graduate Student, 12
(Hannah, Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld University, Universitat Bielefeld, “Eurocentrism,”
http://elearning.uni-bielefeld.de/wikifarm/fields/ges_cias/field.php/Main/Unterkapitel52, Accessed:
7/3/13, LPS.)
Many substantial critiques of Eurocentrism, such as Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) or Samir Amin's
Eurocentrism (1988), have focussed on the production of Eurocentric knowledge through Europe's
encounter with and construction of the Orient as distinct entity. The resulting localisation of the
colonial divide between Orient and Occident has been found as failing to accommodate the Latin
American experience (Mignolo 1998). While both North and Latin America are considered part of the
Occident, they were and continue to be affected by Eurocentrism in quite different ways. With
regards to their insertion into the global economy, the historical experience of the United States as
part of the centre, for example, differs substantially from that of many Latin American countries
whose productive sectors were organised so as to serve the needs of (neo-)colonial powers. The way
Eurocentric values structure inter-American relations becomes apparent in, to name but one area,
development cooperation. Here, US actors intervene in the name of liberal democracy and
development in Latin American societies to help them come closer to the universalized role model of
the developed northern state. On an intra-societal level, postcolonial studies have pointed out how
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 17
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Eurocentric categories, such as race, continue to structure relations among individuals in both North
and South America, through, for example, the exploitation of migrant workers.
Modernity, Universal History and the Americas
Most prominently, the concepts of modernity, progress and universal history have been identified as
inherently Eurocentric. The standard account, as presented in encyclopaedias and European histories,
captures modernity in terms of a self-contained European process of moral and economic progress.
The Plan uses an exploitative Eurocentric model in “Latin” America
Mignolo, Duke University Cultural Anthropology Professor, 9
(Walter D., The Idea of Latin America, pg. 96-98, Google Books, EK)
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 Sánchez Gonzálo 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.
The section on "Latin America" in the CIA's 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.'
However, from the perspective of many who are being looked at and spoken at (not to), things look a
little bit different. The CIA s 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 exists is written in English. That is part of the "reality" of the "idea" of Latin America. The story is
never fully told because "developments" projected from above are apparently sufficient to pave the
way toward the future. "Expertise" and the experience of being trained as an "expert" overrule the
"living experience" and the "needs" of communities that might subsume technology to their ways of
life, and not transform those ways of life to accord with capitalist requirements, using technology as a
new colonizing tool. The blindness of the CIAs experts, and their reluctance to work with people instead
of strolling over expecting everyone to act according to their script, have led a myriad of social
movements to respond - a blatant example of the double-sided double-density of modernity/colonialist.
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It is increasingly difficult for the CIA and other institutions controlling and managing knowledge and
information to silence them. The key issue here is the emergence of a new kind of knowledge that
responds to the needs of the damnes. (the wretched of the earth, in the expression of Prantz
Fanon).They are the subjects who are formed by todays colonial wound, the dominant conception of
life in which a growing sector of humanity become commodities (like slaves in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries) or, in the worst possible conditions, expendable lives. The pain, humiliation,
and anger of the continuous reproduction of the colonial wound generate radical political projects,
new types of knowledge, and social movements.
Globalization seeks to Americanize whole populations – shuts down any indigenous
resistance
Jackson, MIT Anthropology, 9
(Jean E. Latin American Research Review Volume 44, Number 3, 2009, pg. 207 “Neoliberal
Multiculturalism and Indigenous Movements”, muse, date accessed 7/5/2013 IGM)
The rise in international discourses of various kinds of rights— indigenous, human, citizen—has played
an important role in Latin American indigenous organizing, as have the treaties and covenants to
which Latin American countries are signatories. Also important, says Postero, are international NGO
funding and “a global discourse that made ‘indigenousness’ and indigenous rights central tropes of
social movement organizing in the 1990s” (5). The environmental movement has played a supporting
role in some places, and the international indigenous movement has been front and center stage almost
everywhere.
The legacy of the cold war shaped U.S. efforts with respect to indigenous communities in the region
before the democratic transition. The results of the efforts ranged from bad (various midcentury
development initiatives in Paraguay) to catastrophic (in Guatemala). Several more recent international
initiatives have had positive effects, as when accusations of genocide in Paraguay led to hearings by the
U.S. Senate and sub sequent termination of aid. World Bank policies have begun to support indigenous
claims as well. Note, however, Hale’s comment that, although the World Bank supports indigenous
rights, it promotes economic policies “that deepen indigenous structural poverty and economic
misery” (37), an opinion Postero shares. Indigenous resistance has been intense to more recent U.S.
pressures, for example, in regard to a Latin American Free Trade agreement and campaigns to
eradicate coca cultivation.
The logic of liberalism is part of the Eurocentric view of the rest of the world that
seeks to expand capital driven policies that have placed Latin America in the cross
hairs of colonial exploitation and domination.
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, NC)
Capitalist determinations, however, required also (and in the same historical movement) that material
and inter subjective social processes could not have a place but within social relations of exploitation
and domination. For the controllers of power, the control of capital and the market were and are what
decides the ends, the means, and the limits of the process. The market is the foundation but also the
limit of possible social equality among people. For those exploited by capital, and in general those
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dominated by the model of power, modernity generates a horizon of liberation for people of every
relation, structure, or institution linked to domination and exploitation, but also the social conditions
in order to advance toward the direction of that horizon. Modernity is, then, also a question of
conflicting social interests. One of these interests is the continued democratization of social existence.
In this sense, every concept of modernity is necessarily ambiguous and contradictory (Quijano 1998a,
2000b). It is precisely in the contradictions and ambiguities of modernity that the history of these
processes so clearly differentiates Western Europe from the rest of the world, as it is clear in Latin
America. In Western Europe, the concentration of the wage-capital relation is the principal axis of the
tendencies for social classification and the correspondent structure of power. Economic structures and
social classification underlay the19 with the old order, with empire, with the papacy during the period
of so-called competitive capital. These conflicts made it possible for nondominant sectors of capital as
well as the exploited to find better conditions to negotiate their place in the structure of power and in
selling their labor power. It also opens the conditions for a specifically bourgeois secularization of culture
and subjectivity. Liberalism is one of the clear expressions of this material and subjective context of
Western European society. However, in the rest of the world, and in Latin America in particular, the
most extended forms of labor control are nonwaged (although for the benefit of global capital), which
implies that the relations of exploitation and domination have a colonial character. Political
independence, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is accompanied in the majority of the new
countries by the stagnation and recession of the most advanced sectors of the capitalist economy and
therefore by the strengthening of the colonial character of social and political domination under
formally independent states. The Euro centrification of colonial/modern capitalism was in this sense
decisive for the different destinies of the process of modernity between Europe and the rest of the
world (Quijano 1994).
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State to State Engagement
The concept and the actions of the State is inherently Eurocentric
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.)
The Nation-State One of the clearest examples of this tragedy of equivocations in Latin Amer- ica is
the history of the so-called national question: the problem of the mod- ern nation-state in Latin
America. I will attempt here to review some basic 557 Quijano . Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America
issues of the national question in relation to Eurocentrism and the coloniality of power, which, as far as
I know, is a perspective that has not been fully explored. 25 State formations in Europe and in the
Americas are linked and distinguished by coloniality of power. Nations and states are an old
phenomenon. However, what is currently called the “modern” nation-state is a very specific
experience. It is a society where, within a space of domination, power is organized with some
important degree of democratic relations (as democratic as possible in a power structure), basically in
the control of labor, resources, products, and public authority. The society is nationalized because
democratized, and therefore the character of the state is as national and as democratic as the power
existing within such a space of domination. Thus a modern nation-state involves the modern institutions
of citizenship and political democracy, but only in the way in which citizenship can function as legal, civil,
and political equality for socially unequal people (Quijano 1998a). A nation-state is a sort of
individualized society between others. Therefore, its members can feel it as an identity. However,
societies are power structures. Power articulates forms of dispersed and diverse social existence into
one totality, one society. Every power structure always involves, partially or totally, the imposition by
some (usually a particular small group) over the rest. Therefore, every possible nation-state is a
structure of power in the same way in which it is a product of power. It is a structure of power by the
ways in which the following elements have been articulated: ( a ) the disputes over the control of labor
and its resources and products; ( b ) sex and its resources and products; ( c ) authority and its specific
violence; ( d ) intersubjectivity and knowledge. Nevertheless, if a modern nation-state can be expressed
by its members as an identity, it is not only because it can be imagined as a community. 26 The members
need to have something real in common. And this, in all modern nation-states, is a more or less
democratic participation in the distribution of the control of power. This is the specific manner of
homogenizing people in the modern nation-state. Every homogenization in the modern nation-state is,
of course, partial and temporary and consists of the common democratic participation in the generation
and management of the institutions of public authority and its specific mechanisms of violence. This
authority is exercised in every sphere of social existence linked to the state and thus is accepted as
explicitly political. But such a sphere could not be democratic (involving people placed in unequal
relations of power 558 Nepantla as legally and civilly equal citizens) if the social relations in all of the
other spheres of social existence are radically undemocratic or antidemocratic. 27 Since every nationstate is a structure of power, this implies that the power has been configured along a very specific
process. The process always begins with centralized political power over a territory and its population
(or a space of domination), because the process of possible nationalization can occur only in a given
space, along a prolonged period of time, with the precise space being more or less stable for a long
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period. As a result, nationalization requires a stable and centralized political power. This space is, in this
sense, necessarily a space of domination disputed and victoriously guarded against rivals.
European centralized states synonymous emergence with colonial domination of Latin
America intrinsically ties State action to an inherent Eurocentric discourse that
justifies mass colonialism, imperialism, and ethnic cleansing
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. 559,
www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
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
nation-state 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 movement, then. It began as an
internal colonization of peoples with different identities who inhab- ited the same territories as the
colonizers. Those territories were converted into spaces of internal domination located in the same
spaces of the future nation-states. The process continued, simultaneously carrying on an imperial or
external colonization of peoples that not only had different identities than those of the colonizers, but
inhabited territories that were not considered spaces of internal domination of the colonizers. That is to
say, the external colonized peoples were not inhabiting the same territories of the future nation-state of
the colonizers. 559
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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 critique of Eurocentrism articulated in the development aid context often centred on the meaning
and location of rational- ity. It disturbed the opposing of a rational, scientific Self to an irrational
Other. It questioned the imagery of the backward Other whose actions and resistance to development
are located within an irrational, traditional mentality. As one development worker concluded:
Also Tanzanians are rational in their choices, even when we develop- ment workers do not experience
these choices as rational. There is a reason why the farmer chooses the traditional way even if he/she
has learned other ways to do it, which we claim would give higher in- comes, a higher standard of living,
etc. The question the development worker should ask him/herself should be, 'Why is the farmer making
this choice?' Do not ask, 'Why are they not doing what I tell them to do?’! Ask instead 'Why are they
doing as they are doing?' (AISEI> December 1997)
Questioning the location of rationality and Truth also tends to destabilize belief in the value of
development aid. It challenges the mandate of the development worker Self. As one worker put it:
The whole thing is a bit constructed and strange. How can you imagine that someone who comes from
another part of the world should know better what to do in Tanzania in order to move the country
forward. The whole idea is a bit absurd from start to finish. (Interview 18)
Most interviews, then, articulate a positioning against Eurocentrism. This process was both explicit and
implicit. The explicit position- ing is, of course, above all, reflected in the partnership discourse itself.
While the partnership discourse has a strong instrumentalist dimension linked to sustainability, it also
has a moral dimension ar- ticulating the need to challenge the paternalism of development aid.
Hence, the discourse of partnership - the disavowal of paternalism, a new definition of the
development worker role as adviser rather than manager, the introduction of a new terminology reflects the workings of a critique of Eurocentric development practices.
One Other who sometimes figured in this more explicit position- ing was the missionary. While
references to the mission are not always expressed in terms of opposition and criticism, missionary
work, when it was mentioned in interviews, often functioned as the opposed Other, in relation to
which a non-paternalist Self is constructed.' The mission was here linked to cultural imperialism and
forcing beliefs upon others.
DW I just know that I don't want to come as a missionary ... because it is impossible to plant an alpine
flower on the savanna. It will not grow. You have to plant a flower which is adapted and suited to the
conditions here and give it the proper nutrition.... I am afraid to come as a missionary because, with all
due respect, they came here because they thought that the message they brought was good and right.
They believed in it, but with hindsight one can conclude that it was wrong.
Q And you are not convinced that what you believe in is right?
DW No, it's right for me but it might not be right for other people. (Interview 22)
The positioning against Eurocentric development also had an im- plicit dimension. This was expressed
in comments such as 'you could say that this is a culturally imperialist viewpoint, but...' (Interview 34)
or 'you might think that this sounds racist, but.. / (Interview 37). Yet this dimension was evident
above all in the many hesitations and reversals in the interviews - efforts to avoid terminology which
could be read as expressions of Eurocentrism or racism.
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People are so enormously ... they believe in the superstitious. (Interview 11)
Yes, but they are very good, you know ... but sometimes I think that they are ... that we are a bit too
gullible. (Interview 21)
Even though it is debatable whether such reversals indicate any significant difference in the meanings
attached to the Self and the Other, they do display an awareness of - and demonstrate the op- eration
of - anti-racist and anti-imperialist discourses. They reveal efforts to present the development worker
Self as 'aware' and as situated outside racism and Eurocentric development discourses. Such
reversals, that is, show the presence of an anti-racist critique of development inasmuch as assertions
such as 'people are so enormously superstitious*, or 'they are gullible* are known to be expressions
of Eurocentrism or racism, and are therefore rephrased accordingly: 'people believe in the
superstitious'; 'we are a bit too gullible').
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Object/subject of the resolution
Engagement is Eurocentric – the plan posits a dichotomizing view of Latin America,
one that views action in terms of “object” and “subject”
Baca, University of Arizona assistant professor of English and Mexican American
studies, 10
(Damian, Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE, Edited by Damian Baca and Victor Villanueva,
p. 1 -2)
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 Angloand 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 globalization—are 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.
US policies towards Latin America reinforce a hierarchal form of relations –
engagement uses paternal rhetoric to justify a top-down approach
Young, NYTimes, 4/20/13
(Kevin, 4/20/13, “The Good, the Bad, and the Benevolent Interventionist: U.S. Press and Intellectual
Distortions of the Latin American Left” http://www.nytexaminer.com/2013/04/the-good-the-bad-andthe-benevolent-interventionist-u-s-press-and-intellectual-distortions-of-the-latin-american-left/, date
accessed 7/5/13 IGM)
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: 169–171, 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
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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, 192–197; 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 Chávez 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 Wilson’s day,
Communism during the Cold War, and autocrats, populists, terrorists, and drug cartels since the Soviet
Union’s collapse. The main demons are typically external to Latin America—often associated with the
“Old World,” the Soviet Union, or, more recently, various Asian and Middle Eastern countries—but there
are usually internal demons, too (Kenworthy, 1995: 18–37).
Press coverage of right-wing coups against Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez in 2002 and Honduras’s Manuel
Zelaya in 2009, and of the U.S. government’s 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 intellectual
commentary often implied that Latin Americans both needed and wanted U.S. intervention.
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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_howtheusviewsmexico.p
hp, 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.
It was U.S. foreign policy in Mexico that ignored: the ruling PRI party rigging elections, using federal
police and the military to torture and intimidate citizens, imprison political dissenters and labor
organizers. We wittingly assisted an autocratic government that used our aid to implement a system of
corruption, so pervasive, that it will take decades to dismantle. Mexico today, suffers from U.S. aid that
supported a political regime, that in all probability, would have fallen were it not for Uncle Sammy's
tolerance of tyranny in exchange for border stability. So before criticizing Mexico, think about how we
supported the end result.
I believe norteamericanos are still befogged by English traditions and beliefs in "the white man's
burden". That the man of color is less civilized than their European ancestors and somehow unworthy
of the same status or concern. That is why the first U.S. made nuclear power plant was tested in
Rincon, Puerto Rico and not in New York. Ironic since New York has more Puerto Ricans than the
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mother island. However, the Italians, English, Irish, German and French descendants in New York
outnumber those in Puerto Rico.
Please do not think me Anti American or anti white, I am a U.S. citizen and of mixed anglo and latin
heritage. I look more caucasian than Latin. As an American, I am proud, that no other nation has
embraced and assimilated so many folks from around the world of all colors. I know too many
Mexicanos, in particular, whose lives have been immensely improved by migrating to the States.
Imagine if our foreign policy was based on the same noble principles we practice toward immigrants and
citizens residing within the continental United States.
We, U.S. citizens, should insist on a well defined, written foreign policy. If it is U.S. policy, we should be
able to read it. What we have now is no policy at all; only subjective and expedient reactions to world
events; Why can't our leadership develop a well thought out set of criteria that really stands for
freedom and justice for all? A document we can refer to. That guides our decisions and can be used to
measure our success. A benchmark document that citizens can use to judge our diplomatic leadership.
We can do a better job in assisting all our neighbors and especially our closest and most important
trading partner MEXICO. If we were clear about our goals and expectations we could achieve greater
success for both countries. If our foreign policy was really directed toward the best interests of
mankind. If our foreign policy made practical sense it would reflect a dedication to improving human
rights and social economic conditions. Only with a clear vision and road map will we stem the tide of so
many "foreigners" trying to escape onto our shores legally or illegally.
We are the most powerful nation in the world and all nations want our assistance. Only by being
unconditionally true to our values of freedom and justice will we be successful in creating a lasting
peace among all people. By helping all the citizens of the world prosper, without the yoke of tyranny,
we will be doing the right thing for ourselves and all our brothers and sisters irregardless of race or
nationality.
The colonialist Eurocentric mindset is leading to a seismological shift- where we push
out cultures of regions like Mexico all together
Shohat, New York University Professor of Cultural Studies and Stam New York
Professor of French Filmmaking, 97 (Ella, Robert, 1997, Routledge, “Unthinking Eurocentrism”,
JSTOR, page 59-61, accessed 7-4-13 KR)
Eurocentric thinking, in our view, is fundamentally unrepresentative of a world which has long been
multicultural. At times, even multiculturalists glimpse the issues through a narrowly national and
exceptionalist grid, as when well-meaning curriculum committees call for courses about the
"contributions" of the world's diverse cultures to the "development of American society," unaware of
the nationalistic teleology underlying such a formulation. "Multiculturedness" is not a "United
Statesian" monopoly, nor is multiculturalism the "handmaiden" of US identity politics.14 Virtually all
countries and regions are multicultural in a purely descriptive sense. Egypt melds Pharaonic, Arab,
Muslim, Jewish, Christian/Coptic, and Mediterranean influences; India is riotously plural in language and
religion; and Mexico's "cosmic race" mingles at least three major constellations of cultures. Nor is
North American multiculturalism of recent date. "America" began as polyglot and multicultural,
speaking a myriad of languages: European, and Native American.
While the fashionability of the word multiculturalism might soon pass, the reality to which it points
will not soon fade, for these contemporary quarrels are l the surface manifestations of a deeper
"seismological shift" - the decolonization of global culture - whose implications we have barely begun
to register. Only an awareness of the inertia of the colonialist legacy, and of the crucial role of the in
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prolonging it, can clarify the deep-seated justice of the call for culturalism. For us, multiculturalism
means seeing world history and contemporary social life from the perspective of the radical equality
of peoples’ status, potential, and rights. Multiculturalism decolonizes representation not ' in terms of
cultural artifacts - literary canons, museum exhibits, film series -but also in terms of power relations
between communities.
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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 (César, 2-6-12, Critical
Legal Thinking, “New Latin American Constitutionalism: Challeneging Eurocentrism & Decolonizing
History” http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/02/06/new-latin-american-constitutionalism-challengingeurocentrism-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 con­sequence,
they end up pla­cing within a single pro­cess three dis­tinct cycles of ‘plur­al­ist con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism’,
described well by Raquel Yrigoyen: a) mul­ti­cul­tural con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism (1982 – 1988), which
intro­duces the concept of cul­tural diversity and recog­nizes spe­cific indi­gen­ous rights; b)
plu­ri­cul­tural con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism (1988 – 2005), 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 (2006 – 2009), 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 afore­men­tioned
con­sti­tu­tion­al­ists do not seem to recog­nize. In this sense, Raquel Yrigoyen, Bar­to­lomé Clavero
and Ramiro Ávila San­tam­aria seem to be cor­rect when they high­light the per­tin­ence of these two
pro­cesses in rela­tion to the pre­vi­ous Latin Amer­ican con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism. A model that,
accord­ing to Ramiro Ávila San­tam­aria, would be a ‘trans­form­at­ive con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism’ because
it is based on other para­met­ers. A few of those stand out.
First: the re-founding of the State is the other aspect of the recog­ni­tion of colo­ni­al­ism, as well as
the thousand-year-old ori­gins of peoples and nations that have been over­looked. This re-founding
requires the rein­ven­tion of insti­tu­tions and organ­iz­a­tional pro­cesses. Examples of this in the case
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of Bolivia are the Plur­in­a­tional Con­sti­tu­tional Court, the elec­tion of judges and the four dis­tinct
levels of autonomy; in Ecuador, there are ‘func­tions’ (not powers), includ­ing ‘trans­par­ency and social
con­trol func­tions’ and ‘elect­oral func­tions’, as well as spe­cial regimes of ter­rit­orial organization.
Second: a range of rights that break away from divi­sions (be they civil or polit­ical; eco­nomic, social
or cul­tural; or related to old age) and Euro­centrism. This becomes most evid­ent in the case of
Ecuador, which recog­nizes seven cat­egor­ies of rights: those of ‘buen vivir’ (well-being); those of
people and groups who are most in need (old people, young people, preg­nant women, people with a
dis­ab­il­ity, people held pris­oner, drug users, drift­ers , and those suf­fer­ing from ser­i­ous ill­ness);
those of com­munit­ies, peoples and nations; those of par­ti­cip­a­tion; those of free­dom; those of
nature; as well as a sec­tion on respons­ib­il­it­ies. How­ever, this can also be seen in the case of Bolivia,
where they have intro­duced rights of indi­gen­ous nations and a range of con­sti­tu­tional duties.
Third: such con­sti­tu­tions are not just influ­enced by the UN Declar­a­tion, but are also
fun­da­ment­ally con­struc­ted from indi­gen­ous lead­er­ship, of which they are also a res­ult, a role
that is dif­fer­ent from indi­gen­ous justice (in the case of Bolivia it is sub­ject only to the
Con­sti­tu­tional Court) and a new vocab­u­lary based on the indi­gen­ous world­view itself (the
recog­ni­tion of the rights of ‘Pachamama’ – Mother Earth – in Ecuador and the prin­ciples of the
Bolivian nation – of Aymaran ori­gin – are some examples). And they high­light the need to com­bat
racism (includ­ing in rela­tion to indi­gen­ous peoples, not just towards black com­munit­ies, as is usual).
Fourth: the insist­ence on decol­on­iz­a­tion (most evid­ent in the case of Bolivia, which emphas­izes
edu­ca­tion itself as a decol­on­iz­ing force), as well as the inter­cul­tural pro­cess (developed in a more
con­sequen­tial way in the case of Ecuador). It fol­lows, too, that ‘plur­in­a­tion­al­ity’ comes to
ques­tion the lim­its of the con­sti­tu­tional State and imposes a new institutionalism.
To over­look cer­tain innov­at­ive para­met­ers of the two Con­sti­tu­tions and attempt to place in the
same cat­egory the Colom­bian Con­sti­tu­tion of 1991, which recog­nized cul­tural diversity in a
lim­ited way (des­pite the Con­sti­tu­tional Court’s role being one of the most advanced examples of
con­sti­tu­tion­al­ism on the con­tin­ent), is to over­shadow if not deny the prot­ag­on­ism and the
struggle of the indi­gen­ous peoples to decol­on­ize their his­tory and hence to estab­lish an authen­tic
plur­in­a­tional State; and in doing so, pose an intense chal­lenge to the Euro­centric para­met­ers of
constitutionalism.
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Topic Country Names
Renaming land is a direct form of colonization – it eradicates the culture of the
indigenous peoples and forces Western ideals upon them
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, pg. 51, JZ)
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.
The act of renaming the world is the act of claiming territory and exalting the
conquerors
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, pg. 81, JZ)
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
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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
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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/jul-aug/leonard.html, date accessed
7/5/13 IGM)
In contrast, Lyndon Johnson gave support to those governments in sympathy with U.S. policies, which
meant governments of the right and extreme right. This tendency was more pronounced after the 1965
Dominican Republic crisis and the appointment of Thomas C. Mann as Assistant Secretary of State for
Latin American Affairs. Mann was emphatic: communism in the Western Hemisphere was intolerable
because it threatened U.S. national security.14 The communist issue intensified as a result of Fidel
Castro's rise to power in Cuba which generated fear that his revolution would spread throughout the
hemisphere. For its part, the United States forced the isolation of Cuba from hemispheric affairs,
supported anti-Castro forces, and even sponsored assassination plots. In response to this new
communist threat, the United States implemented the Alliance for Progress in 1961. In return for
financial support, Latin American governments pledged themselves to agrarian and tax reforms––
measures not welcomed by Latin elites. However, little significant progress was made in tearing down
the vestiges of traditional society. Moreover, because of civil disruptions at home, the agony of
Vietnam, and the perceived lessened threat of Fidel Castro by mid-decade, the United States lost
interest in the Alliance for Progress, which passed quietly in 1971.15
The drift away from Latin America continued under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. InterAmerican affairs were relegated to a veritable limbo. Trade, not aid, was the guidepost. Agreements
with the Soviet Union, the misadventures of Ché Guevara, and Castro's growing dependence on the
détente minded Soviet Union lessened the threat to security and, coupled with the 1973 U.S. supported
overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, lessened the communist threat to the hemisphere. Cambodia,
China, and the Middle East in global affairs, plus Watergate on the domestic scene, were more
important than Latin America. "Benign neglect" best described U.S. policy toward Latin America
during the first half of the 1970s. Without pressure from the north, right-wing military dictatorships
became commonplace in the south.
The energy crisis focused new attention on Latin America. Rich in natural resources, including oil, Latin
America became more important to the United States. Henry Kissinger recognized this fact in 1976
and began a new dialogue with Latin American nations. President Jimmy Carter recognized the new
realities too. He accepted the report by the Center for Inter-American Relations (commonly known as
the Linowitz Report) that Latin America had achieved a degree of independence from the United States
and that the outmoded policies of domination and paternalism should be rejected. The 1977 Panama
Canal treaties were evidence of this change in U.S. thinking.16
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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)
There is still much work to do in terms of understanding the positions of indigenous peoples. Part of
the difficulty is related to the level of diversity within the indigenous movement. Furthermore,
indigenous peoples are often weary of (and take offense to) attempts to speak for all indigenous
peoples. However, some of the difficulty also lies in the degree of sophistication in many of
indigenous responses, arguments, and positions. This sophistication- combined with the state's
Eurocentric mindset -has made it increasingly difficult for state to take indigenous claims seriously.
FINAL COMMENTS: EUROCENTRIC MODERNITY AND THE ERASURE OF INDIGENOUS POLITICS
My argument is that the Peruvian state finds it difficult to understand indigenous political positions
because they are stuck in a Eurocentric conception of modernity, which owes its existence to Europe,
not to the realities, experiences, and histories of the indigenous peoples of Latin America. Eurocentric
modernity is based on universal values, a teleological notion of development - the apex being Europe
and the United States - and a modern-capitalist ( and socialist) framework that values land and
natural resources as exploitable material for the benefit of the modern nation. Following this logic,
it is difficult for the state to understand how anyone could oppose oil development , especially
"poor" people from the Amazon, which is perhaps why Garda repeatedly argues that indigenous
ideological backwardness is one of the main obstacles to Peruvian development and also why the
president of Perupetro finds it difficult to understand why "poor" indigenous peoples might oppose oil
development.
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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 extraordinary expansion. Their geographical location is 'far out' from
continental Europe and the Mediterranean shores, hampering beneficial interactions. In addition, the
kingdoms had significant hatred for the Muslims of northern Africa, thus impeding potentially beneficial
trade (Landes 1998). Perhaps the curiosity incentive was higher for naval exploration in such a location
with surrounding sea. Of course, it was not their intention to discover a 'new' continent. They where
lucky to do so, particularly when it turned out that their bacterial flora, together with the bacterial
flora of their animals, where devastating and most often lethal for the Indigenous Americans. This is
what Alfred W. Crosby (1999) calls ecological imperialism. This is very crucial, since the cost of the
expansionary and extraction process became less costly. It was now easier to extract vast areas of
landmasses and thus natural resources, which was followed by accumulations in economic, political
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and social power , which in turn created further spectrum for colonial settlements and expansions in
other parts of the world.
Further, the great natural resources of the 'new' continent demanded huge quantities of labour for
the extraction and production processes (Diamond 1997). This could be supplied cheaply through
existing trade networks of slaves, from the geographically optimal continent of Africa. Slaves, inferior,
as their societal status suggested, where now concretely observed as people with darker morphological
traits. Now on one side were the people in governance: western Europeans with light body colours,
on the other side were enslaved people under direct rule: Africans with dark body colours. While in
between there were other people under European sovereignty: Indigenous Americans, Indians, Chinese,
Arabs, and other African and Asian people with darker morphological traits than Europeans. These
perceptions in particular must have laid the foundations for the orderly colour-coded racism in
Western Europe and their settlement nations.
Attempts to obtain natural resources from the earth were started by and are
continued today by consumptive patterns stemming from Eurocentrism.
Stetson, Boise State Assistant Professor, 12
(George, PhD, Assistant Professor, Boise State University, 2012, Sage Publications, “Oil Politics and
Indigenous Resistance in the Peruvian Amazon: The Rhetoric of Modernity Against the Reality of
Coloniality”, http://jed.sagepub.com/content/21/1/76.abstract, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
Modernity/Coloniality and Eurocentric Development
Modernity/coloniality (M/C) is a theoretical approach inspired by the work of scholars, mostly from
Latin America, including Walter Mignolo (Argentina), Enrique Dussel (Mexico), Anibal Quijano (Peru),
Arturo Escobar (Colombia), who claim that the idea of modernity, along with its corollaries
development and modernization, are heavily influenced by a Eurocentric perspective. Here
eurocentric modernity is guided by a logic that informs political, economic, and social thought and is not
only predominant in mainstream institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and the WTO, but also permeates
political institutions like the “modern” nation-state.5
Modernity is most often associated with the intellectual effort on the part of Enlightenment thinkers
to develop objective science, to accumulate knowledge, and to dominate and control nature. For
Harvey, modernity is related to the pursuit of human emancipation by free and autonomous individuals,
leading to rational forms of social organization and thought that liberate humans from irrational notions
of myth, religion, and superstition (1989, p. 12). Modernity, thus, reorients the idea of history and
progress around the logic of development, where “perpetual betterment” is always possible (Escobar,
2007, pp. 181-182). According to most classical (Kant, Hegel, Weber, Marx, etc.) and critical thinkers
(Habermas, Giddens, Taylor, Touraine, Lyotard, Rorty, and Foucault), the origins of modernity are
generally located in France, Germany, and England around the time of the Reformation, the
Enlightenment, and the French Revolution and became consolidated with the Industrial Revolution.
Together, these views suggests that modernity can be explained by factors that are generally internal to
Europe (Escobar, 2007, p. 181).
M/C scholars, conversely, explain the origins of modernity as external to Europe, beginning with
Conquest of the Americas and the economic control of the Atlantic. Drawing from Wallerstein’s world
systems analysis, the “modern” world (capitalist) system was born in the 16th century when
European powers began to expand their reaches through colonial domination. This emphasizes the role
that the extraction of precious minerals and (later) the production of agriculture commodities played
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in financing the Industrial Revolution and fomenting the modern world capitalist system (see Dussel,
2002, p. 223; Wolf, 1982/1997). Rather than understand modernity as a process where European
Enlightenment thinkers introduced (i.e., Locke, Smith, Descartes, Comte) a new logic and rationality,
M/C highlights the fact that European modernity (as a logical structure) was based on the imposition
of a Eurocentric representation of knowledge and power that suppressed and marginalized other
forms of knowledge in a hegemonic project of modern development (Escobar, 2004, p. 217).
Coloniality, argues Mignolo, is “the reverse and unavoidable side of ‘modernity’— its darker side, like the
part of the moon that we do not see when we observe it from the earth” (2000, p. 22). Not the same as
colonialism, which refers to specific historical periods, rather, coloniality refers to the “logical structure
of colonial domination” that maintained Spanish, Dutch, British, and U.S. dominance in Latin America
throughout history (Mignolo, 2005, p. 7) a nd permitted the genocidal acts against indigenous peoples
and Africans and the marginalization of knowledges, religions, and of “nonmodern” cultures. When
the logic of coloniality surfaces, it is explained through rhetoric or promise of modernity, where all
problems can be corrected with modern development. Critically, this logic has been alive since the 16th
century when the Spanish crown appropriated massive amounts of land and brutally exploited
indigenous peoples and slaves, all justified in the name of the logic of salvation and progress (Mignolo,
2005, pp. 10-11).
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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, Perú. and Jorge Cañizares, 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 Científicas. 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.
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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 America…will not stay quietly on the farms or in
the slums unless they are terribly afraid…the 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.)
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Advantage links
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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)
Worse yet, education is threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies often disseminated by the
mass media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant electronic wars that give
viewers the sense of surgical precision, but in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction
produced by modern warfare. In the demonization of an unknown enemy for whom the label "terrorist"
serves the general purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry, media images command too much
attention and can be exploited at times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 period has
produced. Speaking both as an American and as an Arab I must ask my reader not to underestimate the
kind of simplified view of the world that a relative handful of Pentagon civilian elites have formulated for
US policy in the entire Arab and Islamic worlds, a view in which terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral
regime change–backed up by the most bloated military budget in history–are the main ideas debated
endlessly and impoverishingly by a media that assigns itself the role of producing so-called "experts"
who validate the government’s general line. Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle
based on a secular notion that human beings must create their own history have been replaced by
abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of
context, and regard other cultures with contempt.
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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/political-islam-essays-frommiddle-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 king’s
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.
Latin American democracy impacts come from a flawed understanding of the politics
relying on stereotypes
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)
The development of a more adequate theoretical understanding of Latin American democracy has
been hampered rather than advanced by the research strategies represented in recent literature:
theoretical denial, voluntarism, barefoot empiricism, and intellectual recycling. The specific
weaknesses of each of these approaches, however, point the way towards opposing and more
constructive strategies for theorizing about democracy in Latin America. From these signposts, it is
possible to suggest an alternate theoretical agenda to guide the development of future research. The
first step toward constructing a more adequate understanding of Latin American political democracy
is to recognize the need for theoretical revision. To continue to emphasize the cyclical nature of Latin
American politics or the fragile and epiphenomenal nature of democracy is, in effect, to ignore the
inadequacies of established theory in the face of confounding political developments: namely, the
unheralded collapse of authoritarianism and the surprising vitality of political democracy in the face of
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 43
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repeated prophecies of imminent demise. In view of the dismal predictive record established to date, it
is time scholars abandoned ahistorical cyclical theories and authoritarian political forecasting in favor
of research focused on evolving political realities. The process of democratization that has been
underway in Latin America for more than a decade must be explained, not explained away. Second, it
should be recognized that voluntaristic approaches stressing variables such as virti and fortuna
represent a retreat from theory rather than a solution to the problems posed by the failure of
established approaches and theories. While shifting levels of analysis often 490 Karen L. Remmer yields
significant dividends in the social sciences, focusing research upon the realm of the contingent and
particular is unlikely to provide much in way of enlightenment. The origin, functioning, and breakdown
of democracy in Latin America can not be understood without reference to sociopolitical forces and
processes that are institutional, societal, and international in scope. An emphasis on voluntarism
results in a neglect of these levels of analysis and thus to the discarding of the substance of theory as
derived from the analysis of politics in the rest of the world. Latin America ends up being portrayed as
a region in which political choices are unconstrained by social forces or public opinion, leaders are
unrelated to followers, and political outcomes are the product of accidental and unpredictable
configurations of events. Such a portrayal comes dangerously close to resurrecting old stereotypes
about the irrational and personalistic nature of Latin American political reality.
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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)
The development of a more adequate theoretical understanding of Latin American democracy has
been hampered rather than advanced by the research strategies represented in recent literature:
theoretical denial, voluntarism, barefoot empiricism, and intellectual recycling. The specific
weaknesses of each of these approaches, however, point the way towards opposing and more
constructive strategies for theorizing about democracy in Latin America. From these signposts, it is
possible to suggest an alternate theoretical agenda to guide the development of future research. The
first step toward constructing a more adequate understanding of Latin American political democracy
is to recognize the need for theoretical revision. To continue to emphasize the cyclical nature of Latin
American politics or the fragile and epiphenomenal nature of democracy is, in effect, to ignore the
inadequacies of established theory in the face of confounding political developments: namely, the
unheralded collapse of authoritarianism and the surprising vitality of political democracy in the face of
repeated prophecies of imminent demise. In view of the dismal predictive record established to date, it
is time scholars abandoned ahistorical cyclical theories and authoritarian political forecasting in favor
of research focused on evolving political realities. The process of democratization that has been
underway in Latin America for more than a decade must be explained, not explained away. Second, it
should be recognized that voluntaristic approaches stressing variables such as virti and fortuna
represent a retreat from theory rather than a solution to the problems posed by the failure of
established approaches and theories. While shifting levels of analysis often 490 Karen L. Remmer yields
significant dividends in the social sciences, focusing research upon the realm of the contingent and
particular is unlikely to provide much in way of enlightenment. The origin, functioning, and breakdown
of democracy in Latin America can not be understood without reference to sociopolitical forces and
processes that are institutional, societal, and international in scope. An emphasis on voluntarism
results in a neglect of these levels of analysis and thus to the discarding of the substance of theory as
derived from the analysis of politics in the rest of the world. Latin America ends up being portrayed as
a region in which political choices are unconstrained by social forces or public opinion, leaders are
unrelated to followers, and political outcomes are the product of accidental and unpredictable
configurations of events. Such a portrayal comes dangerously close to resurrecting old stereotypes
about the irrational and personalistic nature of Latin American political reality.
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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, Chávez 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 spacehow 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 Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, Michelle Bachelet of
Chile, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and, yes, Hugo Chávez 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 Americans seek not just
formal representation but social and economic justice from their democracies, there is less and less
space for the imposition of the upwardly redistributive neoliberal policies that have defined
Washington's interests since the 1970s. It is imperative that, as activists in the United States, we take
notice of this trend-solidarity today means defending this right to sovereignty.
With the Empire in disarray after the disastrous failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 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 Mérida 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
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 46
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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.
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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-universaljurisdiction-of-the-fear-orientalism-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 who do no wrong. For these operations international law showed conveniently malleable,
framing the hegemonic discourse in its sophisticated vocabulary to obediently serve legal forms of
criminalizing the other and (a) absolving the imperial génocidaire ambitions at the same time as (b)
deny the illegality of colonial practices. Guantanamo detentions, Abu Ghraib tortures and the bombing
of Baghdad or Gaza City would be a terror campaign only if perpetrated against us. The hegemonic
discourse effaces the real peoples of those failed states and deadly focuses on their institutionalized
leaderships to justify a generalized aggression impacting indiscriminately on their populations.
Asymmetric wars have costlier consequences to civilians’ populations than to military apparatuses, as is
well known. However, deaths of civilians belonging to the other army are described as perfectly
proportional. Also damages able to permanently destroy the colonized’ economy are “unexpected”
although “justifiable collateral impacts”. For 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. Occasionally, their non-combatant legal status
can be disputed by the loose wording of international humanitarian law. Somehow, savages’ deaths
can be a posteriori reasonable. Perhaps, the 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”.
Hegemony has leads to cultural homogenization and genocide
Dussel, UAM ethics professor, 2
(Enrique, is professor of ethics at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City.
“World-System and “Trans”-Modernity”, Pg. 235-236, Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 3, Issue 2,
2002, muse, JB)
If it is true that European–North American modernity has had economic and military hegemony over
other cultures (Chinese, Southeast Asian, Hindustani, Islamic, Bantu, Latin American [mestizo, Aymara,
Quechua, Maya], etc.) for only the last two hundred years—and over Africa for only a little more than
one hundred years, since 1885—then this is not [End Page 235] enough time to penetrate the “ethicomythical nucleus” (to borrow Paul Ricoeur's term) of the intentional cultural millenary structures. It is
therefore no miracle that the consciousness of these ignored and excluded cultures is on the rise,
along with the discovery of their disparaged identities. The same thing is happening with the regional
cultures dominated and silenced by European modernity, such as the Galician, Catalan, Basque, and
Andalusian cultures in Spain; the diverse regions and cultural nations in Italy (especially the
Mezzogiorno), Germany (especially Bavaria and the five Länder of the East), France, and even the United
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Kingdom (where the Scottish, Irish, and other groups, like the Québécois in Canada, struggle for the
recognition of their identities); and the minorities in the United States (especially Afro-Americans and
Hispanics). All of this outlines a multipolar twenty-first century world, where cultural difference is
increasingly affirmed, beyond the homogenizing pretensions of the present capitalist globalization
and its supposedly universal culture, and even beyond the postmodern affirmation of difference that
finds it difficult to imagine cultural universalities from a millenary tradition outside of Europe and the
United States. This “trans”-modernity should adopt the best that the modern technological revolution
has to offer—discarding antiecological and exclusively Western aspects—and put it at the service of
differentiated valorized worlds, ancient and actualized, with their own traditions and ignored creativity.
This will allow the emergence of the enormous cultural and human richness that the transnational
capitalist market now attempts to suppress under the empire of “universal” commodities that
materially subsume food (one of the most difficult things to universalize) into capital. The future
“trans”-modernity will be multicultural, versatile, hybrid, postcolonial, pluralist, tolerant, and
democratic (but beyond the modern liberal democracy of the European state). It will have splendid
millenary traditions25 and be respectful of exteriority and heterogeneous identities. The majority of
humanity retains, reorganizes (renovating and including elements of globality),26 and creatively
develops cultures in its everyday, enlightened horizon. The cultures of this majority deepen the
valorative “common sense” of their participants' real and particular existences, countering the
exclusionary process of globalization, which precisely because of this process inadvertently “pushes”
toward a “trans”-modernity. It is a return to the consciousness of the great majorities of humanity, of
their excluded historical unconscious!
Samuel Huntington, an ideologue of U.S. hegemony, sees as a “clash,” as a “war” between
civilizations,27 what is simply and positively [End Page 236] the irreversible uprising of universal cultures
excluded by modernity (and postmodernity). These cultures, in their full creative potential and together
with a redefined Western culture (European and North American culture without its reductive claim to
universality), constitute a more human and complex world, more passionate and diverse, a
manifestation of the fecundity that the human species has shown for millennia, a “trans-modern”
world. A humanity that only spoke in English and that could only refer to “its” past as an Occidental
past would testify to the extinction of the majority of historical human cultural creativity. It would be
the greatest castration imaginable and irreversible in humanity's world history!
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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)
The Western-liberal wing of mainstream international theory relies on a paternalist Eurocentrism that
sings the world into existence with the idiom that 'things can only get better' , and that through
paternalist interventionism the East can be culturally converted along Western civilizational lines in
order to make the world a better place for all peoples (as I explain in the next chapter). This optimistic
and 'progressive' vision is countered by Western-realism which sings the world into existence with the
idiom that 'things can only get bitter’ such that the West's only option is to imperially contain the
'new barbaric threat' to civilization and world order. This approach is fuelled and galvanized by a
pronounced degree of Western angst and relative degrees of pessimism concerning the challenges
allegedly confronting Western civilization. This sensibility is characterized by Samuel Huntington: that
'this new world is a fearful world and Americans have no choice but to live with fear if not in fear*
(Huntington 2004: 341). Moreover, the title of a significant piece by Daniel Pipes relayed this angst into
the Western imagination: The Muslims are Coming! The Muslins are Coming!' (Pipes 1990).2 These
statements and many others like them reflect the politics of Western anxiety and insecurity that
underpin 'offensive Eurocentric' and 'defensive Eurocentric' international theory.
Nevertheless, that Western-realism and Western-liberalism often share much in common is revealed
by the interstitial category of'Western-liberal realism', which is represented most famously by
American neo-Conservatism, as well as 'Western realist-liberalism” that is represented by the likes of
Robert Cooper, John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter. Echoing the Western-liberals, the liberalrealists interpret the end of the Soviet Union as offering up a grand opportunity for the progressive
universalization of Western, and especially, American values (Kagan and Kristol 2000). More
specifically, liberal-realism displays a conditional optimism, such that when the United States
embraces the neo-imperial mandate its proponents revert to singing 'things can only get better, while
in its absence they rue that 'things can only get bitter”. Ultimately their theme song is that 'things could
get better or bitter' (even if it’s not quite so catchy!)
Interestingly, such a label dovetails with the notion of 'Wilsonian realism', which signifies a
commitment to Wilson's so-called liberal internationalist vision, albeit with coercive 'neo-imperialist'
unilateral teeth." This is interesting in the light of my argument made in Chapter 7, where I claimed that
Wilson was not an internationalist who advocated universal self-determination, but was a racist
liberal who denied sovereignty to Eastern societies and called for the need to imperially convert them
along
Western lines according to the provincial logic of other-determination. While neo-Conservatism rejects
scientific racism, nevertheless my reading of Wilson dovetails much more closely with post-1989 liberalrealism than even the label 'Wilsonian realism' conveys at first sight. This is also interesting because
Francis Eukuyama's (2006) recent disenchantment with neoconservative 'Wilsonian realism', w hich led
him to embrace a so called'realistic Wilsonianism’, turns out in the light of my argument to comprise but
a very minor variation on a common offensive/neo-imperialist Eurocentric theme. At the same time, this
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 50
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overlap is rendered all the more clear by what I am calling Western realist-liberalism. Thus in order to
draw out these similarities I shall also consider in this chapter the realist-liberal theory of US hegemony
which overlaps often indiscernibly with liberal-realism.
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“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=ht
tp%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings%2FUnthinkingEurocentri
smIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjCNGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6W
nFAZPF8pes3AW7uu-HLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, par. 3, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
Although neoconservatives caricature multiculturalism as calling for the violent jettisoning of European
classics and of "western civilization as an area of study,"2 multiculturalism is actually an assault not on
Europe or Europeans but on Eurocentrism - on the procrustean forcing of cultural heterogeneity into a
single paradigmatic perspective in which Europe is seen as the unique source of meaning, as the
world's center of gravity, as ontological "reality" to the rest of the world's shadow. Eurocentric
thinking attributes to the "West" an almost providential sense of historical destiny. Eurocentrism, like
Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged point. It maps the
world in a cartography that centralizes and augments Europe while literally "belittling" Africa.3 The
"East" is divided into "Near," "Middle," and "Far," making Europe the arbiter of spatial evaluation, just
as the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time produces England as the regulating center of temporal
measurement. Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into the "West and the Rest"4 and organizes
everyday language into binaristic hierarchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our "nations," their
"tribes"; our "religions," their "superstitions"; our "culture," their "folklore"; our "art," their
"artifacts"; our "demonstrations," their "riots"; our "defense," their "terrorism."
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Discourse links
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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 maracá, maráca, 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 Albérico 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.
In 1578, for example, George Best of Britain wrote about "those Americans and Indians" by which he
referred to our Native American ancestors as Americans and the people off India and Indonesia as
Indians. In 1650 a Dutch work referred to the Algonkians of the Manhattan area as "the Americans or
Natives" In 1771 a Dutch dictionary noted that "the Americans are red in their skins" and so on. As late
as 1845 another Dutch dictionary defined mestizos (metis) as being children of a "European" and an
"American" parent.
English usage is very little different. John Wesley in 1747 referred to First Nations People of Georgia as
"the Americans." The Quaker traveler William Bartram, after a lengthy tour among the Creeks,
Cherokees, and Choitaws in the 1770's refers to them as the "the Americans." Samuel Johnson's
Dictionary (1827 edition) has:" American [from America]. An aboriginal native of America; an inhabitant
of America." The dictionary then quotes Milton ("Such of late/Columbus found the American/so
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girt/with feather'd ....."), and Addison from the Spectator ("The Americans believe that all creatures
have souls, not only men and women, but brutes, vegetables, ... stones").
In 1875 Charles Maclaren in a British encyclopedia wrote of "the American race", "the color of the
Americans", "the American natives" and "the Americans" by which he meant "the Americans of
indigenous races." More recently (1986), the Chronicle of Higher Education noted that "Scientists Find
Evidence of Earliest Americans" in northeastern Brazil (32,000 years old). Clearly these "earliest
Americans" were not United Statesians!
Nonetheless, beginning in the 1740's-1780's British newspapers also began to refer to their British
subjects on the Atlantic seaboard as Americans in the sense of Britons living in America. After the
United States became independent in the 1780's its new citizens began to refer to themselves as
Americans, trying to identify with Tammany and the Native People.
It is simply nonsense to refer to the United States as America. It is "of America", and that's different.
California was part of America before it became part of the United States, and everything from
Canada to Chile is still American! First Nations Peoples clearly have prior claim on the name, whether
they stem from Quebec or Mexico!
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“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,” “Latinitée” – that was being advanced by
France. “Latinidad” was precisely the ideology under which the identity of the ex-Spanish and exPortuguese colonies was located (by natives as well as by Europeans) in the new global, modern/
colonial world order. When the idea of “Latinidad” was launched it had a particular purpose within
European imperial conflicts and a particular function in redrawing the imperial difference. In the
sixteenth century, Las Casas contributed to drawing the imperial difference by distinguishing Christians
from the Ottoman Empire. By the nineteenth century the imperial difference had moved north, to
distinguish between states that were all Christian and capitalist. In the Iberian ex-colonies, the “idea”
of Latin America emerged as a consequence of conflicts between imperial nations; it was needed by
France to justify its civilizing mission in the South and its overt conflict with the US for influence in
that area. France, as a country that joined the Reformation, could count itself in the same camp as
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England and Germany; but it was, at the same time, predominantly Latin and, hence, in historical
contradistinction to the Anglo-Saxon.
In the late nineteenth century, France faced a British Empire that had just colonized India and parts of
Africa and was in the process of strengthening its control over the commercial and financial markets in
South America. Evidence of the competition posed from Britain can still be seen today in the presence of
remnants of its railroad system in Latin American countries. The position officially assumed in France at
that moment has endured and it is still present in the conflicts, tensions, and complicities within the
European Union and in the European Parliament today. The concept of “Latinidad” was used in France
by intellectuals and state officers to take the lead in Europe among the configuration of Latin
countries involved in the Americas (Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France itself ), and allowed it also to
confront the United States’ continuing expansion toward the South – its purchase of Louisiana from
Napoleon and its appropriation of vast swaths of territory from Mexico. White Creole and Mestizo/a
elites, in South America and the Spanish Caribbean islands, after independence from Spain adopted
“Latinidad” to create their own postcolonial identity. Consequently, I am arguing here, “Latin” America
is not so much a subcontinent as it is the political project of Creole-Mestizo/a elites. However, it ended
up by being a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it created the idea of a new (and the fifth)
continental unit (a fifth side to the continental tetragon that had been in place in the sixteenth century).
On the other hand, it lifted up the population of European descent and erased the Indian and the
Afro populations . Latin America was not – therefore – a pre-existing entity where modernity arrived
and identity questions emerged. Rather, it was one of the consequences of the remapping of the
modern/colonial world prompted by the double and interrelated processes of decolonization in the
Americas and emancipation in Europe.
The “idea” of Latin America assumes a region waiting to be exploited by imperial
states – the voice of the indigenous peoples are ignored in favor of the Western
stereotype
Mignolo, Duke Professor of English, 6
(Walter D., 2006, The Idea of Latin America, pg. 96-97, accessed 7/3/13, JZ)
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 Sánchez Gonzálo 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 CIA’s 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
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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 CIA’s 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 exists is written in English. That is part of the “reality” of the “idea” of Latin America. The story is
never fully told because “developments” projected from above are apparently sufficient to pave the
way toward the future. “Expertise” and the experience of being trained as an “expert” overrule the
“living experience” and the “needs” of communities that might subsume technology to their ways of
life, and not transform those ways of life to accord with capitalist requirements, using technology as a
new colonizing tool. The blindness of the CIA’s experts, and their reluctance to work with people
instead of strolling over expecting everyone to act according to their script, have led a myriad of social
movements to respond – a blatant example of the double-sided double-density of
modernity/coloniality. It is increasingly difficult for the CIA and other institutions controlling and
managing knowledge and information to silence them. The key issue here is the emergence of a new
kind of knowledge that responds to the needs of the damnés (the wretched of the earth, in the
expression of Frantz Fanon). They are the subjects who are formed by today’s colonial wound, the
dominant conception of life in which a growing sector of humanity become commodities (like slaves in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) or, in the worst possible conditions, expendable lives. The
pain, humiliation, and anger of the continuous reproduction of the colonial wound generate radical
political projects, new types of knowledge, and social movements.
The term “Latin America” is rooted in the history of Anglo-Saxon 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: What’s 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
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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 several voyages to the Caribbean
region and along the coast of northern Brazil from 1497 to 1502. Unlike Columbus, Vespucci concluded
that Europeans did not previously know about the lands he visited in the west, and he thus referred to
them as the New World. In a 1507 map by German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller, America
appears for the first time with that name. While the protocol of European exploration usually gives
primacy to the first “discoverer,” there would seem to be some justification for naming the newly
known land mass after the navigator who recognized it as separate from Asia (Amerigo Vespucci) rather
than for the first European to report its existence, but who subsequently insisted that he had confirmed
a new way to reach Asia (Christopher Columbus) (Arciniegas 1990).
In subsequent centuries, Europeans and their colonial descendants applied the term America to the
entire western hemisphere (which half of the globe is called “western” and which is called “eastern” is
itself a convention of European origin). That usage continues today in Latin America, where it is
commonly taught that there is one continent in the western hemisphere: America. The Liberator
Simón Bolívar famously convened a conference in Panama in 1826 to work toward a union of the
American republics. He included all nations of the hemisphere in the invitation, and it would not have
occurred to him to add “Latin” to the descriptors, because the term had not yet been invented. When in
1890 the United States and its commercial and financial allies around Latin America established the
Commercial Bureau of the American Republics, which became the Panamerican Union in 1910 and the
Organization of American States in 1948, no terminological distinctions were made by culture or
language. In the modern era “America” has of course become the common shorthand name of the
nation that developed from the thirteen English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America.
This apparent appropriation by one nation of a label that traditionally refers to the entire western
hemisphere has been a recurring source of puzzlement and occasional resentment among Latin
Americans (Arciniegas 1966).
Historically, the first use of the term Latin America has been traced only as far back as the 1850s. It
did not originate within the region, but again from outside, as part of a movement called “panLatinism” that emerged in French intellectual circles, and more particularly in the writings of Michel
Chevalier (1806-79). A contemporary of Alexis de Tocqueville who traveled in Mexico and the United
States during the late 1830s, Chevalier contrasted the “Latin” peoples of the Americas with the “AngloSaxon” peoples (Phelan 1968; Ardao 1980, 1993). From those beginnings, by the time of Napoleon III’s
rise to power in 1852 pan-Latinism had developed as a cultural project extending to those nations
whose culture supposedly derived from neo-Latin language communities (commonly called
Romance languages in English). Starting as a term for historically derived “Latin” culture groups,
L’Amerique Latine then became a place on the map. Napoleon III was particularly interested in using
the concept to help justify his intrusion into Mexican politics that led to the imposition of Archduke
Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, 1864-67. While France had largely lost out in the global imperial
rivalries of the previous two centuries, it still retained considerable prestige in the world of culture,
language, and ideas (McGuinness 2003). Being included in the pan-Latin cultural sphere was attractive
to some intellectuals of Spanish America, and use of the label Latin America began to spread haltingly
around the region, where it competed as a term with Spanish America (where Spanish is the dominant
language), Ibero-America (including Brazil but presumably not French-speaking areas), and other subregional terms such as Andean America (which stretches geographically from Venezuela to Chile, but
which more usually is thought of as including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia), or the Southern
Cone (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay) (Rojas Mix 1991).
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Not until the middle of the 20th century did the label Latin America achieve widespread and largely
unquestioned currency in public as well as academic and intellectual discourse, both in the region
(Marras 1992) and outside of it. With the establishment of the Economic Commission for Latin America
(ECLA, later adding Caribbean to become ECLAC) under United Nations auspices in 1948, the term
became consolidated in policy circles, with political overtones challenging U.S. hegemony but largely
devoid of the rivalries of culture, language, and “race” of earlier times (Reid 1978). The 1960s saw the
continent-wide Latin American literary “boom” and the near-universal adoption of “Latin American
Studies” by English-language universities in the U.S., Great Britain, and Canada. This trend began with
the establishment of the Conference on Latin American History in 1927 and was consolidated with the
organization of the interdisciplinary Latin American Studies Association in 1967. Despite the widespread
and largely unproblematic use of the term in the main languages of the western hemisphere since that
era, regional variations remain: In Brazil América Latina is commonly assumed to refer to what in the
United States is called Spanish America, i.e., “Latin America” minus Brazil.
While discussing the spontaneous creation of such collective labels, we need to recognize that the terms
“Latino” or “Latina/o” now widespread in the United States have no basis in any specific nation or subregion in Latin America. Like the latter term, from which it is derived linguistically, Latina/o is an
invented term of convenience—a neologism built on a neologism (Oboler 1995; Gracia 1999; Oboler &
González 2005; Dzidzienyo & Oboler, 2005). Whatever their origins, Latino or Latina/o have largely
replaced the older “Hispanic” or Hispanic American” within the United States, although that Englishderived term, problematic on several counts, lingers in library subject classifications.
But there are other questions that need to be posed, in the age of identity politics and the assertion of
alternative ethnicities and nationalisms. By its historical and intellectual origins and the claims of panLatinism, the term Latin America privileges those groups who descend from “Latin” peoples: Spain and
Portugal (but not, ironically enough, the French-speaking populations of Canada or the Caribbean). By
another set of criteria, what is now commonly called Latin America might be subdivided into those
regions where the indigenous heritage is strong and native identity has reemerged to claim political
space, especially in Mesoamerica and the Andean region; Afro-Latin America, especially the circumCaribbean region and much of Brazil; and Euro-Latin America, in which relatively massive immigration
from 1870 to the Great Depression of the 1930s transformed the demographic and cultural makeup of
southern Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina (Rojas Mix 1991). In other words, Latin America as a term
ignores or claims dominance over other cultures in the region, which have recently come to reassert
their distinctive traditions, including a plethora of languages spoken by tens of millions of indigenous
people—none of which have any relationship to Spanish or Portuguese (or Latin) beyond a scattering of
loan words. The current condition of peoples of indigenous and African heritage has a historical
relationship to conquest, colonialism, subjugation, forced assimilation, exploitation, marginalization,
and exclusion. Those are not processes to celebrate and use as the basis for national or regional
identity challenging the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon “race,” as was the thrust of pan-Latinism of yore.
But they are basis for claiming cultural and political space—as well as territory and access to resources—
within Latin America, today and into the future.
The term Latin America denies indigenous identities their role in the development of
the continent; only through a critical analysis of this from different perspectives can
we hope to change.
Tarver, Arkansas Tech Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, 4
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(H. Micheal, Ph.D., Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, Professor of History, Arkansas Tech, Fall
2004, World History Association, “World History Bulletin”,
http://www.thewha.org/bulletins/fall_2004.pdf, Accessed 7/8/13, NC)
Latin Americanism in the United States: the problem of representations
The word ‘Latin’ is one of the various terms used to categorize the resident population in the United
States whose cultural inheritance comes from some country in Latin America. Another word is
‘Hispanic,’ which was chosen as the official ‘ethnic label’ of the American governmental agencies since
the seventies.28 What is very interesting is that in the official forms in the United States there is a
particular classification of three groups: White, Black, and Hispanic. According to the government’s
definition, this denomination includes people whose origin or Spanish culture come from Mexico,
Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central America or South America, independently of their race.29 Hence, this
includes Spaniards but excludes Portuguese and Brazilians, and other people whose primary
identification is as a member of an indigenous culture from Central or South America.
In consequence, these terms acquire their meaning only in a wider context: in Latin America no one
would call himself ‘Latin’ or ‘Hispanic’.30 Therefore, it is only by looking at ourselves from the outside,
in cross-cultural contexts, that we can see how deeply enmeshed we are in a variety of cultural
factors that constitute our identity. As García Canclini has pointed out, Latin America is not completely
within its territory,31 it receives its image from disseminated mirrors.
Therefore, the meaning of Latin America cannot be found by only looking within a demarcated territory.
For example, most of the Latin-American cable television channels are broadcasted from the United
States; the number of experts in Latin American literature is larger there than in our part of the
continent. Therefore, Latin America is also in the United States, not only in terms of the mass migrations,
but because it is from the United States where most of the images associated with it are administrated.
For that reason, as I said before, instead of puzzling ourselves over our ‘authentic identity,’ it is better
to investigate the orders of knowledge that make possible the very question of the Latin American
identity and the discourses that aim to solve it.32
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Indigenous replaced with Indians
Eurocentrism has led to the forced juxtaposition of numerous identities into a forced
“other” that is “barbarian, primitive, black and Indian”
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 difference—the awkwardness of living in a continent that is not white,
urban, cosmopolitan, and civilized—finds 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.
The use of the word “Indian” recreates “us/them” binaries that prevent an
understanding of Indian cultures
Carson, Queens University Kingston, 06
(James Taylor, Queens University Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Published September 1 2006,“American
Historians and Indians,” The Historical Journal, 49: 933. Accessed July 3 2013. JB)
In her recent exploration of ‘Indian’ intellectuals in the late nineteenth-century United States, Citizen
Indians (2005), Lucy Maddox remarked that ‘white’ intellectuals of that time relied on ‘Indian’ as a
‘generic category’ and ‘stylistic commonplace’. The same could be said for historians’ use of ‘Indian’
today. And what Maddox found, that ‘the Indian of intellectual debate and the thousands of Indians
whose futures awaited the outcome of the debate … often had little in common’, is as true today as it
was then.37 No other fields of study in the history of the Americas reveal as clearly the origins of the
western hemisphere’s modern nation-states and societies than the ancient origins of American
civilizations and their encounter with the nations of Europe and Africa. But so long as scholars hold to
the old verities of ‘white’ and ‘Indian’ or, more bluntly, ‘us’ and ‘them’, we run all the risks of
navigating by dead reckoning, of seeking Eden, and of never quite understanding the actual people and places
we find in either the documents or the imaginations we use to reconstruct our past. A concept like
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creolization, however, can take us out of Columbus’s shadow into the full light of day, afford a different
way of viewing North America’s past and present, and enable us to tell stories of creation rather than
destruction.
The aff homogenizes Native American Tribes identities into a single identity. This
recreates the colonizing binaries.
Carson, Queens University Kingston, 06
(James Taylor, Queens University Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Published September 1 2006,“American
Historians and Indians,” The Historical Journal, 49: 921–933. Accessed July 3 2013. JB)
The people he met posed a particular challenge. He called them indios, a term that reflected his own
erroneous assumption about where he was and who he was seeing. But the meanings he attached to
the term as he navigated the island seas came to denote so much more than a people who inhabited the
Indies. The edenic qualities Columbus attributed to the islands he surveyed suggested that he wondered
whether or not the Fall or the Flood had ever happened there. If they had not, the ‘Indians’ were a
people who had lived outside of time as he understood it. And if they were innocent, their poverty,
simplicity, and, ultimately, degradation made them ideal candidates for redemption before the One True
Faith in vassalage to the Crowns of Castile and Aragón. As he reported to his sovereigns, the ‘Indians’
were ‘fit to be ordered about and made to work, plant, and do everything else that may be needed,
and build towns and be taught our customs’, and, lastly, ‘to go about clothed’.6
The place that Columbus brought into being, however, was neither blank nor empty, nor particularly
new, for where he saw Muslim tents, medieval monsters, and the Garden of Eden, the people who lived
there held altogether different conceptions of the land and of themselves. To limit the story of
colonization to the narrative of the fall of the ‘Indian’ that so often follows from Columbus’s voyages
predetermines the outcome of the story and leaves unchallenged European notions of what the land
and its possession meant. While explorers charted spiritual, gendered, and commercial cartographies,
their encounters with other people and places unsettled the stability and veracity of the maps and the
ideas that guided them. Columbus, for one, saw a people who lacked all conventional accoutrements
of civilization, as he knew it, such as towns, laws, clothing, and a work ethic. We do not know what
deficiencies his hosts saw in him. Probably a lack of generosity, a suite of bad manners, too much hair,
and an unwillingness to become a part of their world that galled them every bit as much as their alleged
indolence appalled him. But in order to contest the Eden and the ‘Indians’ that the invaders imagined
and the very real processes that created the colonies, we need to know, in a fundamental way, how
the Columbian moment has transfixed our historical gaze in one way while distracting us from other
possible readings of the American past.7
Columbus has cast a long shadow over the field of American history and scholars still take refuge in his
shade. Beginning with his diario and continuing through early chronicles by scholars such as Gabriel de
Oviedo, cosmographers like André Thevet, and naturalists such as Thomas Hariot, each imperial power
developed its own language to describe the people they saw and sought to dispossess.8 Columbus
coined indio while the French preferred sauvage. The early records of the English colony at Jamestown
depicted ‘salvages’ who lived rude lives in the forest and ‘infidels’ who did the devil’s bidding.
Scholars, of course, no longer write about savages or infidels, but among today’s national
historiographies, scholars in the United States are almost alone in their use of the term ‘Indian’. Why?
Canadians now write of aboriginals, first peoples, and first nations while Latin American anthropologists
and historians use various terms derived from indigene. It is important, then, to ponder the meaning of
the word ‘Indian’ and the ways in which this foundational category, and its opposite ‘white’, have
shaped the contours of United States historiography. Dichotomies are oppositions, anthropologist Neil
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Whitehead has written, ‘that seem to demand, and permit, an answer but in fact are only methods of
categorizing the processes of human change and expression that we are trying to conceptualize’.9 As
such, adversarial categories like ‘Indian’ and ‘white’ sustain a particular and exclusive view of the past
and obscure other creative ways of posing and pondering questions about contact and colonization.
We need a new historiographical language to wend our way out of the Columbian binary so that other
possible pasts can rise to the horizon and lead us to new questions and new ways of thinking about
our shared pasts.10
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Not putting an accent in México
American conception of Latin American rhetoric and discourse is inherently
Eurocentric
Chung, Editor-in-chief at the 4th Media, 12
(Dr. Kiyul, Editor-in-chief at the 4th Media, is a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University since 2009. He
was a Visiting Professor at Chinese Academy of Social Science as well from 2006 to 2009, NSNBC
International, “Americanization of the World: Undeniable Reality?”
http://nsnbc.me/2012/01/22/americanization-of-the-world-undeniable-reality/m, Accessed: 7/3/13,
LPS.)
Today Americanization of the world seemingly has become an undeniable reality in many parts of the
globe.
It is indeed quite surprising to realize again how deep and broad, cross national borders, regions,
cultures, religions, and languages, a large part of the world seems to have been tainted with America’s
“soft, attractive, and smart” language , ideas and popular culture.
As we fully discussed before, Nye’s case is indeed a distinctive example that another America’s simplistic
but very much sophisticated thereby deceptive language seems to have become globalized.[56]
The case of Nye’s “Soft Power” fanfare reminds us of Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization” concept,[57]
America’s another tactical language that’s once also fascinated the whole globe which later became
globalized, regardless whether the latter’s theory is logically persuasive, morally justified or not.
However, both America’s tactically deceptive languages, as many arguably charge, seem to have
anyway galvanized the globe for a couple of decades now. That could be another “undeniable reality,”
too!
For example, according to the Wikipedia, even Chinese President Hu Jintao also used Nye’s language of
“soft power” in his 2007 address to the 17th Communist Party Congress.
Hu said, “China needs to increase its soft power.”[58] Even if he might have meant probably something
quite different from Nye’s original thought and tried to encourage his 1.5 billion renmin (人民: people)
to utilize Chinese “cultures as attractive national resources”[59] in its international relations.
As this International Conference on “Soft Power and Nation Branding” suggests as one of its four major
topics to discuss, President Hu might have also meant for a Chinese government project in terms of its
“nation branding” by using that America’s tactical language.
However, it is still symbolically a significant incident which first deserves an attention. And it then seems
also show how deep, far and thorough America’s “soft power” resources in the forms of language,
culture, and ideas might have penetrated into hearts and minds of the people around the globe
including important Chinese figures!
I am quite sure it could be most probable Chinese’ top policymakers, strategists, scholars and experts,
too, might have already figured out, in suspicion or skepticism, the tactical deceptiveness of America’s
strategic language. I am sure they are also well aware of the Wikipedia introductions of President Hu’s
statement together with that of America’s top Pentagon official.
The Wikipedia introduces Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in regard to the use of Nye’s language:
“[Gates] spoke of the need to enhance American soft power by ‘a dramatic increase in spending on the
civilian instruments of national security – diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic
action and economic reconstruction and development.’”[60]
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It’s quite OK an American Secretary of Defense used the language of one of his nation’s best military
strategists. But I am not sure how the world would react to the fact that even the sitting Chinese
President also used that same American language.
If some identifiably interpret this coincidence as America’s acculturation of China in process, would that
interpretation be too much of logical leap, exaggeration or political paranoia?
At any rate, I wonder how world’s general public and readers of Wikipedia would interpret this symbolic
coincidence or what kinds of questions they might raise in regards to China’s future in term of,
seemingly, its rapid Americanization process.
It would be very much helpful if Chinese scholars and experts could seriously engage in for open
dialogue to assess how much Chinese culture and society, particularly their “way of thinking,” if it’s the
case, might have been influenced by American culture, language and ideas.
But, for sure today, it seems it’s by and large an undeniable reality that even the Chinese national
leadership is using the same language American Secretary of Defense does.
It seems definite now America’s sophistication of tactical language, popular culture and attractive ideas
must have lured not only hearts and minds of the West but also now that of the East, even Chinese.
Too apparently, China sits completely at the other end of Western hemisphere, cross over the Pacific
Ocean and vast Eurasian Continents. Their histories, cultures, religions, languages and traditions are far
from each other.
Most distinctively, their ideological and political systems yet have vast differences. However,
American language the English and its popular culture seem to have successfully acculturated a large
part of the world including America’s former stern enemy states like China and Russia.
Among those American cultures, Hollywood films probably could be one of the most influential (of
course, not in positive ways!) and powerful means to acculturate, assimilate, thereby indoctrinate a
large number of global populations into “American way of thinking,” in addition to America’s already
globalized fast food culture such as McDonalds, Coca Cola, KFC, and so on which, however, are not
necessarily healthy at all.[61]
In these ongoing processes of Americanization of the whole globe more than a half century now,
China and Russia seem no exception from America’s strategic acculturation project (in other words,
cultural indoctrination or cultural imperialism[62]) by its profit-oriented culture, consumption-oriented
society, commercialism, individualism, materialism, language, publication, food, fashion, more
significantly by “often biased, destructive and violent Hollywood movies,” but most seriously that
“American way of thinking.”
Lately, Americanization seems also becoming prevalent even in the realms of mass media both in China
and Russia.
This is how Nye characterizes what his real intentions through his strategic language of “soft power” are:
“The success of soft power heavily depends on the actor’s reputation within the international
community, as well as the flow of information between actors.
Thus, soft power is often associated with the rise of globalization and neoliberal international relations
theory. Popular culture and media is regularly identified as a source of soft power, as is the spread of a
national language, or a particular set of normative structures; a nation with a large amount of soft
power and the good will that engenders it inspire others to acculturate, avoiding the need for expensive
hard power expenditures.”[63]
Here in this very statement, Nye plainly explains how soft power can successfully produce “what
America preferably wants.”
Thus, if that American acculturation, for example, in China and Russia, might have gone through so
much already for two three decades now, it seems then no matter how big in population, vast in
territorial lands, rich in cash (China for the moment), oil and gas (Russia), strong in military, and most
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advanced in military scientific technologies are, lots of important things in these nations may not be
easily worked out. In many cases, it’s been very difficult to deal with and extremely challenging to
reverse those cultural assimilation or acculturation processes, meaning, ongoing processes of
Americanization in their own nations.
It seems Americanization, even during America’s one of the most serious economic crises, is still in rapid
processes among not small populations around the globe! It is not, as many emphatically claim,
anymore a question of if!
Therefore, unless those nations should try to do something very serious now (before too late!) in order
to properly deal with any of its negative, decaying and often destructive impacts to their own nations,
that could make them, too, some day, if not at any moment soon, fall into the realms of America’s
global hegemonic domination like those distinctively negative cases of Japan, South Korea and the likes
around the globe.
Now it seems apparent Chinese media, academia and top think-tanks also use the same American
strategic languages in their public discourses including official government statements.
I wonder if this particular cultural phenomenon in areas of academia and media is the one that makes
many Chinese scholars and experts genuinely concerned of America’s rapid acculturation of Chinese
society and what that would mean to their nation’s future!
As well-known, the Roman Empire didn’t fall by outside’s military powers but moral and cultural chaos
and decay from inside.
As many around the globe including a number of American consciences warn, that profit-oriented,
commercialized, and consumption-oriented American culture may not be necessarily a healthy antidote,
prescription or roadmap for any nation’s healthy futures.
Is Religion as Culture the Most Powerful “Soft Power” Resources?
Religion, considered as the most powerful and distinctive cultural resource, is the one America and the
West have employed throughout its centuries-old history of colonization of the non-West. Needless to
say, that Western religion is Christianity.
According to the History of Western Colonialism of the Americas, the Christianity (both Catholic and
Protestant) has become the most powerful “cultural method” as “soft power” to Westernize or
Colonize of that vast continent.[64]
One distinctive such example is the almost complete Christianization of the majority populations, over
95%, of North, South, and Central American continents. They are called Christians, both Catholics and
Protestants.
In addition to the religion, a conqueror’s language the Spanish became the official language of both
colonized South and Central America, except Brazil, where Portuguese instead became the official
language.
Of course, needless to say, both religion and language are cultures, therefore, in Nye’s term, “soft
power.” Since religion and language are cultures, this cultural legacy is often called “cultural
assimilation, acculturation or cultural imperialism.”[65]
Nye exhorts these “soft power” methods of “cultural assimilation,” “religious indoctrination” and/or
“cultural imperialism” as “soft power” should be further employed than “hard power” means in order to
effectively and even economically more cheaply achieve what America strategically wants.
During heyday of colonial expansionism by the West, the following analogy <<“On the one hand
[Christian] Bible (religion as culture: “soft power”) and the other hand Guns (military “hard power”),
they brought to our lands colonialism!”>> has become one of the most symbolic phrases to describe
how Western “hard” powers have applied their religion as “soft power” to further colonize or
indoctrinate those colonized or indoctrinated!
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K Affs
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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 world’s 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 America—Indians, blacks, and mestizos— and redefined others.
Terms such as Spanish and Portuguese , and much later European , which until then indicated only
geographic origin or country of origin, acquired from then on a racial connotation in reference to the
new identities. Insofar as the social relations that were being configured were relations of
domination, such identities were considered constitutive of the hierarchies, places, and corresponding
social roles, and consequently of the model of colonial domination that was being imposed. In other
words, race and racial identity were established as instruments of basic social classification. As time
went by, the colonizers codified the phenotypic trait of the colonized as color, and they assumed it as
the emblematic characteristic of racial category. That category was probably initially established in the
area of Anglo-America.
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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, Perú. and Jorge Cañizares, 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 knowledge? 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.
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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.solidarityus.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 real-or-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.
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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 O’Hearn, 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 extends from
colonialism to modernity, modernity to postmodernism and to the future. Modernity's construction of
tradition as an impediment to advancement, of the non-West as 'developing societies' and 'Third
World*, and of instrumental rationality as justification for progress are just as Eurocentric as the
plainly racist categorization of colonialism. This variety of Eurocentrism, like its colonial counterpart, is
now also widely recognized. What is not appreciated, however, is the Eurocentric nature of
postmodernism. This is largely due to the fact that postmodernism emerged as a reaction against
modernity and self-avowedly tried to shape itself in pluralistic terms. But the basic premises of
postmodernism are just as Eurocentric as modernity, if not even more so. For example,
postmodernism's overriding concern with the demolition of grand narratives such as Religion,
Tradition and History are detrimental to the very existence of the non-West for it is these very
narratives that make the non-West what it is: not West. The insistence that everything is meaningless
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and that nothing can give meaning and direction to our lives is a distinctively Western view that finds
no echo whatsoever in non-Western cultures, societies and civilizations. Moreover, postmodernism's
obsession with irony, ridicule and cynicism becomes an instrument for further marginalizing and
hence writing off the non-West. A discourse that seeks to give representation to the Other, to give a
voice to the voiceless, paradoxically seeks to absorb the non-West in ‘bourgeoisie liberalism' and the
secular history of the West, it is not just that postmodernism continues the Eurocentric journey of
modernity and colonialism: we get higher, more sophisticated forms of Eurocentrism as we move
towards the future.
Rejection of their Eurocentric epistemology is key to solve. It creates the potential 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 (Martí 1987;
Mariátegui 1979; Fals-Borda 1970; 526 Nepantla Fernández 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).
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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)
Insofar as Agamben acquiesces to the unquestioned centrality of Europe ­ and of the critically
unexamined version of ancient Athens that is taken to be its precursor- as the originating matrix of
conceptual and cultural meaning, Agamben joins in the uncritical glorification of the philosophical
masterpieces of ancient Athens, construed as the crucible of European culture, but fails to confront
the significance of the system of chattel slavery that afforded the philosophers and tragic poets the
leisure to create their philosophical treatises and theatrical masterpieces, which nonetheless owe
their existence to the sys­ tem of slavery. Agamben thereby perpetuates a Eurocentric discourse of
race, based on an idealized version of ancient Greece that plays down the gendered implications of
his own intervention, even as his focus on race in the modern state (albeit a Eurocentric account of
race) provides a necessary corrective to Irigaray's equally problematic and Eurocentric account of sexual
difference as foundational. At the same time, Irigaray's focus on sexual difference serves as a corrective
to Agamben's exclusive focus on race.
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Impacts
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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
inter-subjectivity
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/wp-content/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 reconceives 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 world’s 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 intersubjectivity 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,
subjectivity/inter-subjectivity and the production of knowledge from within these inter-subjective
relations. Or, alternatively, all control over sex, subjectivity, authority and labor are articulated around
it. As I understand the logic of “structural axis” in Quijano’s usage, the element that serves as an axis
becomes constitutive of and constituted by all the forms that relations of power take with respect to
control over that particular domain of human existence. Finally, Quijano also makes clear that, though
coloniality is related to colonialism, these are distinct as the latter does not necessarily include racist
relations of power. Coloniality's birth and its prolonged and deep extension throughout the planet is
tightly related to colonianism (Quijano, 2000b, 381)
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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)
Although neoconservatives caricature multiculturalism as calling for the violent jettisoning of
European classics and of "western civilization as an area of study,"2 multiculturalism is actually an
assault not on Europe or Europeans but on Eurocentrism - on the procrustean forcing of cultural
heterogeneity into a single paradigmatic perspective in which Europe is seen as the unique source of
meaning, as the world's center of gravity, as ontological "reality" to the rest of the world's shadow.
Eurocentric thinking attributes to the "West" an almost providential sense of historical destiny.
Eurocentrism, like Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged
point. It maps the world in a cartography that centralizes and augments Europe while literally
"belittling" Africa.3 The "East" is divided into "Near," "Middle," and "Far," making Europe the arbiter
of spatial evaluation, just as the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time produces England as the
regulating center of temporal measurement. Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into the "West and
the Rest "4 and organizes everyday language into binaristic hierarchies implicitly flattering to Europe:
our " nations," their "tribes"; our "religions," their "superstitions"; our "culture," their "folklore"; our
"art," their "artifacts"; our "demonstrations," their "riots"; our "defense," their "terrorism."
Eurocentrism first emerged as a discursive rationale for colonialism, the process by which the
European powers reached positions of hegemony in much of the world. Indeed, J.M. Blaut calls
Eurocentrism "the colonizer's model of the world."5 As an ideological substratum common to
colonialist, imperialist, and racist discourse, Eurocentrism is a form of vestigial thinking which
permeates and structures contemporary practices and representations even after the formal end of
colonialism. Although colonialist discourse and Eurocentric discourse are intimately intertwined, the
terms have a distinct emphasis. While the former explicitly justifies colonialist practices, the latter
embeds, takes for granted, and "normalizes" the hierarchical power relations generated by
colonialism and imperialism, without necessarily even thematizing those issues directly.
The epistemological legitimization of Eurocentrism white-washes 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=ht
tp%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings%2FUnthinkingEurocentri
smIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjCNGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6W
nFAZPF8pes3AW7uu-HLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
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Eurocentrism first emerged as a discursive rationale for colonialism, the process by which the
European powers reached positions of hegemony in much of the world. Indeed, J.M. Blaut calls
Eurocentrism "the colonizer's model of the world."5 As an ideological substratum common to
colonialist, imperialist, and racist discourse, Eurocentrism is a form of vestigial thinking which
permeates and structures contemporary practices and representations even after the formal end of
colonialism. Although colonialist discourse and Eurocentric discourse are intimately intertwined, the
terms have a distinct emphasis. While the former explicitly justifies colonialist practices, the latter
embeds, takes for granted, and "normalizes" the hierarchical power relations generated by
colonialism and imperialism, without necessarily even thematizing those issues directly. Although
generated by the colonizing process, Eurocentrism's links to that process are obscured in a kind of
buried epistemology. Eurocentric discourse is complex, contradictory, historically unstable. But in a kind
of composite portrait, Eurocentrism as a mode of thought might be seen as engaging in a number of
mutually reinforcing intellectual tendencies or operations: 1. Eurocentric discourse projects a linear
historical trajectory leading from classical Greece (constructed as "pure," "Western," and "democratic")
to imperial Rome and then to the metropolitan capitals of Europe and the US. It renders history as a
sequence of empires: Pax Romana, Pax Hispanica, Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. In all cases, Europe,
alone and unaided, is seen as the "motor" for progressive historical change: it invents class society,
feudalism, capitalism, the industrial revolution. 2. Eurocentrism attributes to the "West" an inherent
progress toward democratic institutions (Torquemada, Mussolini, and Hitler must be seen as
aberrations within this logic of historical amnesia and selective legitimation). 3. Eurocentrism elides
non-European democratic traditions, while obscuring the manipulations embedded in Western formal
democracy and masking the West's part in subverting democracies abroad. Eurocentrism minimizes
the West's oppressive practices by regarding them as contingent, accidental, exceptional. Colonialism,
slave-trading, and imperialism are not seen as fundamental catalysts of the West's disproportionate
power. Eurocentrism appropriates the cultural and material production of non-Europeans while
denying both their achievements and its own appropriation, thus consolidating its sense of self and
glorifying its own cultural anthropophagy. The West, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett puts it, "separates
forms from their performers, converts those forms into influences, brings those influences into the
center, leaves the living sources on the margin, and pats itself on the back for being so cosmopolitan."6
In sum, Eurocentrism sanitizes Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West;
it thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements - science, progress, humanism - but of the nonWest in terms of its deficiencies, real or imagined.
As a work of adversary scholarship, Unthinking Eurocentrism critiques the universalization of Eurocentric
norms, the idea that any race, in Aimé Césaire's words, "holds a monopoly on beauty, intelligence, and
strength."
Their Bankrupt Eurocentric Epistemology is the root cause of colonialism in Latin
America leading to destruction of cultures, the extermination of natives, slavery and
unending cultural subordination replicating bare life.
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)
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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 debates—free from immediate
constraints of time or financing pressures—that 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 perspective on the so-called crisis of the subject if we were to conclude that the
extermination natives, transatlantic slavery, and the subordination and exclusion of the other were
nothing more than the other face, the necessary mirror of the self, the indispensable contrasting
condition for the construction of modern identities.
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Root Cause Oppressions
Eurocentrism is the root cause of all other isms- our flawed epistemology stems from
a Eurocentric perspective- decolonizing is the only way to solve
Baker, Professor of Education and Human Development, University of Rochester, 12
(Michael, Professor at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, October 31 November 4, 2012, American Educational Studies Association, Annual Conference Seattle, Washington,
“Decolonial Education: Meanings, Contexts, and Possibilities,”
http://academia.edu/3266939/Decolonial_Education_Meanings_Contexts_and_Possiblities, Accessed:
7/7/13, LPS.)
Decolonial thinking developed by this group, now calling itself modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, is
centered around a theory of modern/colonial power/knowledge relations that aims to explain the
politics of our identities within a worldwide racial system of classification. The foundation of this
system of classification was the imperial idea of humanity, an invention of early modern natural law
theory allowing elite Europeans to interpret themselves in relation non-Europeans and the uncivilized
European masses. In the debates over the humanity of the Amerindians at the School of Salamanca in
1542, a new conceptualization of the medieval concept of humanitas emerged that became the basis for
the modern epistemological framework. Humanitas was conceived in the cognitive operation of
creating the framework for western knowledge production (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 15).
Rooted in the sixteenth and seventeenth century reformulations of medieval natural law theory and
novel conceptions of the state of nature, the modern worldview was constituted by cultural
conceptions and theories of human nature, history, and destiny that set the outer limits and the
internal possibilities for understanding the world, others, and oneself (Jahn, 2000, p. xv).
Based upon a rethinking of the biblical conceptualizations of the state of nature and the nature of man
that emerged from the Reformation and the theological debates over the legal status of the
Amerindians, Europeans came to understand themselves as a distinct cultural group, separate from
Christendom, within a universal civilized-barbarian hierarchical classification system. Civilized humanity
was constituted in a double movement that detached Man from God and distinguished European from
non-Europeans (Mignolo, 2000). The Renaissance idea of man was used as a point of reference to
identify and invent the boundaries of civilized humanity and to hierarchically classify people on the
margins and exteriority of these boundaries. Humanitas and anthropos are the two central European
constructs for human beings that emerged from this intellectual formation that ranked and divided
people around the world into knowing subjects and known objects (Osamu, 2006). From its sixteenth
century reformulation, humanitas refers to the self-definition of the civilized ethno-class that controls
knowledge through which anthropos, the object of knowledge, can be constructed, known and
managed. It was during this transition from the medieval to early modern periods that the world began
to be hierarchically and racially conceived by a particular group of epistemic agents, supported by
Christian theology, exploring, mapping, and classifying the whole world for the first time within a newly
emerging epistemological framework that became the foundation of the conceptual/narrative we now
call modern civilization (Mignolo, 2007, p. 115). The self-understanding of European elites that emerged
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was built upon a conceptual matrix of dual opposites
where the barbarian, the woman, the child, nature, the homosexual, etc., were incorporated into a
complex hierarchy tied to the changing divisions of labor in the modern capitalist system. This system of
classification allowed European civilized males to interpret themselves at the apex of a universal
hierarchy while providing a rationale for maintaining these categories and divisions.
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From this modern/colonial perspective, the link between Eurocentrism and knowledge was
rearticulated in linking coloniality with Eurocentrism (Quijano, 1999). As a way of conceiving and
organizing knowledge based upon a universalized conception of humanitas, the colonial matrix of power
enabled the subjugation of populations to various binary identities and colonial/imperial forms of selfunderstanding (Quijano, 2000). Differences related to ethnicity, race, gender, class, sexuality,
disability, nationalism, religion, etc., are interrelated today within the modern/colonial system of
power/knowledge relations established by a particular ethno-racial group of elite, Christian,
heterosexual, men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These various identities and
differences were transformed into values within multiple and interrelated hierarchies. As a
consequence, the ways in which both colonized and colonizing peoples have learned to interpret and
understand themselves, others, and the world are inventions of a European colonial/imperial matrix of
power and knowledge relations. This system of classification has enabled modes of control of social
life and economic and political organizations that emerged in the European management of the
colonies in the Americas at the beginning of the sixteenth century and subsequently became
worldwide. Coloniality became a global model of power and integration of all people and places on
earth into the process of building and expanding, both materially and intersubjectively, a new
space/time called modernity.
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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_Eurocentrism_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. -- Anglo-American)
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 peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture,
and nation that were, in effect, conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and to
educate the world” (Willinsky, 1989, pp. 2-3). Race, in other words, is a “mental category of modernity”
(Quijano, 2000, p. 536), created along with European colonization of the Americas and the emergence of
capitalism in the Atlantic commercial circuit in the sixteenth century. Modernity/coloniality came
together in the sixteenth century during the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit that
propelled an incipient European capitalism and charted the racial geopolitical map of the world.
Racial classification and the divisions and control of labor are historically intertwined – the two parts
of colonial matrix of power (Quijano, 1999; Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992). Types of work, incomes
earned, and geographical location among the world’s population today profoundly reflect this racial
capitalist hierarchy and domination – the coloniality of power. Coloniality of power has been since the
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sixteenth century and is still today an epistemic principle for classifying the non-European world in
relation to Europe on the principle of skin color and brain capacity (i.e., race and rationality). Ethnicities
(local community identities based on shared knowledge, faith, language, memories, tastes etc.) have
been racialized within this modern matrix of power (Sardar, Nandy & Wyn Davies1993).
Multicultural education therefore should be understood and consequently taught within the colonial
horizon of modernity, since the sixteenth century. Racism is a symptom of the persistence of
coloniality of power and the colonial difference.
One of the achievements of imperial reason was to affirm European or white, Christian, male,
heterosexual, American, as a superior identity by constructing inferior identities and expelling them to
the outside of the normative sphere of the real (Mignolo, 2006). Cultural differences then would be
recognized as part of the colonial difference in the 500-year history of control and domination by the
white, European, heterosexual, Christian, male through the intersection of race, religion, gender, class,
nationality and sexuality. The coloniality of power is a European imposed racial classification system
that emerged 500 years ago and expanded along with (is constitutive of) the modern/colonial world
capitalist-system. Race, class, gender, and sexuality and religion intersect as hierarchical elements
within the modern/colonial capitalist system of classification and power relations.
Eurocentrism has empirically lead to the associate of race with conceptions of class,
intelligence and personality- this is the ultimate unethical epistemology and must be
rejected.
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)
For the colonisers, skin colours were one of the most important signifiers for the status of a person
(Loomba 2006). This is most visible when considering the perspectives the British held towards Asians
on one hand and Africans on the other. The British held Africans so low in value that they transported
Indians and other Orientals to Africa to build necessary infrastructure for the production and
transportation of goods. The Africans where believed not intelligent enough for the task. According to
a compilation presented by Floyd Dotson (1975) the number of Orientals in Africa was nearly one million
people at the end of the colonial period in 1950s, spread mostly in the British controlled southern and
eastern parts of Africa. Even today, there are significant numbers of people with Indian ancestry in these
regions.
These perceptions, together with xenophobia and related prejudice, received practical imprints
through centuries of societal constructions, stigmatisations and mistreatment during the process of
colonial rule around the world, but also within countries in Europe and NeoEurope during and after
colonial times (there are of course numerous studies on this subject, perhaps the most assessable one
is Fredrichson 2002 and 2003). Together these forces created and augmented ethnic related rifts in
socioeconomic standards around the world.
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This is the point in which everything that isn’t white, male, European, and human is
permanently devalued to always be inferior.
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)
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 world’s 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 dominant place
in global, colonial/modern capitalism; by the new validity of the mystified ideas of humanity and
progress, dear products of the Enlightenment; and by the validity of the idea of race as the basic
criterion for a universal social classification of the world’s population. The historical process is, however,
very different. To start with, in the moment that the Iberians conquered, named, and colonized
America (whose northern region, North America, would be colonized by the British a century later),
they found a great number of different peoples, each with its own history, language, discoveries and
cultural products, memory and identity. The most developed and sophisticated of them were the
Aztecs, Mayas, Chimus, Aymaras, Incas, Chibchas, and so on. Three hundred years later, all of them
had become merged into a single identity: Indians. This new identity was racial, colonial, and
negative . The same happened with the peoples forcefully brought from Africa as slaves: Ashantis,
Yorubas, [End Page 551] Zulus, Congos, Bacongos, and others. In the span of three hundred years, all of
them were Negroes or blacks. This resultant from the history of colonial power had, in terms of the
colonial perception, two decisive implications. The first is obvious: peoples were dispossessed of their
own and singular historical identities. The second is perhaps less obvious, but no less decisive: their
new racial identity, colonial and negative, involved the plundering of their place in the history of the
cultural production of humanity. From then on, there were inferior races, capable only of producing
inferior cultures. The new identity also involved their relocation in the historical time constituted with
America first and with Europe later: from then on they were the past. In other words, the model of
power based on coloniality also involved a cognitive model, a new perspective of knowledge within
which non-Europe was the past, and because of that inferior, if not always primitive.
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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 modeled- rejection 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)
To many, the story may initially seem out of place because it is foreign. This is hardly the case. The
U nited S tates is so unprecedentedly powerful that it can be best understood ( even in its domestic
race relations ) when observed from without. Those who run America and benefit materially from
its global hegemony regard the world as one place. So, then, must those around the globe who are
subject to America’s overwhelming social and economic influence. American racism is not merely a
domestic social contaminant but a principal American export as well. The very notion of the nation-
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state has become little more than a convenient legal fiction or hiding place for anonymous and
rapacious interests.
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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 own—control over life and work—is 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.
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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,fromthemagic-mythic 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.
Only a rejection of Eurocentric epistemologies will create change in Latin America. It is
the only barrier to resolving structural problems.
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, NC)
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 inter subjective 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,
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 88
Eurocentrism K
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.
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No Solvency – Economic Development
Policies which support development fail – addressing Eurocentric hierarchies is key to
effective decision calculus
Rhodd, Florida Atlantic University Economics Professor, 96
(Rupert G. Rhodd, April 7, 2013, “Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of Economic
Development Theories Review,” Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 63, No. 2, pg. 548, JSTOR, Accessed 74-13, EK)
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 culturebias 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.
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No Solvency - Economy Advantages
Eurocentrism locks in economic inequities
Miguel, Universidad Federal de Rondonia International relations Professor, 9
(Vinicius Valentin Raduan Miguel, August 4, 2009, Political Affairs, “Colonialism and Underdevelopment
in Latin America,” http://www.politicalaffairs.net/colonialism-and-underdevelopment-in-latin-america/,
accessed July 4, 2013, EK)
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 nonintensive 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.
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Turns Case - Instability
Even if the Aff wins 100% of the truth claims of their impacts we will still win root
cause, the only instability in Latin America stems from racial homogenization justified
by Eurocentrism.
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, NC)
The process of the racial homogenization of a society’s members, imagined from a Eurocentric
perspective as one characteristic and condition of modern nation-states, was carried out in the
countries of the Southern Cone not by means of the decolonization of social and political relations
among the diverse sectors of the population, but through a massive elimination of some of them
(Indians) and the exclusion of others (blacks and564 Nepantla mestizos). Homogenization was
achieved not by means of the fundamental democratization of social and political relations, but by the
exclusion of a significant part of the population, one that since the sixteenth century had been racially
classified and marginalized from citizenship and democracy. Given these original conditions, democracy
and the nation-state could not be stable and firmly constituted. The political history of these
countries, especially from the end of the 1960s until today, cannot be explained at the margins of these
determinations.30
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AT: US Not Imperialist
Every Empire claims distinction, but relies on same colonial patterns of Otherization
and violence
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)
Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like "us" and didn’t appreciate
"our" values–the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma–there 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 clichés, 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 book’s publication Orientalism once again raises the question of
whether modern imperialism ever ended, or whether it has continued in the Orient since Napoleon’s
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. Naipaul’s 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 insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism,
irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against the latest bunch of "natives." Each of these
phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, each its own reductive images, its
own disputatious polemics.
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Alts
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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 history—assumed
as universal—becomes 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 world’s 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 planet’s
carrying capacity.
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Paradigm Shift Key
Alternative epistemologies need to shift from a narrative of fixing Latin America to
one of critical analysis. We cannot just attribute the problems that we face in Latin
America to buzz words of colonialism and imperialism, but rather we need to
challenge the way we tie it to the history of Europe.
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)
Shifting from narratives that emphasize progress toward ones that emphasize cross-cultural
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 themes—conquest and colonization, slavery, racism, wars of independence, nation
building, imperialism and neocolonialism, economic development and dependency, and twentiethcentury 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 America’s 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
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“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=ht
tp%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings%2FUnthinkingEurocentri
smIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjCNGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6W
nFAZPF8pes3AW7uu-HLw&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.
Only unthinking Eurocentrism solves- that’s key to solve other forms and methods of
exclusion
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=ht
tp%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings%2FUnthinkingEurocentri
smIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjCNGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6W
nFAZPF8pes3AW7uu-HLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
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
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 97
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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 (modeled on impeccable divinities and infallible popes), and
assume instead imperfection and contradiction. Congruent with our double thrust, we will deploy a
double operation of critique and celebration, of dismantling and rebuilding, of critiquing Eurocentric
tendencies within dominant discourse while celebrating the transgressive utopianism of multicultural
texts and practices. We do not mean "utopia" in the sense of scientistic "blueprint" Utopias or totalizing
metanarratives of progress, but rather in the sense of "critical Utopias" which seek what Tom Moylan
calls "seditious repression of social change" carried on in a "permanently open process of envisioning
what is not yet."15 Rather than constructing a purist notion of correct texts or immaculate sites of
resistance, we would propose a positively predatory attitude which seizes esthetic and pedagogic
potentialities in a wide variety of cultural practices, finding in them germs of subversion that can
"sprout" in an altered context. Rather than engaging in a moralistic, hectoring critique, our hope is to
point to the exuberant possibilities opened up by critical and polycentric multiculturalism.
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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_Possiblities, 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 geopolitics 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 from the experiences of and responses to European colonization in
the Andean regions during the sixteenth century. The colonial context created a betweeness of
cosmologies for the colonized. This consciousness of being between cultures within a dominant culture
is the central feature of decolonial thought -- thinking from the borders created by a totalizing
cosmology associated with European modernity. For example, the sixteenth century writings of Waman
¶
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Puma de Ayala focused on ways to preserve Aymara and Kechua knowledge cultures and co-exist within
the new world order (Mignolo, 2005). Today, decolonization is used among indigenous intellectuals
around the world, where a variety of models of decolonial education have emerged. Decolonial
thinking about education is rooted in the violent occlusion of ways of knowing and being among
indigenous civilizations in the Americas within the imposition of a new world order. The conquest of
the Americas meant the demolition of indigenous education and economic systems. European
Renaissance universities, for example, were soon transplanted across the Atlantic that had no relation to
the languages and histories of the native peoples.
Decoloniality solves- it’s the best way to break down other negative form of
exclusionary knowledge production- means we control root cause
Baker, Professor of of Education and Human Development at the University of
Rochester, 12
(Michael, Professor at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, October 31 November 4, 2012, American Educational Studies Association, Annual Conference Seattle, Washington,
“Decolonial Education: Meanings, Contexts, and Possibilities,”
http://academia.edu/3266939/Decolonial_Education_Meanings_Contexts_and_Possiblities, Accessed:
7/7/13, LPS.)
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
capitalist-communist 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 1955, in which 29 countries from Asia and Africa came together to find a common ground
and vision beyond the capitalist-communist binary. Bandung was followed by Belgrade where the
conference of the Non-Aligned countries brought several Latin American countries together with
Asian and African countries in 1961, the same year Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth was
published. ¶ The experience of political decolonization during the Cold War, along with the publication of
seminal decolonial texts by the 1960s, led to the realization that decolonization had to include the
critique of the modern western system of knowledge and understanding. In addition, the impact of
decolonization struggles in Asia and Africa, the emergence of dictatorial regimes in South America, and
the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. all contributed to a major transformation of the scholarly fields of
study by the 1970s (Mignolo, 2011). In the global south, the concern was the geopolitics of knowledge
and decolonizing imperial knowledge. In the U.S., the concern was the body-politics of knowledge, as a
new organization of knowledge and understanding came into being, i.e., women’s studies, ethnic
studies, Chicano/Latino/a studies, Native-American studies, African-American studies, Queer and
Asian-American studies, etc. Body-politics refers to the individual and collective biographical grounds
of understanding and thinking (Tlostanova, 2010). Both of these movements for decolonizing
knowledge, emerging from different locations and concerns, brought to the surface the recognition and
critique of the geopolitics of the modern knowledge regime. The relationship between geopolitics and
epistemology was the central theme that emerged in the decolonial movements of the global south,
while in the U.S., the questions centered on the relationship between identity and epistemology
(Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, pp. 193-194).
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Eurocentrism K
Latin America is the starting point of Eurocentric knowledge production
Baker, Professor of of Education and Human Development at the University of
Rochester, 12
(Michael, Professor at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, October 31 November 4, 2012, American Educational Studies Association, Annual Conference Seattle, Washington,
“Decolonial Education: Meanings, Contexts, and Possibilities,”
http://academia.edu/3266939/Decolonial_Education_Meanings_Contexts_and_Possiblities, Accessed:
7/7/13, LPS.)
As a consequence of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., new spheres of knowledge (e.g., ethnic
studies, etc.) emerged which incorporated the knower into the known (the collective memory of
communities), and brought the perspectives of the marginalized and dispossessed into the social sphere
of knowledge. These various new “studies” also introduced an alternative justification of knowledge –
education for liberation from subjective and epistemic colonization (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, pp.
193-194). Today, the massive migration occurring in the U.S. has begun to connect with decolonial
thinking processes that emerged within these new spheres of knowledge. All of these various studies,
combined with an array of new conceptual tools no longer controlled by the disciplines, provide the
seeds for the decolonization of the humanities, still firmly implanted within Eurocentric knowledge
cultures (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, p. 34) ¶ From a decolonial perspective, Eurocentrism can be
understood as the ways the world has been interpreted and understood (and taken for granted)
through a structure of knowledge and system of power relations that emerged with the colonization
of the Americas and the formation of Europe as a geocultural identity distinct from Christendom. The
naming and mapping of the world’s continents for example, were imperial/colonial inventions of
Christian European thought that are now interpreted as ontological realities. Eurocentrism is another
name for the modern worldview within which modern western education emerged and effectively
reproduced since the end of the Renaissance to the present. From this perspective, modernity is
interpreted as a regional narrative of a Eurocentric worldview (captured in term Occidentalism) that was
imposed upon the world under the guise of its universal, rational, and beneficial nature (Coronil, 1997).
Eurocentric modernity is a thoroughly naturalized conceptual/narrative background horizon through
which the world continues to be known and lived today (Dirlik, 1999). The call to decolonize
knowledge and education is situated in the larger framework of this critique of Eurocentrism. ¶ In the
early 1990s, new contributions to decolonial thinking converged among a group of Latin American
intellectuals with roots in some of the earlier intellectual movements described above. Critically
appropriating the “modern world-system” framework initiated by Immanuel Wallerstein in U.S.
historical sociology, the modern/colonial world system perspective developed a critique of the
civilizational model of modernity understood as a Eurocentric predatory project. This decolonial critique
of the modern world system is derived from “Latin” American experiences of living under the
hegemony of European and North American thought and control over the past five hundred years.
According to this perspective, the modern world we are living in is a consequence of the emergence and
global expansion of a colonial/imperial project we have mythically conceived as modernity or modern
western civilization (Dussel, 1995). Instead of viewing the emergence of European modernity as an
endogenous development that expanded outward, this post-Occidental perspective interprets European
identity and the invention of Occidental civilization as a consequence of the complex interrelations
between Europeans and the rest of the world in the initial formation of the first worldwide system. Selfascribed civilized European males from within their newly sovereign territorial states became the
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managing centers and all-knowing agents of this new system that connected the world together for the
first time and made human life dispensable. Contrary to our western educated, helenocentric,
Enlightenment oriented historical horizon, European modernity emerged in part with the violent joining
together of capitalism and colonialism in the Atlantic commercial circuit along with the invention of a
legitimating mono-cultural epistemological framework during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Decolonial thinking is the only way to solve
Baker, Professor of of Education and Human Development at the University of
Rochester, 12
(Michael, Professor at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, October 31 November 4, 2012, American Educational Studies Association, Annual Conference Seattle, Washington,
“Decolonial Education: Meanings, Contexts, and Possibilities,”
http://academia.edu/3266939/Decolonial_Education_Meanings_Contexts_and_Possiblities, Accessed:
7/7/13, LPS.)
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 non-western
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 of non-modern systems
and principles of knowledge and categories of thought. Decolonial education aims to demythologize
the two principle founding myths of modernity – that history of human civilization is a trajectory that
departed from the state of nature and culminated in Europe, and that differences between Europe and
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non-Europe are natural (racial) differences and not consequences of power (Quijano, 2000). ¶ Decolonial
education involves learning to unlearn in order to relearn (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012).
Decoloniality is the only way to solve
Baker, Professor of of Education and Human Development at the University of
Rochester, 12
(Michael, Professor at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, October 31 November 4, 2012, American Educational Studies Association, Annual Conference Seattle, Washington,
“Decolonial Education: Meanings, Contexts, and Possibilities,”
http://academia.edu/3266939/Decolonial_Education_Meanings_Contexts_and_Possiblities, Accessed:
7/7/13, LPS.)
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 modernity’s 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 recognition that our identities and differences are not
ontological categories but relational constructions within the colonial matrix of power. ¶ Decolonial
education raises and attempts to address questions of transformation, such as, how can education at
the cultural and psychological levels contribute to the processes of deimperialization and
decolonization? How can teachers learn to teach beyond the distorted cultural/historical imaginary
and impoverished subjectivity of the modern horizon of thought where everything is hierarchically
ranked according to Eurocentric concepts, standards, and assumptions? What kinds of worldviews
could schools promote along with what kinds of epistemologies? How can different and incompatible
knowledge traditions be joined together in the classroom for learning about the world, oneself, and
others? All of these questions and more involve forms of interpretation where the plurality of
perspectives and diversity of forms of self-understanding are recognized, adequately translated,
understood, and included in open and non-hierarchical dialogical relations. Academic subjects would be
taught geo-historically and bio-graphically, (where, when, who, why), in order to understand the links
between knowledge, culture, and geohistorical locations – the geopolitics of knowledge. A course in
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modern science and knowledges of nature for example might be organized around the history of energy
from the 19th century to the present. Teachers and students would learn to recognize the power
relations intertwined with modern knowledge, or how school subjects and knowledge disciplines are
embedded within the body and geo-politics of the modern world order. ¶ Modernity/(de)coloniality is
an alternative macro-narrative to Eurocentric modernity that can orient an intercultural curriculum
within a pluriversal ethos grounded in historical experiences. Modernity/(de)coloniality is an
epistemic and macro-narrative shift in the modern interpretive horizon that includes the experiences
and knowledge of those who have been marginalized within modernity. This is not a new abstract
universality, but an opening up to and learning from the pluri-versality eclipsed by the projections of
Euro-American universality over the past five hundred years. Differences in ways of knowing and being
are universal or world-wide, and education, if it claims to be about learning and understanding the
“real” world, should not be contained by one dominant cultural projection that delimits learning about
ourselves and the world for violent instrumental global designs (Jensen, 2006).
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Latin America – Alternative Term
The history behind the term ‘Latin America’ should not be forgotten, it homogenizes
the identities of everyone home to and now living there. We endorse the phrase ‘Afroindo-iberoamérica’ as an inclusive and historically conscious term.
Tarver, Arkansas Tech Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, 4
(H. Micheal, Ph.D., Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, Professor of History, Arkansas Tech, Fall
2004, World History Association, “World History Bulletin”,
http://www.thewha.org/bulletins/fall_2004.pdf, Accessed 7/8/13, NC)
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 commission, it was proclaimed that ‘Latin America’
was an unreal concept, but one that turned out extremely useful and the discussion stopped.26
In brief, the name ‘Latin America’ has become a cultural concept loaded not only with history, but with
conflicts, differences, homogenizations, similarities, that speak about the complexity of a historical
configuration that cannot be diluted in its thoughtless use as an analytical category or just an
intellectual tool. As Nestor García Canclini has shown, Latin America has always been a “hybrid
construction, in which contributions from European Mediterranean countries, Indigenous peoples, and
African migrations have met.”27 And this constitutive fusion enlarges with the English-speaking world.
This is demonstrated by the huge presence of immigrants and Latin cultural products in the United States
and the rest of the world.
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Perm Debate
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AT: Perm – Do Both
Cannot simply “add” other knowledges, only the alt alone can effectively challenge
the foundations of colonial systems of domination
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”, jstor, accessed 7/7/13, sbl, p. 528-29)
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 dialogues with other cultures and other forms of
knowledge. Apart from epistemological rigidities and the overwhelming burden of institutional and
academic inertia, the main obstacles are political. The possibilities for democratic communications are
severely limited by the profound differences of power that exist today between different cultures and
between different peoples.
Perm fails – normalizing the function of liberal society makes any counterrevolution
fail
Lander, Latin American Social Science Council, 2 (Edgardo, “Eurocentrism, Modern
Knowledges, and the “Natural Order of Global Capital” Nepantla: Views from South Volume 3, Issue 2,
2002, pg. 247 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nep/summary/v003/3.2lander.html, date accessed 7/4/13
IGM)
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Third, by ignoring the colonial/imperial relationships between peoples and cultures—ones that made
the modern world-system possible— Eurocentric knowledge understands modernity to be an internal
product of European genius, owing nothing to the rest of the world (Coronil 1997, 2000). Similarly, the
current condition of the other peoples of the planet is seen as having no connection to the
colonial/imperial experience. Their present status of “backwardness” and “poverty” is the result,
rather, of insufficient capitalist development. Instead of being seen as the products of modern
experience, such conditions are interpreted as being symptoms of the absence of modernity. We are
therefore dealing with a history that dehistoricizes and conceals the constitutive relationships of the
modern colonial world-system (Coronil 1997, 2000; Mignolo 2000a, 2000b; Quijano 2000).
Fourth, proceeding from the basic assumptions of Eurocentrism, liberal society is assumed as the
natural order of things. Once former “primitive” or “backward” historical phases are overcome, the
particular historical experience of liberal capitalist society and the liberal worldview are ontologized
as the “normal” state of society. In this way, possessive individualism (Macpherson 1970), the
separation of the fields of collective life (political, social, cultural, economic), and a conception of
wealth and the good life unilaterally associated with the accumulation of material goods
characteristic of liberal society are transformed into a universal standard for judging the deficiencies,
backwardness, or poverty of the rest of the peoples and cultures of the planet.
It follows from the hegemony of this articulated body of assumptions that the main transformational
practices of the contemporary world— including the globalization of markets and of financial
movement, the politics of deregulation and opening, as well as structural adjustment and the
dismantling of state social policies—are simply adaptations to “technological transformations,” or new
conditions created for “globalization.” These conditions are understood to be a new stage of “modern”
or “postmodern” society. Given the common sense established by the hegemony of liberal thought,
these practices are inevitably assumed to represent the course of natural history. In the analyses and
debates surrounding these practices, the players, along with their interests, strategies, contradictions,
and oppositions, disappear. The most powerful effect of the naturalization of social practices is its
effectiveness in clouding the power relationships underlying the hegemonic tendencies of
globalization.
Perm fails – each policy towards the region serves to reinforce Eurocentrism as
dominant
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)
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
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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 self-consciousness. 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 omissions—
compensatory 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, they
do nothing to overcome the marginalization of the history of Latin America in the field of world
history.
Bringing back any previous method for studies of Latin America will fail. Only
completely rejecting these frameworks allows for a new and fair assessment of how
we view Latin America
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)
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.
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The plague of Eurocentric knowledge implicates the entirety of our knowledge base by
constructing false binaries, this means the Alt comes before all other action and you
don’t get the perm
Alcoff, CUNY Philosopher, 7
(Linda Martín, Philosopher at the City University of New York who specializes in epistemology, feminism,
race theory and existentialism,She is currently the president of the APA, Eastern Division, 2007,
“Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality”, http://waltermignolo.com/wpcontent/uploads/2013/03/Alcoff-Mignolo-7.3.alcoff.pdf, Pages 86-87, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
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 Quijano’s 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.
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AT: Perm – Do Both (Decolonizing Knowledge Alt)
Simply talking about colonialism or adding more scholars to the discussion isn’t
enough. Debating about decolonization at the level of knowledge production is key –
leads to academic spill over
Foneseca and Jerrems, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid graduate students, 12
Melody, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Ari, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, June 2012, “Why
Decolonise International Relations Theory?”, Pg. 3-4,
http://academia.edu/1631024/Why_Decolonise_IR_theory, JB)
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 racist practices undertaken by states and individuals"."1 To counter this he proposes Du Bois' color
line as an initial approach to the study of racism as an international institution. Vitalis understands that
"his views on the 'race concepf expressed, over time, a growing understanding of what we now mean
when we say that the idea of race itself is a social construction".12
In summary, the decolonisation of IR may not simply be achieved by including the histories of others
or by adding certain scholars to the mainstream. It must critique the Western canon's point of
enunciation in order to open a space for understandings from different comprehensions,
temporalities, spaces, concepts of governance, human rights and democracy. On one hand, it must
challenge modern international structures, while, on the other hand, claim the means to produce
knowledge, to dialogue about that which has been excluded. Decolonial Thinking offers a number of
valuable tools to build on this critique. Here we will focus on one key elements; the coloniality of
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power. We will address coloniality via three guiding questions. Firstly (I), we will discuss coloniality and
ask if the involvement of the whole world in International Relations after decolonisation led to the
decolonisation of power relations. Secondly (II), we will analyse whether decolonisation has radically
changed the objectives of IR theory. Finally (III), to conclude, we will briefly discuss how coloniality is still
found in power relations in the Post-Cold War era.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 112
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AT: Perm Doublebind
Inclusion of the plan disrupts the alternative, must refuse the Aff as act is rupturing
Eurocentric colonialism
Miguel, U of Glasgow Masters in Human Rights and International Politics, 9
(Vinicius Valentin Raduan, Masters in Human Rights and International Politics, University of Glasgow,
2009, Political Affairs, “Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Latin America”,
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/colonialism-and-underdevelopment-in-latin-america/, Accessed 7/5/13,
IGM)
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 .
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 113
Eurocentrism K
AT: Perm – Universalism DA
The permutation is merely another form of Western “Universalism”. This is a desire to
destroy singularities. The impact is racism and bare life.
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)
Neoliberalism and postmodernism are two of the prevailing theoretical influences in contemporary Latin
American social sciences. From the point of view of the tensions referred to earlier, neoliberalism has
an unequivocal content. It is a dogmatic reaffirmation of lineal conceptions of universal progress and
the “imaginary of development.” It assumes the central countries as models toward which all must
inexorably turn. Neoliberalism reaffirms a colonial perspective in which the only significant subjects
are those with roles in the modernizing project: entrepreneurs, technocrats, middle-class
neighborhood associations, and other members of a mythological civil society. The indifference toward
“others” who cannot find a place in this utopia of market and liberal democracy suggests the presence
of vestiges of the fundamental racism characteristic of all colonial thought. The most deplorable
assumptions on the sociology of modernization have been taken up with renewed devotion. From the
perspective of the imaginary of modernity, all differences are redefined as obstacles to be overcome. On
the other hand, such modern values as equity and autonomy become archaic, obsolete. In this
radicalization of Western “universalism,” all historical singularity disappears. International financial
experts can jump from country to country and indistinctly advise Russia, Poland, or Bolivia on the virtues
of the market. Economics is a science; the places, people, and customs with which it operates are
accidents of minor importance compared to the universality of its objective laws.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 114
Eurocentrism K
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 it usually guaranteed immediate and generous US support. Herman sums the situation up
neatly: “Among Latin American elites, a peasant asking for a higher wage or a priest helping organise a
peasant cooperative is a communist. And someone going so far as to suggest land reform or a more
equitable tax system is a communist fanatic”. Hence “... peasants trying to improve themselves, priests
with the slightest humanistic proclivities, and naturally anyone trying to change the status quo, are
communist ... evil, a threat to "security", and must be treated accordingly.” (Herman, 1982, p. l56.) As
Chomsky (1986) says, “The military juntas adopt a free enterprise - blind growth model. ... Since free
enterprise-growth-profits-USA are good, anybody challenging these concepts of their consequences is
ipso facto a Communist-subversive-enemy.” Hence “... any resistance to business power and privilege
in the interests of equity ... is a National Security and police problem ... From the standpoint of the
multinationals and latifundists, this is superb doctrine: reform is equated with subversion. In the words
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 115
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of the Guatemalan Foreign Minister, Toriello, any Latin American government that exerts itself to bring
about a truly national program which affects the interests of the powerful foreign companies, in whose
hands the wealth and the basic resources in large part repose in Latin America, will be pointed out as
Communist . . . and so will be threatened with foreign intervention.“
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 116
Eurocentrism K
Answers to:
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 117
Eurocentrism K
AT: Case Outweighs
Aff claims are not “objectively true” but rather incomplete, self-serving claims within
the closed loop of Eurocentric knowledge
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”, pg. 527-228
, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
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 disciplines—
anthropology 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
organization—the capitalist market—is the “natural form of organizing production. It corresponds to
an individual universal psychology” (Wallerstein 1996,20). Its political organization—the 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
It is a colonial system of knowledge that expresses and legitimizes the modern colonial world-system.
Europe’s dominating position in the world structure of colonialism established a monopoly of the
locus of enunciation of “objective,” scientific knowledge about the modern world (Mignolo1995,329).
It is a perspective with only one subject (white, European, with the exclusion of every other subject and
every other form or style of knowledge). This leads to the naturalization of this power structure, which
comes to be explained as resulting from hierarchical differences in race, culture, or other classifying
systems, which always envision the modern West as the maximum expression of human
development. Any difference between the cultural patterns of the hegemonic powers and the rest of
the world is seen as the expression of the intrinsic inferiority of all others, or as hindrances to be
supplanted (forcefully if necessary) through the European-led civilizing or modernizing process. This
system of knowledge has proved to be long lasting and has outlived colonialism as a foundation of
today’s worldwide hegemonic structure of power (Quijano 2000).
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 118
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AT: We Have Latin American Authors
The problem isn’t about incorporating other authors, it’s about allowing for other
forms of knowledge production
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)
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 debates—free from immediate
constraints of time or financing pressures—that 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 perspective on the so-called crisis of the subject if we were to conclude that the
extermination natives, transatlantic slavery, and the subordination and exclusion of the other were
nothing more than the other face, the necessary mirror of the self, the indispensable contrasting
condition for the construction of modern identities.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 119
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AT: You said “Latin America”
We recognized that “Latin America” is a generalizing term – there is no easy
alternative and our use is contextualized by out criticism
Mabry, Professor of History Mississippi State University, 2
(Donald J., Published 2002, “Colonial Latin America”, p. iv – v,
http://historicaltextarchive.com/latin/colonial.pdf, sbl)
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 American’s 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.
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AT: Positivism
Positivism isn’t 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 difference—the awkwardness of living in a continent that is not white,
urban, cosmopolitan, and civilized—finds 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.
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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 Autónoma de Madrid, Ari, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, June 2012, “Why
Decolonise International Relations Theory?”, Pg. 2-3,
http://academia.edu/1631024/Why_Decolonise_IR_theory, JB)
In this paper we propose that the “coloniality of power”, a concept developed by Decolonial Thinking,
provides a useful tool for theorizing International Relations (IR).Decolonial Thinking is a perspective
that was conceived by a group of (mainly) Latin American academics involved in the
modernidad/colonialidad group Despite receiving little attention in IR, we argue that this approach
aids critical academics by connecting with recent literature discussing the foundational role of
colonialism. Here we will firstly recap on the body of work that has been emerging in the discipline
before exploring how the coloniality of power allows us to conceptualize the material and ideational
residues of colonialism. We will pay particular attention to the coloniality of historical and contemporary
IR theory. Through this analysis we high light that despite the end of official colonization there has been
a continuation of coloniality.
Since the mid-1980s numerous critical voices have challenged traditional IR theory by drawing on
Feminist, Neo-Marxist, Poststructuralist, Postcolonial and Frankfurt School theories. These theorisations
have gained greater influence after the end of the Cold War. Decolonial Thinking is of most relevance
to these approaches and to the growing number of theorists who, over the last decade, have focused on
the “coloniality” problem. These scholars have analysed how the Eurocentric origins of the discipline
have led, not only to the exclusion of knowledge from the non-Western world, but also, a general
amnesia and ignorance about imperialism, colonialism, and racism.
Critical researchers have sought to unearth a wide range of issues that have been silenced. As
Branwen G. Jones has pointed out, “how is it possible that IR has paid so little attention to race,
colonialism, and imperialism, to the intertwined nature of the histories of the West and ‘the rest’?”
Authors underline the importance of being able to “find a way of engaging with –rather than ignoring –
non-Western political thought in a manner that is not beholden to colonial ideologies that drain the
non-Western world of all significant content for the study of a modernity that is now, and perhaps was
always, integrally global.” This is particularly relevant if, as we suggest, the knowledge and imaginaries
produced in the discipline are reflected in global politics: from securitization to governability or local
reproductions of violence. Scholars have also begun to question who the subjects of IR are. Meera
Sabaratnam has argued, “[t]he notion of ‘dialogue’[…] requires that we ask questions about their
identities, horizons and interests, and indeed how these are situated within the world of practice and
action, rather than presuming homogeneity of interest and a common purpose to inquiry.”
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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=ht
tp%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings%2FUnthinkingEurocentri
smIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjCNGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6W
nFAZPF8pes3AW7uu-HLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
Our critique of Eurocentrism is addressed not to Europeans as individuals but rather to dominant
Europe’s historically oppressive relation to its internal and external "others." We are in no way
suggesting, obviously, that non-European people are somehow “better” than Europeans, or that Third
World and minoritarian cultures are inherently superior. There is no inborn tendency among
Europeans to commit genocide, as some "ice people" theorists would suggest - such theories merely
colonialist demonizations - nor are indigenous or Third World peoples innately noble and generous. Nor
do we believe in the inverted European narcissism that posits Europe as the source of all social evils in
the world. Such an approach remains Eurocentric ("Europe exhibiting its own unacceptability in front of
an anti-ethnocentric mirror," in Derrida's words) and also exempts Third world patriarchal elites from
all responsibility.7 Such "victimology" reduces non-European life to a pathological response to
Western penetration. It merely turns colonilialist claims upside down. Rather than saying that "we"
(that is, the West) have brought "them" civilization, it claims instead that everywhere "we" have
brought diabolical evil, and everywhere "their" enfeebled societies have succumbed to "our" insidious
influence. The vision remains Promethean, but here Prometheus has brought not fire but the Holocaust,
reproducing what Barbara Christian calls the "West's outlandish claim to have invented everything,
including Evil."8 Our focus here, in any case, is less on intentions than on institutional discourses, less
on "goodness" and "badness" than on historically configured relations of power. The question, as Talal
Asad puts it, is not "how far Europeans have been guilty and Third World inhabitants innocent but,
rather, how far the criteria by which guilt and innocence are determined have been historically
constituted."9 The word "Eurocentric" sometimes provokes apoplectic reactions because it is taken as a
synonym for "racist." But although Eurocentrism and racism are historically intertwined - for example,
the erasure of Africa as historical subject reinforces racism against African-Americans - they are in no
way equatable, for the simple reason that Eurocentrism is the "normal" consensus view of history that
most First Worlders and even many Third Worlders learn at school and imbibe from the media. As a
result of this normalizing operation, it is quite possible to be antiracist at both a conscious and a
practical level, and still be Eurocentric. Eurocentrism is an implicit positioning rather than a conscious
political stance; people do not announce themselves as Eurocentric any more than sexist men go
around saying: "Hi. I'm Joe. I'm a phallocrat." This point is often misunderstood, as in David Rieff s
breathless claim that "there is no business establishment any more that is committed ... to notions of
European superiority."10 But corporate executives are the last people who need consciously to worry
about European superiority; it is enough that they inherit the structures and perspectives bequeathed
by centuries of European domination.
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AT: Eurocentrism good – Democracy/Science/Progress
Eurocentrism has hid behind terms like “democracy” “science” and “progress”, but
this is nothing more than a historical contradiction hiding behind cultural genocide
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)
Although generated by the colonizing process, Eurocentrism's links to that process are obscured in a
kind of buried epistemology.
Eurocentric discourse is complex, contradictory, historically unstable. But in a kind of composite
portrait, Eurocentrism as a mode of thought might be seen as engaging in a number of mutually
reinforcing intellectual tendencies or operations:
1. Eurocentric discourse projects a linear historical trajectory leading from classical Greece
(constructed as "pure," "Western," and "democratic") to imperial Rome and then to the metropolitan
capitals of Europe and the US. It renders history as a sequence of empires: Pax Romana, Pax Hispanica,
Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. In all cases, Europe, alone and unaided, is seen as the "motor" for
progressive historical change: it invents class society, feudalism, capitalism, the industrial revolution.
2. Eurocentrism attributes to the "West" an inherent progress toward democratic institutions
(Torquemada, Mussolini, and Hitler must be seen as aberrations within this logic of historical amnesia
and selective legitimation).
3. Eurocentrism elides non-European democratic traditions, while obscuring the manipulations
embedded in Western formal democracy and masking the West's part in subverting democracies
abroad.
Eurocentrism minimizes the West's oppressive practices by regarding them as contingent, accidental,
exceptional. Colonialism, slave-trading, and imperialism are not seen as fundamental catalysts of the
West's disproportionate power.
Eurocentrism appropriates the cultural and material production of non-Europeans while denying both
their achievements and its own appropriation, thus consolidating its sense of self and glorifying its
own cultural anthropophagy. The West, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett puts it, "separates forms from
their performers, converts those forms into influences, brings those influences into the center, leaves
the living sources on the margin, and pats itself on the back for being so cosmopolitan."6
In sum, Eurocentrism sanitizes Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West;
it thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements - science, progress, humanism - but of the nonWest in terms of its deficiencies, real or imagined.
The knowledge production and discourse of the 1AC by affirming things like
“hegemony” “globalization” and “empire” is one plagued colonial oversight whose
end point is the eradication of supposedly different epistemologies
Guardiola-Rivera, U of London Senior Law Lecturer, 2
(Oscar, Senior lecturer in law at Birkbeck, University of London, 2002, Nepantla: Views from South 3.1,
“In State of Grace: Ideology, Capitalism, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge”
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/v003/3.1guardiola-rivera.pdf, pages 15-38, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 124
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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/v003/3.1guardiolarivera.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 enterprise—the 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.
Their evidence doesn’t assume all parts of history – Eurocentrism has allowed for
racism, inequalities and continued cultural homogenization
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=ht
tp%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings%2FUnthinkingEurocentri
smIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjCNGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6W
nFAZPF8pes3AW7uu-HLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
Rather than attacking Europe per se, an anti-Eurocentric multiculturalism, in our view, relativizes
Europe, seeing it as a geographical fiction that flattens the cultural diversity even of Europe itself.
Europe has always had its own peripheralized regions and stigmatized communities (Jews, Irish,
Gypsies, Huguenots, Muslims, peasants, women, gays/lesbians). Nor do we endorse a Europhobic
attitude; our own text invokes European thinkers and concepts. That we emphasize the "underside" of
European history does not mean we do not recognize an "overside" of scientific, artistic, and political
achievement. And since Eurocentrism is a historically situated discourse and not a genetic inheritance,
Europeans can be anti-Eurocentric, just as non-Europeans can be Eurocentric. Europe has always
spawned its own critics of empire. Some of the European cultural figures most revered by today's
neoconservatives, ironically, themselves condemned colonialism. Samuel Johnson, the very archetype of
the neoclassical conservative, wrote in 1759 that "Europeans have scarcely visited any coast but to
gratify avarice, and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without right and practice cruelty without
incentive."11 Even Adam Smith, the patron saint of capitalism, wrote in his Wealth of Nations (1776)
that for the natives of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits resulting from the
discovery of America "have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have
occasioned."12 Yet when contemporary multiculturalists make the same points, they are accused of
"Europe-bashing."13 Or the critiques are acknowledged, but then turned into a compliment to Europe,
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 125
Eurocentrism K
in a kind of "fallback position" for Euro-narcissism: "Yes, Europe did all those cruel things, but then, only
Europe has the virtue of being self-critical." Eurocentric thinking, in our view, is fundamentally
unrepresentative of a world which has long been multicultural. At times, even multiculturalists glimpse
the issues through a narrowly national and exceptionalist grid, as when well-meaning curriculum
committees call for courses about the "contributions" of the world's diverse cultures to the
"development of American society," unaware of the nationalistic teleology underlying such a
formulation. "Multiculturedness" is not a "United Statesian" monopoly, nor is multiculturalism the
"handmaiden" of US identity politics.14 Virtually all countries and regions are multicultural in a purely
descriptive sense. Egypt melds Pharaonic, Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Christian/Coptic, and Mediterranean
influences; India is riotously plural in language and religion; and Mexico's "cosmic race" mingles at
least three major constellations of cultures. Nor is North American multiculturalism of recent date.
"America" began as polyglot and multicultural, speaking a myriad of languages: European, and Native
American.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 126
Eurocentrism K
AT: West is Best
The view of Latin America as irrational and instable stems from the Eurocentric view
of Europe as the Supreme Being and the East as inferior, Latin America isn’t labeled as
the East or European, but rather is painted as primitive and basic. Vote Neg to reject
this ethnocentric perspective in favor of a new epistemological view.
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)
The success of Western Europe in becoming the center of the modern world-system, according to
Wallerstein’s 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-à-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/mythicscientific, irrational-rational, 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 “Orient”—not 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 over the
world. It would not be possible to explain the elaboration of Eurocentrism as the hegemonic perspective
of knowledge otherwise. The Eurocentric version is based on two principal founding myths: first, the
idea of the history of human civilization as a trajectory that departed from a state of nature and
culminated in Europe; second, a view of the differences between Europe and non-Europe as
natural(racial) differences and not consequences of a history of power. Both myths can be
unequivocally recognized in the foundations of evolutionism and dualism, two of the nuclear elements
of Eurocentrism.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 127
Eurocentrism K
AT: West is Best – Science Impacts
Eurocentrism creates false binaries and divorces forms of knowledge production –in
order to truly stray from a Eurocentric epistemological frame we must reorganize our
systems of knowledge production and epistemology reproduction structure
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.)
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 the separation of the quest for the true and the quest
for the good and the beautiful. Indeed, it was not all that easy to enshrine this divorce within the
geoculture of the modern world-system. It took three centuries before the split was institutionalized.
Today, however, it is fundamental to the geoculture, and forms the basis of our university systems.¶ This
conceptual split has enabled the modern world to put forward the bizarre concept of the value-neutral
specialist, whose objective assessments of reality could form the basis not merely of engineering
decisions (in the broadest sense of the term) but of socio-political choices as well. Shielding the
scientists from collective assessment, and in effect merging them into the technocrats, did liberate
scientists from the dead hand of intellectually irrelevant authority. But simultaneously, it removed from
the major underlying social decisions we have been taking for the last 500 years from substantive (as
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 128
Eurocentrism K
opposed to technical) scientific debate. The idea that science is over here and socio-political decisions
are over there is the core concept that sustains Eurocentrism, since the only universalist propositions
that have been acceptable are those which are Eurocentric. Any argument that reinforces this
separation of the two cultures thus sustains Eurocentrism. If one denies the specificity of the modern
world, one has no plausie way of arguing for the reconstruction of knowledge structures, and
therefore no plausible way of arriving at intelligent and substantively rational alternatives to the
existing world-system.¶ In the last twenty years or so, the legitimacy of this divorce has been challenged
for the first time in a significant way. This is the meaning of the ecology movement, for example. And
this is the underlying central issue in the public attack on Eurocentrism. The challenges have resulted in
so-called "science wars" and "culture wars," which have themselves often been obscurantist and
obfuscating. If we are to emerge with a reunited, and thereby non-Eurocentric, structure of
knowledge, it is absolutely essential that we not be diverted into sidepaths that avoid this central
issue. If we are to construct an alternative world-system to the one that is today in grievous crisis, we
must treat simultaneously and inextricably the issues of the true and the good.¶ And if we are to do that
we have to recognize that somethin special was indeed done by Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth
centuries that did indeed transform the world, but in a direction whose negative consequences are upon
us today. We must cease trying to deprive Europe of its specificity on the deluded premise that we are
thereby depriving it of an illegitimate credit. Quite the contrary. We must fully acknowledge the
particularity of Europe's reconstruction of the world because only then will it be possible to transcend
it, and to arrive hopefully at a more inclusively universalist vision of human possibility, one that avoids
none of the difficult and imbricated problems of pursuing the true and the good in tandem.
Eurocentric Discourse is inherently bad- it washes away cultures and paints the “nonwest” as the villains. Using the alternative to reshape the focus is key
Shohat, New York University Professor of Cultural Studies and Stam New York
Professor of French Filmmaking, 97 (Ella, Robert, 1997, Routledge, Unthinking Eurocentrism:
Multiculturalism and the Media, page 60, ,”
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAB&url=ht
tp%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings%2FUnthinkingEurocentri
smIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjCNGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6W
nFAZPF8pes3AW7uu-HLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, accessed 7-7-13 KR)
Eurocentrism first emerged as a discursive rationale for colonialism, the process by which the
European powers reached positions of hegemony in much of the world. Indeed, J.M. Blaut calls
Eurocentrism "the colonizer's model of the world."5 As an ideological substratum common to
colonialist, imperialist, and racist discourse, Eurocentrism is a form of vestigial thinking which
permeates and structures contemporary practices and representations even after the formal end of
colonialism. Although colonialist discourse and Eurocentric discourse are intimately intertwined, the
terms have a distinct emphasis. While the former explicitly justifies colonialist practices, the latter
embeds, takes for granted, and "normalizes" the hierarchical power relations generated by colonialism
and imperialism, without necessarily even thematizing those issues directly.
Although generated by the colonizing process, Eurocentrism's links to that process are obscured in a
kind of buried epistemology.
Eurocentric discourse is complex, contradictory, historically unstable. But in a kind of composite
portrait, Eurocentrism as a mode of thought might be seen as engaging in a number of mutually
reinforcing intellectual tendencies or operations:
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 129
Eurocentrism K
1. Eurocentric discourse projects a linear historical trajectory leading from classical Greece
(constructed as "pure," "Western," and "democratic") to imperial Rome and then to the metropolitan
capitals of Europe and the US. It renders history as a sequence of empires: Pax Romana, Pax Hispanica,
Pax Britannica. Pax Americana. In all cases, Europe, alone and unaided, is seen as the "motor" for
progressive historical change: it invents class society, feudalism, capitalism, the industrial revolution.
2. Eurocentrism attributes to the "West" an inherent progress toward democratic institutions
(Torquemada, Mussolini, and Hitler must be seen as aberrations within this logic of historical amnesia
and selective legitimation).
3. Eurocentrism elides non-European democratic traditions, while obscuring the manipulations
embedded in Western formal democracy and masking the West's part in subverting democracies
abroad.
Eurocentrism minimizes the West's oppressive practices by regarding them as contingent, accidental,
exceptional. Colonialism, slave-trading, and imperialism are not seen as fundamental catalysts of the
West's disproportionate power.
Eurocentrism appropriates the cultural and material production of non-Europeans while denying both
their achievements and its own appropriation, thus consolidating its sense of self and glorifying its
own cultural anthropophagy. The West, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett puts it, "separates forms from
their performers, converts those forms into influences, brings those influences into the center, leaves
the living sources on the margin, and pats itself on the back for being so cosmopolitan."6
In sum, Eurocentrism sanitizes Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West;
it thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements - science, progress, humanism - but of the nonWest in terms of its deficiencies, real or imagined.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 130
Eurocentrism K
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)
Rather than attacking Europe per se, an anti-Eurocentric multiculturalism, in our view, relativizes
Europe, seeing it as a geographical fiction that flattens the cultural diversity even of Europe itself.
Europe has always had its own peripheralized regions and stigmatized communities (Jews, Irish, Gypsies,
Huguenots, Muslims, peasants, women, gays/lesbians). Nor do we endorse a Europhobic attitude; our
own text invokes European thinkers and concepts. That we emphasize the "underside" of European
history does not mean we do not recognize an "overside" of scientific, artistic, and political
achievement. And since Eurocentrism is a historically situated discourse and not a genetic inheritance,
Europeans can be anti-Eurocentric, just as non-Europeans can be Eurocentric. Europe has always
spawned its own critics of empire. Some of the European cultural figures most revered by today's
neoconservatives, ironically, themselves condemned colonialism. Samuel Johnson, the very archetype
of the neoclassical conservative, wrote in 1759 that "Europeans have scarcely visited any coast but to
gratify avarice, and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without right and practice cruelty without
incentive."11 Even Adam Smith, the patron saint of capitalism, wrote in his Wealth of Nations (1776)
that for the natives of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits resulting from the
discovery of America "have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have
occasioned."12 Yet when contemporary multiculturalists make the same points, they are accused of
"Europe-bashing."13 Or the critiques are acknowledged, but then turned into a compliment to Europe,
in a kind of "fallback position" for Euro-narcissism: "Yes, Europe did all those cruel things, but then,
only Europe has the virtue of being self-critical."
Eurocentric thinking, in our view, is fundamentally unrepresentative of a world which has long been
multicultural. At times, even multiculturalists glimpse the issues through a narrowly national and
exceptionalist grid, as when well-meaning curriculum committees call for courses about the
"contributions" of the world's diverse cultures to the "development of American society," unaware of
the nationalistic teleology underlying such a formulation. "Multiculturedness" is not a "United
Statesian" monopoly, nor is multiculturalism the "handmaiden" of US identity politics.14 Virtually all
countries and regions are multicultural in a purely descriptive sense. Egypt melds Pharaonic, Arab,
Muslim, Jewish, Christian/Coptic, and Mediterranean influences; India is riotously plural in language and
religion; and Mexico's "cosmic race" mingles at least three major constellations of cultures. Nor is North
American multiculturalism of recent date. "America" began as polyglot and multicultural, speaking a
myriad of languages: European, and Native American.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 131
Eurocentrism K
This isn’t a critique of Europeans, but a critique of Europe’s historical dominance of
the world. The solution to Eurocentrism isn’t violent revolt but an act of multicultural
becoming in which we all recognize that our cultures exist on an equal plane –
acknowledgement that no race is right is to key overcoming violence in the status quo
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. 2-4, JB)
As a work of adversary scholarship, Unthinking Eurocentrism critiques the universalization of
Eurocentric norms, the idea that any race, in Aimé Césaire's words, "holds a monopoly on beauty,
intelligence, and strength." Our critique of Eurocentrism is addressed not to Europeans as individuals
but rather to dominant Europe’s historically oppressive relation to its internal and external "others."
We are in no way suggesting, obviously, that non-European people are somehow “better” than
Europeans, or that Third World and minoritarian cultures are inherently superior. There is no inborn
tendency among Europeans to commit genocide, as some "ice people" theorists would suggest - such
theories merely colonialist demonizations - nor are indigenous or Third World peoples innately noble
and generous. Nor do we believe in the inverted European narcissism that posits Europe as the source
of all social evils in the world. Such an approach remains Eurocentric ("Europe exhibiting its own
unacceptability in front of an anti-ethnocentric mirror," in Derrida's words) and also exempts Third
world patriarchal elites from all responsibility.7 Such "victimology" reduces non-European life to a
pathological response to Western penetration. It merely turns colonilialist claims upside down. Rather
than saying that "we" (that is, the West) have brought "them" civilization, it claims instead that
everywhere "we" have brought diabolical evil, and everywhere "their" enfeebled societies have
succumbed to "our" insidious influence. The vision remains Promethean, but here Prometheus has
brought not fire but the Holocaust, reproducing what Barbara Christian calls the "West's outlandish
claim to have invented everything, including Evil."8 Our focus here, in any case, is less on intentions
than on institutional discourses, less on "goodness" and "badness" than on historically configured
relations of power. The question, as Talal Asad puts it, is not "how far Europeans have been guilty and
Third World inhabitants innocent but, rather, how far the criteria by which guilt and innocence are
determined have been historically constituted."9
The word "Eurocentric" sometimes provokes apoplectic reactions because it is taken as a synonym for
"racist." But although Eurocentrism and racism are historically intertwined - for example, the erasure of
Africa as historical subject reinforces racism against African-Americans - they are in no way equatable,
for the simple reason that Eurocentrism is the "normal" consensus view of history that most First
Worlders and even many Third Worlders learn at school and imbibe from the media. As a result of this
normalizing operation, it is quite possible to be antiracist at both a conscious and a practical level, and
still be Eurocentric. Eurocentrism is an implicit positioning rather than a conscious political stance;
people do not announce themselves as Eurocentric any more than sexist men go around saying: "Hi. I'm
Joe. I'm a phallocrat." This point is often misunderstood, as in David Rieff s breathless claim that "there
is no business establishment any more that is committed ... to notions of European superiority."10 But
corporate executives are the last people who need consciously to worry about European superiority; it is
enough that they inherit the structures and perspectives bequeathed by centuries of European
domination.
Rather than attacking Europe per se, an anti-Eurocentric multiculturalism, in our view, relativizes
Europe, seeing it as a geographical fiction that flattens the cultural diversity even of Europe itself.
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 132
Eurocentrism K
Europe has always had its own peripheralized regions and stigmatized communities (Jews, Irish,
Gypsies, Huguenots, Muslims, peasants, women, gays/lesbians). Nor do we endorse a Europhobic
attitude; our own text invokes European thinkers and concepts. That we emphasize the "underside" of
European history does not mean we do not recognize an "overside" of scientific, artistic, and political
achievement. And since Eurocentrism is a historically situated discourse and not a genetic inheritance,
Europeans can be anti-Eurocentric, just as non-Europeans can be Eurocentric. Europe has always
spawned its own critics of empire. Some of the European cultural figures most revered by today's
neoconservatives, ironically, themselves condemned colonialism. Samuel Johnson, the very archetype
of the neoclassical conservative, wrote in 1759 that "Europeans have scarcely visited any coast but to
gratify avarice, and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without right and practice cruelty without
incentive."11 Even Adam Smith, the patron saint of capitalism, wrote in his Wealth of Nations (1776)
that for the natives of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits resulting from the
discovery of America "have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have
occasioned."12 Yet when contemporary multiculturalists make the same points, they are accused of
"Europe-bashing."13 Or the critiques are acknowledged, but then turned into a compliment to Europe,
in a kind of "fallback position" for Euro-narcissism: "Yes, Europe did all those cruel things, but then, only
Europe has the virtue of being self-critical."
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 133
Eurocentrism K
AT: Zizek – the leftist plea for Eurocentrism
Zizek’s cannot avoid globalization – it’s ignorant of non-Western parts of history
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. 87-90, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, 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 world-system (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
United States increasingly emerges as the universal model. At this point Zizek compares the United
States with the Roman Empire and Christianity: "The first centuries of our era saw the opposition of the
global ‘multicultural' Roman empire and Christianity, which posed such a threat to the empire precisely
on account of its universal appeal." There is another perspective from the past that could be taken:
France, an imperial European country, and the United States, a decolonized country that takes a leading
role in a new process of colonization. This perspective emphasizes the spatial order of the
modern/colonial world-system instead of the linear narrative that Zizek invokes by going back to the
Roman Empire and locating it in "the first century of our era." To whose era is he referring? This is not
an era that can be [End Page 88] claimed without hesitation by Wallerstein, Quijano, or Dussel, for
example, not to mention American Indian and African American intellectuals. However, what matters
here is that in Zizek's argument, what is really being threatened by globalization is "universality itself, in
its eminently political dimension." The consequences, manifested in several contradictory arguments
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 134
Eurocentrism K
and actions, are countered by Zizek with a strong claim for sustaining the political (struggle) in place of
the depoliticization that is the challenge globalization poses to universality. Here is Zizek's triumphal
claim of the "true European legacy": "Against this end-of-ideology politics, one should insist on the
potential of democratic politicization as the true European legacy from ancient Greece onwards. Will we
be able to invent a new mode of repoliticization questioning the undisputed reign of global capital? Only
such a repoliticization of OUR predicament can break the vicious cycle of liberal globalization destined to
engender the most regressive forms of fundamentalist hatred." 85 Zizek here identifies the "true
European legacy," and a few pages earlier he refers to "the fundamental European legacy." However, at
the end of the paragraph just quoted, he alludes to "forms of fundamentalist hatred" as if the
"fundamental European legacy" were excused and excluded from any form of "fundamentalism." Zizek's
plea totally ignores the colonial difference and blindly reproduces the belief that whatever happened in
Greece belongs to a European legacy that was built during and after the Renaissance—that is, at the
inception of the Atlantic commercial circuit and the modern/colonial world. In fact, all the examples
Zizek quotes in his arguments are consequences of the emergence, transformation, and consolidation of
the modern/colonial world (the formation and transformation of capitalism and occidentalism as the
modern/colonial world imaginary). 86 However, Zizek reproduces the macronarrative of Western
civilization (from ancient Greece to the current North Atlantic) and casts out the macronarrative of the
modern/colonial world in which the conflict between globalization and universality emerged. Since he
does not see beyond the linear narrative of Western civilization, he also cannot see that "diversality"
rather than universality is the future alternative to globalization.
Let me explain. I see two problematic issues in Zizek's proposal. One is that Greece is only a European
legacy, not a planetary one. If we agree that solutions for contemporary dilemmas could be found in
Greek moral and political philosophy, we cannot naturally assume that "from Greece onwards" is
linked only to the European legacy. The first issue here would be [End Page 89] to de-link the Greek
contribution to human civilization from the modern (from the Renaissance on, from the inception of the
modern/colonial world) contribution. Thus the Greek legacy could be reappropriated by the
Arabic/Islamic world, which introduced Greece to Europe, and also by other legacies—Chinese, Indian,
sub-Saharan African, or American Indian and Creole in Latin America and the Caribbean—that do not
exist as a European legacy but as a discontinuity of the classical tradition. 87 One of the consequences
of this perspective would be "diversality," that is, diversity as a universal project, rather than the
reinscription of a "new abstract universal project" such as Zizek proposes. I no longer feel like enrolling
(or requesting membership) in a new abstract universal project that claims a fundamental European
legacy. I assume that there are several good alternatives to the increasing threat of globalization, and
of course the fundamental European legacy is one of them. I am not talking about relativism, of course. I
am talking about diversality, a project that is an alternative to universality and offers the possibilities
of a network of planetary confrontations with globalization in the name of justice, equity, human
rights, and epistemic diversality. The geopolitics of knowledge shows us the limits of any abstract
universal, even from the left, be it the planetarization of the social sciences or a new planetarization of a
European fundamental legacy in the name of democracy and repoliticization.
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Framework
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Framework is Eurocentric
The alt is key to deconstruct Eurocentric frameworks – academia is a key starting point
Ucelli, founder, New York Marxist School and O’Neil, 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 Mao’s 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
contributions from non-European cultures but says that if they’re important enough, they’ll be
subsumed within the Western legacy; that the current global cultural marketplace will automatically
absorb and disseminate any new cultural products of universal validity.
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Questioning Colonialism is A Priori
Rigorously questioning a colonial epistemology is key to make room for noncolonialist activity
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)
My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a
longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping
fury that so imprison us. I have called what I try to do "humanism," a word I continue to use stubbornly
despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean
first of all attempting to dissolve Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles so as to be able to use one’s mind
historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover humanism is sustained
by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking
therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist. This it is to say that every domain is linked to
every other one, and that nothing that goes on in our world has ever been isolated and pure of any
outside influence. We need to speak about issues of injustice and suffering within a context that is
amply situated in history, culture, and socio-economic reality. Our role is to widen the field of
discussion. I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocating the rights of the
Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention
paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The
paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane
goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that
Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore it would seem to be a vital
necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the simplifying and
confining ones based on mutual hostility that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so
long.
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Latin American Critical Analysis Key
Widening debates to talk about the perspectives from other countries is key to
devising a new knowledge base, even when talking from the perspective of privilege
targeted change is possible.
Tarver, Arkansas Tech Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, 4
(H. Micheal, Ph.D., Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, Professor of History, Arkansas Tech, Fall
2004, World History Association, “World History Bulletin”,
http://www.thewha.org/bulletins/fall_2004.pdf, Accessed 7/8/13, NC)
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 America’s 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 naïf 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 studies, its problem is not simply to accumulate layers of knowledge about different and new parts
of the world. It is necessary to have schemes that allow locating regional histories in larger
establishments. And this implies necessarily revisiting certain conceptual devices, widening the debate
to other countries and by means of that being more reflexive about the implications of the tools used
to make world history possible.
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AT: USFG Focus Good
Must rethink state monopolization of politics & power
Park, University of Oklahoma and Wilkins, Univerity of Texas, 5
(Jane, Univ. of Oklahoma, Karin, Univ of Texas @ Austin, Global Media Journal, “Re-orienting the
Orientalist Gaze”, http://lass.purduecal.edu/cca/gmj/sp05/gmj-sp05-park-wilkins.htm, Accessed 7/5/13,
IGM)
By implication, the north/south and west/east divisions conventionally understood as the way to
organize national settings within a global system are now less relevant. A dominant geometry of
development (Shah & Wilkins, 2004), divides countries along political (communism in east vs.
democracy in west), economic (industrialized north vs. agricultural south), cultural (modern vs.
traditional), and hierarchical (first =west; second =east, and third=south) lines. However, the validity of
these regional distinctions should be questioned. This model has been critiqued for its ethnocentric
and arrogant vision, collapsing diverse communities with a wide range of cultural histories into
monolithic groups. More often than not, the interests of domestic elites in poorer countries are
identical to the interests of the elite in the wealthier countries. These categorizations, such as
West/East, are problematic, given rapidly shifting political-economic contexts involving changing
patterns of political and economic dominance among national actors, the strengthening of regional
institutions and identities, the globalization of economic and communication systems, and the
privatization of industries (Hagopian, 2000; Schuurman, 2000). New global categorizations may need to
focus on access to resources, whether economic, political, social or cultural, within and across
geopolitical territories. Inequity in terms of access to resources then becomes the overarching concern
(Schuurman, 2000). Although we need to foreground tangible issues related to basic human needs, the
broader concern with access to resources addresses the intangible as well, touching on social, cultural,
political and spiritual resources (Steeves, 2002). Access to resources builds from one’s position within a
socio-political network. This vision offers a more nuanced framework of power, in which networks
offer the possibility for some to reach certain goals, such as employment, education, media production,
policy making, and more. Power is not only activated within state and corporate institutions, but also
within social groups, though these networks tightly intersect. While issues of territory are still relevant,
particularly when clearly many groups, such as Palestinians, are struggling for a sovereignty rooted in
place, and nation-states are still critical actors in the global sphere (Morris & Waisbord, 2001), we need
to rethink relationships of power as partly connected with spatial arrangements (Escobar, 2000;
Escobar et al., 2002), and not just in terms of place. And when we do consider place, we may need to
attend to the critical role of regional actors and not just the US.
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AFF ANSWERS
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Link Answers
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AT: Knowledge Production
Eurocentrism is key to multicultural knowledge production- its just a locus point- it
doesn’t produce “evil” or “westernized” knowledge
O’Brien, 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, Entanglement’s and
Eurocentrism,” http://globalhistoryatlse.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/how-do-you-study-global-historycomparisons-connections-entanglements-and-eurocentrism/, Accessed: 7/6/13, LPS.)
The US is the uebermost case of a nation defined on a centred historical and ideological construct.
Anyone can become American if they sign up to this founding mythology.¶ Is Centred History good
History?¶ A centred history has flaws because it must create distinct events in order for its narrative
arc to work. However, events are not centred and so each centred history much obscure one thing
when it tries to focus on another.¶ For example, the Renaissance was only possible because the Arabs
preserved knowledge of the Ancient Greeks which Europe had lost (I almost wrote “which we lost”,
naughty). Focussing on a narrative of the Renaissance risks ignoring the rest of the world. ¶ Are all
histories equal? Some would say yes. A Global History Scholar from Malaysia attended a conference on
Global History and requested that non-Islamic scholars admit the Koran as a historical source. Is the
History of the Koran admissible?¶ What is good history? Is it a matter of the quantity of sources? The
quality of the sources provided? There are a multitude of sources on most subjects saying contrary
things, very often from very good authorities too. This way lies rampant relavatism, from which it is
difficult to learn anything.¶ The problem with centred history is that because it is highly specialised and
necessarily fragmented it risks only being able to explain itself; it becomes arcane knowledge. History as
a discourse becomes history as rhetoric. History of “exceptionalism” from American to Chinese fails to
help us explain the world.¶ Global History attempts to overcome this by being a completely
cosmopolitan exercise. Not only that but by focussing on a very long time scale it avoids the risk of being
beholden to a dominant narrative of any one historian or school of historians.¶ Comparisons,
connections, interactions and entanglements¶ Connections are important because we need to
understand the webs and flows of goods, knowledge and people between distant (in space and time)
others. This information is revealed in different channels; trade; diffusion of ideas; exchange;
encounters; dislocation; aculturation. There are also vectors that determine how these connections are
made, technological, scientific and epidemiological.¶ All history is Comparative history. With reciprocal
comparisons we can try to avoid some of the flaws of euro- and western- centric histories. Rather than
ask “why didn’t China end up like England,” we can ask “why didn’t England end up like China?” This
allows us to surmount the tyranny of local detail. It also prevents us from taking ownership of a topic
and allowing this to cloud our judgement. We can aggregate and average features over large areas
and examine their similarities and differences.¶ Interactions and entanglements also give us a way to
examine things without a centre. For example, Iberia, Southeast Asia and the US/Mexico border all give
us opportunities to look at competing narratives and identities. This is not to accept relavatism, but
rather to enable us to accept and analyse the existence of completing and complimentary identities.
Global History allows us to examine the diversity of human experience and enables us to challenge
the cultural and political enterprises of hegemony.¶ Virtues of Global History¶ It revisits common
¶
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denominators of chronology, concepts and causality across as much of time and space as possible. It
helps us to deal with the facts on the grounds while accepting diversity to avoid describing contingent
events as universal experiences.¶ This decentred history helps us to understand the process of change
rather than merely explain how we got to where we are, however narrowly or broadly “we” are defined
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Permutations
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Perm - General
Permutation do both – an approach will facilitates policy action is key to reconceptualize 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, “Re-orienting the
Orientalist Gaze”, http://lass.purduecal.edu/cca/gmj/sp05/gmj-sp05-park-wilkins.htm, accessed 7/6/13,
IGM)
By implication, the north/south and west/east divisions conventionally understood as the way to
organize national settings within a global system are now less relevant. A dominant geometry of
development (Shah & Wilkins, 2004), divides countries along political (communism in east vs.
democracy in west), economic (industrialized north vs. agricultural south), cultural (modern vs.
traditional), and hierarchical (first =west; second =east, and third=south) lines. However, the validity of
these regional distinctions should be questioned. This model has been critiqued for its ethnocentric
and arrogant vision, collapsing diverse communities with a wide range of cultural histories into
monolithic groups. More often than not, the interests of domestic elites in poorer countries are
identical to the interests of the elite in the wealthier countries. These categorizations, such as
West/East, are problematic, given rapidly shifting political-economic contexts involving changing
patterns of political and economic dominance among national actors, the strengthening of regional
institutions and identities, the globalization of economic and communication systems, and the
privatization of industries (Hagopian, 2000; Schuurman, 2000). New global categorizations may need to
focus on access to resources, whether economic, political, social or cultural, within and across
geopolitical territories. Inequity in terms of access to resources then becomes the overarching concern
(Schuurman, 2000). Although we need to foreground tangible issues related to basic human needs, the
broader concern with access to resources addresses the intangible as well, touching on social, cultural,
political and spiritual resources (Steeves, 2002). Access to resources builds from one’s position within a
socio-political network. This vision offers a more nuanced framework of power, in which networks
offer the possibility for some to reach certain goals, such as employment, education, media
production, policy making, and more. Power is not only activated within state and corporate
institutions, but also within social groups, though these networks tightly intersect. While issues of
territory are still relevant, particularly when clearly many groups, such as Palestinians, are struggling for
a sovereignty rooted in place, and nation-states are still critical actors in the global sphere (Morris &
Waisbord, 2001), we need to rethink relationships of power as partly connected with spatial
arrangements (Escobar, 2000; Escobar et al., 2002), and not just in terms of place. And when we do
consider place, we may need to attend to the critical role of regional actors and not just the US.
Permutation do both – action is a prerequisite to change. Exclusively criticizing a
problem obscures the effects of imperialism
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)
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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 Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s 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 history—assumed as universal—becomes¶ 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 world’s
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 planet’s carrying capacity.
Theory alone can’t solve – an understanding of the role of IR in creating change is key
to effective criticism
Matin, committee member of Centre for Advanced International Theory, 12 (Kamran,
European Journal of International Relations 2013 19: 353
“Redeeming the universal: Postcolonialism and the inner life of Eurocentrism”,
http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/19/2/353 pg. 355, date accessed 7/7/13 IGM)
My core argument is that there is a fundamental tension between theory and method ¶ in
postcolonialism that prevents the translation of its critique of Eurocentrism into an ¶ alternative nonethnocentric social theory. For on the one hand, postcolonialism declares ¶ macro-theoretical
agnosticism toward the social in general, which is manifest in its categorical rejection of, or deep
skepticism toward, the concept of the universal identified ¶ with Eurocentric anticipation and violent
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pursuit of global socio-cultural homogeneity. ¶ On the other hand, postcolonialism comprehends colonial
socialities in terms of their ¶ interactive constitution through a method whose strategic site of operation
is specifically ¶ the intersocietal or the international.¶ But the idea of the international logically requires
¶ a general conception of the social in general whose historical referent bursts the empirical bounds
of any notion of the social in the singular, whether society, culture, or civilization. This is for the simple
reason that the idea of the international encompasses, or rather ¶ ought to encompass, the
interconnected multiplicity of the social as an ontological property. This mutually constitutive relation
between the social and the international escapes ¶ any theory that is strategically anchored in only one
of these two dimensions of social ¶ reality. The apparent theoretical incommensurability of classical IR
and social and political theories is a testimony to this claim (Waltz, 1979; Wight, 1966). A unified
theoretical ¶ comprehension of the social and the international must, I therefore contend, be central
to ¶ any attempt at supplanting Eurocentrism. This requires an explicit theoretical incorporation of
the universal. But a conception of the universal that is fundamentally rethought ¶ away from being an
immanent self-transcendence of the particular, and re-comprehended ¶ as a radical amenability to,
and constitutiveness of, alterity (Cheah, 2008; cf. Chernilo, ¶ 2006). IR with its paradigmatic focus on the
condition and consequences of political ¶ multiplicity is arguably a, if not the most, fertile intellectual
ground for pursuing such a ¶ theoretical project. That this intellectual potential has not been realized
has a great deal ¶ to do with the supra-social and non-historical conception of the international by
main¶ stream IR theory; a problem that recent historical sociological scholarship in IR has ¶ thrown in to
sharp relief (e.g. Lawson, 2006; Rosenberg, 1994; Teschke, 2003). But a ¶ historical sociological IR in
and of itself cannot succeed in exorcizing IR’s Eurocentric ¶ spirit. The historicization of international
relations has to be dialectically complemented ¶ with the internationalization of the social, that is, the
theoretical articulation of the constitutive impact of the interactive coexistence of multiple societies on
internal processes ¶ of social change (Matin, 2007). The idea of ‘uneven and combined development’ ¶
(Trotsky, 1985), I argue, contains the organic integration of these two intellectual moves ¶ involving an
interactive and heterogeneous notion of the universal. It is therefore imbued ¶ with a radical
potential for generating a positive non-ethnocentric international social ¶ theory.
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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 (Martí 1987;
Mariátegui 1979; Fals-Borda 1970; 526 Nepantla Fernández 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).
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Impact Answers
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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.)
True to Foucault’s understanding, we should remember that the intellectual is not just the product
or¶ the agent of the division of labor, but also an anthropological figure in the sense this term
acquires in¶ It is in this sense that I understand Robert Young’s appraisal of the status of eurocentrism
in¶ Foucault—“¶ The Order of Things¶ could be seen as an analysis not of eurocentrism as such, but
of its¶ philosophical and conceptual archaeology” (Young 1995, 9). Foucault’s acute orientalism is
not¶ merely the obverse of his investment in the methodological error of culturalism’s “selfcontainment”,¶ it is also, far more crucially, a sign of the intellectual’s inability to avert the disastrous
reversibility and¶ confusion between the opposing poles of knowledge and experience that was
identified by¶ The Order¶ of Things¶ as the crucial feature of modernity. The crux of eurocentrism, as the
quintessential modern¶ geocultural hegemony, lies in the economy that links experience to knowledge
through a plethora of¶ philosophical decisions such as dialectical negation and phenomenological
reduction (the two main¶ straw men in Foucault’s work). Indeed, Chapter Nine of¶ The Order of Things¶ is
devoted to analyzing¶ the transcendental and empirical elements in the constitution of knowledge that
turn “the analysis of¶ actual experience” into a hopelessly equivocal “discourse of mixed nature”
(Foucault 1966/1973,¶ 332/321). Dialectical negativity and phenomenology both constitute, each in
separate ways, flawed¶ yet archaeologically-similar responses to this amphibological mixture that
results in the modern¶ construct of Man as simultaneously both subject and object of knowledge.
Leonard Lawlor has¶ persuasively demonstrated how Foucault’s critique of the amphibological nature of
the modern¶ concept of “lived-experience” (¶ le vécu¶ ) lies at the heart of the critique of modern Man
deployed by¶ The Order of Things¶ . Against this critique of¶ le vécu¶ or lived-experience, Foucault
proposes a notion¶ of¶ le vivant¶ , or the living, whose point of departure is taken from Canguilhem’s
biological notion of¶ error. In explaining Foucault’s objection to the concept of lived-experience, Lawlor
writes: “the¶ critique of the concept of¶ vécu¶ is based on the fact that the relationship in¶ vécu¶ is a
mixture (¶ un¶ mélange¶ ) which closes ‘‘¶ un écart infime¶ ’’. Conversely, Foucault’s conception of the
relationship –¶ here we must use the word ‘‘¶ vivant¶ ’’ – in ‘‘¶ le vivant¶ ’’ is one that dissociates and keeps
‘‘l’écart¶ infime’’ open” (Lawlor 2005, 417). This “¶ écart infime¶ ”, which the English translation of¶ Les
mots et¶ les choses¶ renders as a “miniscule hiatus” (Foucault 1966/1973, 351/340), must be
understood,¶ argues Lawlor, in both senses of the French word “¶ infime¶ ”: both “miniscule” and
“infinitesimal” or¶ “infinitely divisible” (Lawlor 2005, 422). I suppose that what Lawlor has in mind when
basing his¶ argument on the dual meaning of the French word¶ infime¶ is a form of what Sakai calls
“continuity in¶ discontinuity” (Sakai 2009, 85). In this case, the meaning of¶ infime¶ as the “infinitely
divisible” would¶ refer us to what mathematics calls “continuity”, while that of the “miniscule” would
take us back to a¶ difference so small it cannot be measured, thus constituting the incommensurability
of¶ “discontinuity”.
¶
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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 the novelties were real, but argue that they were less a
positive than a negative accomplishment.
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Alternative Answers
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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)
However, there is another--perhaps even more challenging--limitation to the Western critique of
Eurocentrism. Intellectuals and cultural producers in the West disturbed by the paradoxical fate of
humanism have, in large part, responded by calling for what is commonly referred to as
"multiculturalism." Initially a strategic political category and now a burgeoning cottage industry,
multiculturalism has lately been deployed by those seeking to displace Eurocentrism within academia
by diversifying the core curriculum of the humanities. It has, perhaps predictably, been assailed from
both the Right (by the likes of Arthur Schlesinger) and from the Left (by, among others, Slavoj Zizek),
thereby confronting its critics with a field that is as volatile as it is congested. However, as a
constitutive element of the wake of Eurocentism, the multicultural initiative would appear to be
critically compromised in two pertinent ways. First, because it reinvests in Man, that is, in a notion of
global human identity that prompts one to mistake immediate, socially specific opportunities to
broaden one's cultural horizons for humanity's alleged universal capacity for choosing which identity
markers it wishes to affirm. And second--as others have observed--because it fails to differentiate
meaningfully between contexts where multiculturalism effectively has been imposed (true, for
example, of virtually all colonial encounters) and contexts where it is fostered as an intellectual
innovation. Even when, in the former colonies of Asia and Africa, an imposed multiculturalism is
vigorously reappropriated, it is done with an eye toward renegotiating a distinctly local version of an
often imported tension between tradition and modernity. Thus, to the extent that multiculturalism is
represented as a necessary corollary to the critique of Eurocentrism (especially in the West), it
threatens to contradict the ends of such a critique by authorizing means for [End Page 11] realizing it
that obscure crucial differences "on the ground." Not to put too fine a point on it: multiculturalism to a
Bolivian tin miner, who wears Tweeds T-shirts (assembled in Bolivia, sold in the United States, blackmarketed everywhere) while listening to Ricky Martin on the camp radio, does not mean what it does to
a Midwestern student in the United States who carries his copy of Cien años de soledad in a book bag
made of leather from Argentina that, in the semiotics of North American youth subcultures, signifies
alternative. Despite the fact that multiculturalism is under siege (especially from the Right), and criticism
of it is now fashionable, if it cannot meaningfully differentiate among cultural contexts and serves, in
effect, to protect the West from actually transforming the conditions of its self-representation, then
not only is it a flawed immanent critique of Eurocentrism, but--for that very reason--it must also be
abandoned as a global strategy. " We" are not the world , and perhaps this is never more obvious than
when we attempt to compensate for that very fact. At least, that's what we were thinking.
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Alt Can’t Solve
European thought is the crux and root of Western and modern philosophy- they can’t
access their solvency
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.)
(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 Europe was not only good but the
face of the future everywhere.¶ Universalizing theories have always come under attack on the grounds
that the particular situation in a particular time and place did not seem to fit the model. There have also
always been scholars who argued that universal generalizations were intrinsically impossible. But in the
last thirty years a third kind of attack has been made against the universalizing theories of modern social
science. It has been argued that these allegedly universal theories are not in fact universal, but rather a
presentation of the Western historical pattern as though it were universal. Joseph Needham quite some
time ago designated as the "fundamental error of Eurocentrism ...the tacit postulate that modern
science and technology, which in fact took root in Renaissance Europe, is universal and that it follows
that all that is European is" (cited in Abdel-Malek, 1981: 89).
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Social science thus has been accused of being Eurocentric insofar as it was particularistic. More than
Eurocentric, it was said to be highly parochial. This hurt to the quick, since modern social science prided
itself specifically on having risen above the parochial. To the degree that this charge seemed reasonable,
it was far more telling than merely asserting that the universal propositions had not yet been
formulated in a way that could account for every case.
Rejection of Eurocentric ideology fails
Wasserstrom, University of California History Professor, 1
(Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, January 2001, American Historical Foundation “Eurocentrism and Its
Discontents,” http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2001/0101/0101vie1.cfm, accessed July 6,
2013, EK)
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
Two-Thirds 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" ourselves—sometimes justifiably,
sometimes not—by scholars based outside of the West.
Fourth, in spite of all this, the enduring legacy of many Eurocentric tendencies, assumptions, and
practices remains a real problem that needs to be addressed in creative, forceful ways. "Read Globally,
Write Locally" is, I think, a good watchword for all graduate students in history of the 21st century. But
this advice is still much easier for Europeanists than for others to ignore; it should not be. This suggests
to me that there is still much that can and should be done—at the AHR and elsewhere—to encourage
new habits of reading and new forms of cross-fertilizations between area specialists (and world
historians) of various sorts.
Alt Fails – too connected to everything
Dirlik, Former Duke University History Professor, 99
(Arif Dirlik, Spring 1999, “Is There History after Eurocentrism?: Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the
Disavowal of History,” pg. 18-19, JSTOR, accessed July 7, 2013, EK)
Recognition of Eurocentrism as a historical phenomenon that differs from other centrisms in terms of
the totalizing structures that served as its agencies returns us to the question that I raised earlier. If
Eurocentrism globalized a certain ethnocentrism, and rendered it into a universal paradigm, is there
then an outside to Eurocentrism? An outside to Eurocentrism may be found in places untouched and
marginalized by it, which are fewer by the day, or it may be found in its contradictions, which
proliferate daily. The universalization of Eurocentrism must itself be understood in terms of the ways in
which EuroAmerican values were interpellated into the structures of soci- eties worldwide, transforming
their political, social, and economic relations, but not homogenizing them, or assimilating them to the
structures and values of Eurocentrism. Questions of homogenization versus heterogenization, sameness
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and difference, assimilation and differentiation, are in many ways misleading questions, for they
confound what are historical processes with the apportionments of identity into ahistorical, static
categories. As I understand it here, the universalization of Eurocentric practices and values through
the EuroAmerican conquest of the world implies merely the dislodging of societies from their
historical trajectories before Europe onto new trajectories, without any implication of uniformity, for
the very universalization of Eurocentrism has bred new kinds of struggles over history, which continue
in the present. It also implies, how- ever, at least in my understanding, that these struggles took place
in- creasingly on terrains that, however different from one another, now included EuroAmerican power
of one kind or another as their dynamic constituents. That, I believe, distinguishes what we might want
to describe as a modernity defined by EuroAmerica from earlier forms of domination, which were
regionally, politically, and socially limited by the technological, organizational, and ideological limits of
domination. Sinocentrism, however effective in East and Southeast Asia, was nevertheless limited to
those regions. Eurocentrism as compared to earlier "centrisms"
Alternative Fails – to engrained to shift away
Dirlik, Former Duke University History Professor, 99
(Arif Dirlik, Spring 1999, “Is There History after Eurocentrism?: Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the
Disavowal of History,” pg. 29-30, JSTOR, accessed July 7, 2013, EK)
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, continue 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 questioning 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 affirmation 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
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will not resolve the contradiction, or provide a guide to the future, but it might serve at least to clarify
the ways in which the present uses and abuses the past, and serve as a reminder of our own
historicity- why we say and do things differently than they were said or done in the past. Ours is an
age when there is once again an inflation of claims to critical consciousness. These claims are often
based on an expanded consciousness of space. We need to remind ourselves, every time we speak of
the constructedness of some space or other, that it may be impossible, for that very reason, to think
of spaces without at the same time thinking of the times that produced those spaces.
The Alt can’t solve- Counter discourses of Eurocentrism stem from western modes of
thought and knowledge production
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.)
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 Abdel-Malek (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 roots in the European Middle Ages, when some intellectual Christian
monks set themselves the task of understanding better non-Christian religions, by learning their
languages and reading carefully their religious texts. Of course, they based themselves on the premise of
the truth of Christian faith and the desirability of converting the pagans, but nonetheless they took
these texts seriously as expressions, however perverted, of human culture.¶ When Orientalism was
secularized in the nineteenth century, the form of the activity was not very different. Orientalists
continued to learn the languages and decipher the texts. In the process, they continued to depend upon
a binary view of the social world. In partial place of the Christian/pagan distinction, they placed the
Western/Oriental, or modern/non-modern distinction. In the social sciences, there emerged a long line
of famous polarities: military and industrial societies, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, mechanical and
organic solidarity, traditional and rational-legal legitimation, statics and dynamics. Though these
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polarities were not usually direcly related to the literature on Orientalism, we should not forget that one
of the earliest of these polarities was Maine's status and contract, and it was explicitly based on a
comparison of Hindu and English legal systems. ¶ Orientalists saw themselves as persons who diligently
expressed their sympathetic appreciation of a non-Western civilization by devoting their lives to
erudite study of texts in order to understand (verstehen) the culture. The culture that they understood
in this fashion was of course a construct, a social construct by someone coming from a different
culture. It is the validity of these constructs that has come under attack, at three different levels: it is
said that the concepts do not fit the empirical reality; that they abstract too much and thus erase
empirical variety; and that they are extrapolations of European prejudices.¶ The attack against
Orientalism was however more than an attack on poor scholarship. It was also a critique of the political
consequences of such social science concepts. Orientalism was said to legitimate the dominant power
position of Europe, indeed to play a primary role in the ideological carapace of Europe's imperial role
within the framework of the modern world-system. The attack on Orientalism has become tied to the
general attack on reification, and allied to the multiple efforts to deconstruct social science narratives.
Indeed, it has been argued that some non-Western attempts to create a counterdiscourse of
"Occidentalism" and that, for example, "all elite discourses of antitraditionalism in modern China, from
the May Fourth movement to the 1989 Tienanmen student demonstration, have been extensively
orientalized," (Chen 1992, 687), therein sustaining rather than undermining Orientalism . ¶ 5) Progress.
Progress, its reality, its inevitability, was a basic theme of the European Enlightenment. Some would
trace it back through all of Western philosophy (Bury 1920, Nisbet 1980). In any case, it became the
consensus viewpoint of nineteenth-century Europe (and indeed remained so for most of the twentieth
century as well). Social science, as it was constructed, was deeply imprinted with the theory of
progress.
The alt doesn’t solve – their understanding of eurocentrism is reductionist, and
ignores the historical circumstance that it came out of. In reality, eurocentrism is
inevitable
Dirlik, “Knight Professor of Social Science” from the University of Oregon, 99 (Arif,
Cultural Critique, No 42 (Spring, 1999), pp. 1-34 “Is There History after Eurocentrism?: Globalism,
Postcolonialism, and the¶ Disavowal of History”, pg. 1-2, date accessed 7/7/13, jstor, IGM)
Ours would seem to be another age of paradoxes. Localization ¶ accompanies globalization, cultural
homogenization is challenged by ¶ insistence on cultural heterogeneity, denationalization is more than
¶ matched by ethnicization. Capitalism at its moment of victory over ¶ socialism finds itself wondering
about different cultures of capitalism ¶ at odds with one another. There is a preoccupation with history
when ¶ history seems to be increasingly irrelevant to understanding the ¶ present. Worked over by
postmodernism, among other things, the ¶ past itself seems to be up for grabs, and will say anything we
want it ¶ to say.
It is another one of these paradoxes that I take up in this essay: ¶ the paradox of Eurocentrism. The
repudiation of Eurocentrism in ¶ intellectual and cultural life seems to be such an obvious necessity ¶ that
it may seem odd to speak of it as a paradox. Yet a good case can ¶ be made that Eurocentrism, too, has
come under scrutiny and criticism at the very moment of its victory globally. Whether we see in the ¶
present the ultimate victory or the impending demise of Eurocentrism depends on what we
understand by it, and where we locate it. ¶ The widespread assumption in our day that Eurocentrism
may be ¶ spoken or written away , I will suggest, rests on a reductionist culturalist understanding of
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Eurocentrism. Rendering Eurocentrism into a ¶ cultural phenomenon that leaves unquestioned other
locations for it ¶ distracts attention from crucial ways in which Eurocentrism may be ¶ a determinant
of a present that claims liberation from the hold on it ¶ of the past. What is at issue is modernity, with
all its complex constituents, of which Eurocentrism was the formative moment. Just as modernity is
incomprehensible without reference to Eurocentrism, ¶ Eurocentrism as a concept is specifiable only
within the context of ¶ modernity. Rather than define Eurocentrism from the outset, therefore, I seek
to contextualize it in order to restore to it-and the many ¶ arguments against it-some sense of historicity.
Attempts at decolonizing the academies Eurocentric epistemology fall short leaving
the original colonial power structures in place – it is nothing more than a theory of
dependency
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. 61 – 63, The South Atlantic Quarterly,
Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
The Liberation of Philosophy and the Decolonization of the Social Sciences
Dependency theory has not yet lost its posture, although it has been severely criticized. It is capable of
holding its own in the middle of a critical tempest because its critics addressed the conceptual structure
of dependency, not its raison d'être. The fact that dependency at large was and is the basic strategy in
the exercise of coloniality of power is not a question that needs lengthy and detailed argumentation.
Even though in the current stage of globalization there is a Third World included in the First, the
interstate system and the coloniality of power organizing it hierarchically have not vanished yet. It is
also not the point here whether the distinction between center and periphery was as valid at the end of
the twentieth century as it was in the nineteenth century. If dependency in the modern/colonial worldsystem is no longer structured under the center/periphery dichotomy, this does not mean that
dependency vanishes because this dichotomy is not as clear today as it was yesterday. On the other
hand, interdependency is a term that served to restructure the coloniality of power around the
emergence of transnational corporations. 19 What Anibal Quijano terms "historico-structural
dependency" should not be restricted to the center/periphery dichotomy. 20 Rather, it should be
applied to the very structure of the modern/colonial world-system and capitalistic economy.
Dependency theory was more than an analytic and explanatory tool in the social sciences. 21 While
world-system analysis owes its motivating impulse and basic economic, social, and historical structure to
dependency theory, 22 it is not and could not have served as the political dimension of dependency
theory. Dependency theory was parallel to decolonization in Africa and Asia and suggested a course of
action for Latin American countries some 150 years after their decolonization. World-system analysis
operates from inside the system, while dependency theory was a response from the exteriority of the
system—not the exterior but the exteriority. That is to say, the outside is named from the inside in the
exercise of the coloniality of power. Dependency theory offered an explanation and suggested a course
of action for Latin America that could hardly have been done by a world-system analysis. [End Page 62]
World-system analysis in its turn did something that the dependency analysis was not in a position to
accomplish. That is, world-system analysis introduced a historical dimension and a socioeconomic
frame (the modern world-system) into the social sciences, thus displacing the origin of history and
cultures of scholarship from ancient Greece to the modern world-system. The emergence of the social
sciences in the nineteenth century was indeed attached to the epistemic frame opened by the second
modernity (the French Enlightenment, German Romantic philosophy, and the British industrial
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revolution). 23 World-system analysis responded to the crisis of that frame in the 1970s, when
decolonization took place in Africa and Asia and the changes introduced by transnational corporations
brought to the foreground the active presence of a world far beyond Western civilization. The
irreducible (colonial) difference between dependency theory and world-system analysis cannot be
located in their conceptual structures but in the politics of their loci of enunciation. Dependency theory
was a political statement for the social transformation of and from Third World countries, while worldsystem analysis was a political statement for academic transformation from First World countries. This
difference, implied in the geopolitics of knowledge described by Carl E. Pletsch, is indeed the irreducible
colonial difference—the difference between center and periphery, between the Eurocentric critique of
Eurocentrism and knowledge production by those who participated in building the modern/colonial
world and those who have been left out of the discussion. 24 Las Casas defended the Indians, but the
Indians did not participate in the discussions about their rights. The emerging capitalists benefiting
from the industrial revolution were eager to end slavery that supported plantation owners and
slaveholders. Black Africans and American Indians were not taken into account when knowledge and
social organization were at stake. They, Africans and American Indians, were considered patient, living
organisms to be told, not to be heard.
The impact of dependency theory on the decolonization of scholarship in Latin America was
immediate and strong. In 1970 Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda published an important book
titled Ciencia Propia y Colonialismo Intelectual [Intellectual colonialism and our own science], which
today echoes a widespread concern in cultures of scholarship in Asia and Africa. The scenario is simple:
Western expansion was not only economic and political but also educational and intellectual. The
Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism was accepted in former colonies as "our own" critique [End Page
63] of Eurocentrism; socialist alternatives to liberalism in Europe were taken, in the colonies, as a path
of liberation without making the distinction between emancipation in Europe and liberation in the
colonial world. Quite simply, the colonial difference was not considered in its epistemic dimension. The
foundation of knowledge that was and still is offered by the history of Western civilization in its
complex and wide range of possibilities, provided the conceptualization (from the right and the left)
and remained within the language frame of modernity and Western civilization. Fals-Borda's book is
still valid because it keeps in mind a current dilemma in cultures of scholarship. In fact, Fals-Borda's early
claims for the decolonization of the social sciences echoes the more recent claims made by Boaventura
de Sousa Santos from Portugal in his argument "toward a new common sense." 25 Granted, Santos is
not focusing on Colombia or Latin America. However, the marginality of Portugal, as the south of
Europe, allows for a perception of the social sciences different from that which one might have from the
north.
While Wallerstein argues for the opening of the social sciences, assuming the need to maintain them
as a planetary academic enterprise, Fals-Borda's concerns are with the very foundation of the social
sciences and other forms of scholarship. In other words, the planetary expansion of the social sciences
implies that intellectual colonization remains in place, even if such colonization is well intended,
comes from the left, and supports decolonization. Intellectual decolonization, as Fals-Borda intuited,
cannot come from existing philosophies and cultures of scholarship. Dependency is not limited to the
right; it is created also from the left. The postmodern debate in Latin America, for example,
reproduced a discussion whose problems originated not in the colonial histories of the subcontinent
but in the histories of European modernity.
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Epistemology isn’t ahistorical – attempts to reduce Eurocentrism down to mere forms
of knowledge production fail – it’s irreducible and ignorant of the colonial difference
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. 63-66, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
An indirect continuation of Fals-Borda's argument for intellectual decolonization is the project that
Enrique Dussel has been pursuing since the early 1990s. 26 Philosophy of liberation, as conceived by
Dussel since the late 1960s, is another consequence of dependency theory and the intellectual
concerns that prompted its emergence. One of Dussel's main concerns was and still is a philosophical
project contributing to social liberation (I will return to the distinction between emancipation and
liberation). His latest book is the consequence of a long and sustained philosophical, ethical, and
political reflection. 27 Fals-Borda's argument was concerned not just with a [End Page 64] project in the
social sciences for the liberation of the Third World; rather, it concerned also a project of intellectual
liberation from the social sciences. In the case of Dussel, liberation is thought with regard to
philosophy. Here again is the irreducible colonial (epistemic) difference between a leftist social
sciences project from the First World and a liberation of the social sciences (and philosophy) from the
Third World. 28
The logic of this project, from the standpoint of the colonial difference, has been formulated in Dussel's
confrontations between his own philosophy and ethic of liberation and that of Gianni Vattimo. 29 In one
short but substantial chapter ("‘With Vattimo?'; ‘Against Vattimo?'") Dussel relates Vattimo's
philosophy to nihilism and describes nihilism as a "twilight of the West, of Europe, and of modernity."
30 In closing this section (and immediately after the preceding description), Dussel adds,
Has Vattimo asked himself the meaning that his philosophy may have for a Hindu beggar
covered with mud from the floods of the Ganges; or for a member of a Bantu community from subSaharan Africa dying of hunger; or for millions of semi-rural Chinese people; or for hundreds of
thousands of poor marginalized in suburban neighborhoods like Nezahualcoyotl or Tlanepantla in
Mexico, as populated as Torino? Is an aesthetic of "negativity," or a philosophy of "dispersion as final
destiny of being," enough for the impoverished majority of humanity? 31
At first glance, and for someone reading from the wide horizon of continental philosophy, this
paragraph could be interpreted as a cheap shot. It is not, however. Dussel is naming the absent location
of thinking, obscured by the universalizing of modern epistemology and its parallelism and
companionship with capitalism, either as justification or as internal critique, such as Vattimo's. Indeed,
what is at stake in Dussel's argument is not just being but the coloniality of being, from whence
philosophy of liberation found its energy and conceptualization. It is simply the colonial difference that
is at stake. Dussel's point comes across more clearly in the second section of his article on Vattimo,
when Dussel underlines the discrepancy between the starting point in both projects. As is well known, a
room looks altered if you enter it from a different door. Furthermore, of the many doors through which
one could have entered the room of philosophy, only one was open. The rest were closed. You
understand what it means to have only one door open and the entry heavily regulated. Dussel notes
that the starting point [End Page 65] for a "hermeneutic ontology of the twilight" (Vattimo) and the
"philosophy of liberation" are quite different. Dussel framed this distinction in terms of the geopolitics
of knowledge: the first is from the north; the second, from the south. The south is not, of course, a
simple geographic location but a "metaphor for human suffering under global capitalism." 32 The first
discourse is grounded in the second phase of modernity (industrial revolution, the Enlightenment). The
second discourse, that of philosophy of liberation, is grounded in the first phase of modernity and comes
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from the subaltern perspective—not from the colonial/Christian discourse of Spanish colonialism but
from the perspective of its consequences, that is, the repression of American Indians, African slavery,
and the emergence of a Creole consciousness (both white/mestizo mainly in the continent and black in
the Caribbean) in subaltern and dependent positions. From this scenario Dussel points out that while in
the north it could be healthy to celebrate the twilight of Western civilization, from the south it is
healthier to reflect on the fact that 20 percent of the earth's population consumes 80 percent of the
planet's income.
It is no longer possible, or at least it is not unproblematic, to "think" from the canon of Western
philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity. To do so means to reproduce the
blind epistemic ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not impossible, any political philosophy of
inclusion. 33 The limit of Western philosophy is the border where the colonial difference emerges,
making visible the variety of local histories that Western thought, from the right and the left, hid and
suppressed. Thus there are historical experiences of marginalization no longer equivalent to the
situation that engendered Greek philosophy and allowed its revamping in the Europe of nations,
emerging together with the industrial revolution and the consolidation of capitalism. These new
philosophies have been initiated by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Menchú, Gloria Anzaldúa,
Subramani, Abdelkhebir Khatibi, and Edouard Glissant, among others. Consequently, two points should
be emphasized.
The first is the ratio between places (geohistorically constituted) and thinking, the geopolitics of
knowledge proper. If the notion of being was invented in Western philosophy, coloniality of being
cannot be a continuation of the former. Because of coloniality of power, the concept of being cannot
be dispensed with. And because of the colonial difference, coloniality [End Page 66] of being cannot be
a critical continuation of the former (a sort of postmodern displacement) but must be, rather, a
relocation of the thinking and a critical awareness of the geopolitics of knowledge . Epistemology is
not ahistorical . But not only that , it cannot be reduced to the linear history from Greek to
contemporary North Atlantic knowledge production . It has to be geographical in its historicity by
bringing the colonial difference into the game. 34 The densities of the colonial experience are the
location of emerging epistemologies, such as the contributions of Franz Fanon, that do not overthrow
existing ones but that build on the ground of the silence of history. In this sense Fanon is the equivalent
of Kant, just as Guaman Poma de Ayala in colonial Peru could be considered the equivalent of Aristotle.
35 One of the reasons why Guaman Poma de Ayala and Fanon are not easily perceived as equivalents of
Aristotle and Kant is time. Since the Renaissance—the early modern period or emergence of the
modern/colonial world—time has functioned as a principle of order that increasingly subordinates
places, relegating them to before or below from the perspective of the "holders (of the doors) of time."
Arrangements of events and people in a time line is also a hierarchical order, distinguishing primary
sources of thought from interesting or curious events, peoples, or ideas. Time is also the point of
reference for the order of knowledge. The discontinuity between being and time and coloniality of being
and place is what nourishes Dussel's need to underline the difference (the colonial difference) between
continental philosophy (Vattimo, Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Michel Foucault) and philosophy of
liberation.
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Neg links to the K
Neg employs eurocentrism
El-Affendi, Cambridge University Islamic Studies Professor, 12
(Abdelwahab el-Affendi, October 14, 2012, Economic and Social Research Council, “Narratives of
Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence,”http://www.esrc.ac.uk/myesrc/grants/RES-071-27-0010/outputs/Read/58ab38e7-50c3-4211-805f-a2af2e3cca91, accessed July 7,
2013, EK)
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 postEnlightenment 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.
K links to itself – their knowledge relies on European structures too, and thus
shouldn’t be universalized
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.solidarityus.org/site/node/993, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
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 and preordained path. How, then, do anti-Eurocentric histories differ from
these classic explanations of the origin of capitalism? The critiques generally take one or both of two
forms. First, they deny the "superiority" of Europe and emphasize the importance, in fact the
dominance, of non-European economies and trading networks throughout most of human history, as
well as the level of technological development achieved by some of the main actors (for example, Andre
Gunder Frank's argument about the Asian-dominated world economy, which, he argues, lasted until
1750-1800 [See note 1]); and/or second, they emphasize the importance of European imperialism in the
development of capitalism. Often this second thesis has to do with the role of British imperialism,
particularly the profits of sugar plantations and the slave trade, in the development of industrial
capitalism, though 1492 is also a major milestone in the earlier rise of capitalism, as it is for J.M. Blaut,
who attributes European economic development in large part to the riches plundered from the
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Americas.[See note 2] These two theses may be combined in the argument that the dominant nonEuropean trading powers could and probably would have produced capitalism (or maybe even did,
though further development was thwarted), if only they hadn't been ripped off by Western
imperialism. Now clearly, no serious historian today would deny the importance of trade and technology
in Asia and other parts of the non-European world, or, for that matter, the relatively modest level of
development attained by Europeans before the rise of capitalism. Nor would any such historian,
especially on the left, deny the importance of imperialism in European history and the tremendous
damage it has done. The question, though, is what this has to do with capitalism, and on that score, the
anti-Eurocentric arguments tend to fall into precisely those Eurocentric (and bourgeois) traps they are
meant to avoid. The remarkable thing about anti-Eurocentric critiques is that they start from the same
premises as do the standard Eurocentric explanations, the same commercialization model and the same
conception of primitive accumulation. Traders or merchants anywhere and everywhere are seen as
potential, if not actual, capitalists, and the more active, wide-ranging, and wealthy they are, the further
they are along the road of capitalist development. In that sense, many parts of Asia, Africa, and the
Americas were well on their way to capitalism before European imperialism, in one way or another,
blocked their path. None of these critics seems to deny that at some point, Europe did diverge from
other parts of the world, but this divergence is associated with "bourgeois revolution" and/or with the
advent of industrial capitalism, once enough wealth had been accumulated by means of trade and
imperial expropriation. Since trade was widespread in other parts of the world, imperialism was the
really essential factor in distinguishing Europe from the rest, because it gave European powers the
critical mass of wealth that finally differentiated them from other commercial powers. So, for instance,
J.M. Blaut talks about "protocapitalism" in Asia, Africa, and Europe and argues that the break which
distinguished Europe from the rest occurred only after wealth acquired by looting the Americas made
possible two types of revolution in Europe, first the "bourgeois" and then the "industrial." "I use the
word `protocapitalism'," he says, "not to introduce a technical term but to avoid the problem of defining
another term, `capitalism.'"[See note 3] This evasion is disarmingly candid, but also revealing. Since Blaut
does not conceive of capitalism as a specific social form, he can have no clear conception of non- or
precapitalist modes of production with different operating principles, and no conception of a transition
from one to the other. Commercial practices shade into "protocapitalism," which grows into "modern"
capitalism. "Protocapitalism," argues Blaut, finally matured in "modern" capitalism because of wealth
accumulated from the colonies. Here, Europe had a distinct "locational" advantage because the
Americas were relatively accessible to European empires. It was this crucial geographic advantage, Blaut
believes, that gave Europe privileged access to the wealth required to jump-start their bourgeois and
industrial revolutions. The "bourgeois revolutions," which, according to Blaut, first truly distinguished
Europe from the rest of the world, finally gave political power to the classes that had been enriched
especially by colonial wealth, and allowed them to get on with the business of capitalist development
unhindered by non-capitalist forces. Once they took power, they were able to mobilize the state to
facilitate accumulation and create the infrastructure for industrial development. From then on, the
Industrial Revolution, though it did not happen overnight, was inevitable. In this version, the echoes of
the old Eurocentric and bourgeois narrative are truly uncanny: Not only is European development
basically the rise to power of the bourgeoisie, but advanced and wealthy non-European civilizations
seem to be cases of arrested development because, even if through no fault of their own, they never did
throw off their shackles by means of bourgeois revolution. And here too, just as in classical political
economy and its notion of "primitive accumulation," the leap forward to "modern" capitalism occurred
because the bourgeoisie had managed, in one way or another, to accumulate sufficient wealth. Blaut
tries to dissociate himself from the notion of "primitive accumulation" but seems to miss the point
completely.[See note 4] Accumulation from the American colonies, he argues, was not some "primitive"
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form of accumulation but, from the start, "capital accumulation: of profit." But this proposition simply
confirms his affinity to the classic conception, in which "primitive accumulation" is indeed the
accumulation of "capital." "Capital," in that conception, is indistinguishable from any other kind of
wealth or profit, and capitalism is basically more of the same, just as it is for Blaut. "Primitive
accumulation" is "primitive" only in the sense that it represents the accumulation of the mass of wealth
required before "commercial society" can reach maturity. In that sense, it's very much like Blaut's own
conception of early "capital accumulation," which, after 1492 and the looting of the Americas, reached
the critical mass that made "mature" capitalism (or, in the terms of classical political economy,
"commercial society") possible. Like classical political economy, Blaut's argument evades the issue of the
transition to capitalism by presupposing its existence in earlier forms. As we'll see in a moment, a
decisive break from the classic model came with Marx's critique of political economy and its notion of
"primitive accumulation," his definition of capital not simply as wealth or profit but as a social relation,
and his emphasis on the transformation of social property relations as the real "primitive accumulation."
Yet critics of Eurocentric history have more or less returned to the old notion. Even at the point where
they diverge most emphatically from the classic Eurocentric histories, in their emphasis on
imperialism, they simply invert an old Eurocentric principle. In the old accounts, Europe surpassed all
other civilizations by removing obstacles to the natural development of "commercial society"; in the
anti-Eurocentric inversion, the failure of non-Europeans to complete the process of development,
despite the fact that they had already come so far, was caused by obstacles created by Western
imperialism. So here again there seems to be no conception of capitalism as a specific social form, with a
distinctive social structure, distinctive social relations of production, which compel economic agents to
behave in specific ways and generate specific laws of motion. And here again there is no real transition.
In much the same way that the old Eurocentric arguments took capitalism for granted, this one too
avoids explaining the origin of this specific social form—or to be more precise, denies its specificity and
hence evades the question of its origin—by assuming its prior existence ("protocapitalism," not to
mention even earlier forms of trade and mercantile activity). There is no explanation of how a new social
form came into being. Instead, the history of capitalism is a story in which age-old social practices, with
no historical beginning, have grown and matured—unless their growth and maturation have been
thwarted by internal or external obstacles. There are of course variations on the old themes, most of all
the attack on imperialism. There are also other refinements like the idea of "bourgeois revolution"—
though even this idea, no matter how much it is dressed up in Marxist trappings, is not fundamentally
different from Eurocentric-bourgeois accounts which treat the bourgeoisie as agents of progress and
credit them with throwing off the feudal shackles that impeded it. But whatever variations are
introduced into the story, basically capitalism is just a lot more of what already existed in
protocapitalism and long before: more money, more urbanization, more trade, and more wealth.
Critiques of Eurocentrism fail- they are reproduced from a Eurocentric form of thought
means there’s no way to solve
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.)
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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 were also in the process of doing it, up to the moment
that Europe used its geopoliticaL power to interrupt the process in other parts of the world. The second
is that whatever Europe did is nothing more than a continuation of what others had already been doing
for a long time, with the Europeans temporarily coming to the foreground. The third is 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. The first two arguments, widely
offered, seem to me to suffer from what I would term "anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism." The third
argument seems to me to be undoubtedly correct, and deserves our full attention. What kind of curious
animal could "anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism" be? Let us take each of these arguments in turn.¶ There
have been throughout the twentieth century persons who have argued that, within the framework of
say Chinese, or Indian, or Arab-Muslim "civilization," there existed both the cultural foundations and the
socio-historical pattern of development that would have led to the emergence of full-fledged modern
capitalism, or indeed was in the process of leading in that direction. In the case of Japan, the argument
is often even stronger, asserting that modern capitalism did develop there, separately but temporally
coincident with its development in Europe. The heart of most of these arguments is a stage theory of
development (frequently its Marxist variant), from which it logically followed that different parts of the
world were all on parallel roads to modernity or capitalism. This form of argument presumed both the
distinctiveness and social autonomy of the various civilizational regions of the world on the one hand
and their common subordination to an overarching pattern on the other.¶ Since almost all the various
arguments of this kind are specific to a given cultural zone and its historical development, it would be a
massive exercise to discuss the historical plausibility of the case of each civilizational zone under
discussion. I do not propose to do so here. What I would point out is one logical limitation to this line
of argument whatever the region under discussion, and one general intellectual consequence. The
logical limitAtion is very obvious. Even if it is true that various other parts of the world were going down
the road to modernity/capitalism, perhaps were even far along this road, this still leaves us with the
problem of accounting for the fact that it was the West, or Europe, that reached there first, and was
consequently able to "conquer the world." At this point, we are back to the question as origin- ally
posed, why modernity/capitalism in the West? ¶ Of course, today there are some who are denying that
Europe in a deep sense did conquer the world on the grounds that there has| always been resistance,
but this seems to me to be stretching our reading of reality. There was after all real colonial conquest
that covered a large portion of the globe. There are after all rea military indicators of European strength.
No doubt there were always multiple forms of resistance, both active and passive, but if the resistance
were truly so formidable, there would be nothing for us to discuss today. If we insist too much on nonEuropean agency as a theme, we end up whitewashing all of Europe's sins, or at least most of them. This
seems to me not what the critics were intending.¶ In any case, however temporary we deem Europe's
domination to be, we still need to explain it. Most of the critics pursuing this line of argument are more
interested in explaining how Europe interrupted an indigenous process in their part of the world than
in| explaining how it was that Europe was able to do this. Even more to the point, by attempting to
diminish Europe's credit for this deed, this presumed "achievement," they reinforce the theme that it
was an achievement. The theory makes Europe into an "evil hero" - no doubt evil, but also no doubt a
hero in the dramatic sense of the term, for it was Europe that made the final spurt in the race and
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crossed the finish line first. And worse still, there is the implication, not too far beneath the surface,
that, given half a chance, Chinese, or Indians, or Arabs not only could have, but would have, done the
same - that is, launch modernity/capitalism, conquer the world, exploit resources and people, and play
themselves the role of evil hero.¶ This view of modern history seems to be very Eurocentric in its antiEurocentrism, because it accepts the significance (that is, the value) of the European "achievement"
in precisely the terms that Europe has defined it, and merely asserts that others could have done it
too, or were doing it too. For some possibly accidental reason, Europe got a temporary edge on the
others and interfered with their development forcibly. The assertion that we others could have been
Europeans too seems to me a very feeble way of opposing Eurocentrism, and actually reinforces the
worst consequences of Eurocentric thought for social knowledge.¶ The second line of opposition to
Eurocentric analyses is that which denies that there is anything really new in what Europe did. This line
of argument starts by pointing out that, as of the late Middle Ages, and indeed for a long time before
that, western Europe was a marginal (peripheral) area of the Eurasian continent, whose historical role
and cultural achievements were below the level of various other parts of the world (such as the Arab
world or China). This is undoubtedly true, at least as a first-level generalization. A quick jump is then
made to situating modern Europe within the construction of an ecumene or world structure that has
been in creation for several thousand years (see various authors in Sanderson, 1995). This is not
implausible, but the systemic meaningfulness of this ecumene has yet to be established, in my view. We
then come to the third element in the sequence. It is said to follow from the prior marginality of western
Europe and the millennial construction of a Eurasian world ecumene that whatever happened in
western Europe was nothing special and simply one more variant in the historical construction of a
singular system.¶ This latter argument seems to me conceptually and historically very wrong. I do not
intend however to reargue this case (see Wallerstein, 1992a). I wish merely to underline the ways in
which this is anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism. Logically, it requires arguing that capitalism is nothing new,
and indeed some of those who argue the continuity of the development of the Eurasian ecumene have
explicitly taken this position. Unlike the position of those who are arguing that a given other civilization
was also en route to capitalism when Europe interfered with this process, the argument here is that we
were all of us doing this together, and that there was no real development towards capitalism because
the whole world (or at least the whole Eurasian ecumene) was always capitalist in some sense.¶ Let me
point out first of all that this is the classic position of the liberal economists. This is not really different
from Adam Smith arguing that there exists a "propensity [in human nature] to truck, barter, and
exchange one thing for another" (1937, 13). It eliminates essential differences between different
historical systems. If the Chinese, the Egyptians, and the Western Europeans have all been doing the
same thing historically, in what sense are they different civilizations, or different historical systems? (per
contra, see Amin 1991). In eliminating credit to Europe, is there any credit left to anyone except to panhumanity? ¶ But again worst of all, by appropriating what modern Europe did for the balance-sheet of
the Eurasian ecumene, we are accepting the essential ideological argument of Eurocentrism, that
modernity (or capitalism) is miraculous, and wonderful, and merely addding that everyone has always
been doing it in one way or another. By denying European credit, we deny European blame. What is so
terrible about Europe's "conquest of the world" if it is nothing but the latest part of the ongoing march
of the ecumene? Far from being a form of argument that is critical of Europe, it implies applause that
Europe, having been a "marginal" part of the ecumene, at last learned the wisdom of the others (and
elders) and applied it successfully.¶ And the unspoken clincher follows inevitably. If the Eurasian
ecumene has been following a single thread for thousands of years, and the capitalist world-system is
nothing new, then what possible argument is there that would indicate that this thread will not continue
forever, or at least for an indefinitely long time? If capitalism did not begin in the sixteenth (or the
eighteenth) century, it is surely not about to end in the twenty-first. Personally, I simply do not believe
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this, and I have made the case in several recent writings (Wallerstein, 1995; Hopkins & Wallerstein,
1996). My main point, however, here, is that this line of argument is in no way anti-Eurocentric, since it
accepts the basic set of values that have been put forward by Europe in its period of world dominance,
and thereby in fact denies and/or undermines competing value systems that were, or are, in honor in
other parts of the world.
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Turn – Rejection = Worse Alternatives Fill In
Rejecting or eradicating Eurocentrism just allows other worse pervasive and
exclusionary form of epistemology and knowledge production from seeping in - turns
the K
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.)
This kind of revisionist historiography is often persuasive in detail, and certainly tends to be
cumulative. At a certain point, the debunking, or deconstructing, may become pervasive, and perhaps
a counter-theory take hold. This is, for example, what seems to be happening (or has already
happened) with the historiography of the French Revolution, where the so-called social interpretation
that had dominated the literature for at least a century and a half was challenged and then to some
degree toppled in the last thirty years. We are probably entering into such a so-called paradigmatic shift
right now in the basic historiography of modernity.
Whenever such a shift happens, however, we ought to take a deep breath, step back, and evaluate
whether the alternative hypotheses are indeed more plausible, and most of all whether they really
break with the crucial underlying premises of the formerly dominant hypotheses. This is the question I
wish to raise in relation to the historiography of European presumed achievements in the modern
world. It is under assault. What is being proposed as a replacement? And how different is this
replacement? Before, however, we can tackle this large question, we must review some of the other
critiques of Eurocentrism.
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AT: Deconstruction/Decolonization
Decolonization requires an encounter with the colonized – simply deconstructing one
knowledge base doesn’t 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 Anglo-American 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, á 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, social sciences, and the humanities). Such a displacement of perspective was already
suggested by Moroccan philosopher Abdelkhebir Khatibi, which I have discussed at length elsewhere. 49
However, certainly Bernasconi will concur with Khatibi in naming decolonization as the type of
deconstructive operation proposed by Outlaw, thus maintaining and undoing the colonial difference
from the colonial difference itself. That is to say, maintaining the difference under the assumption that
"we are all human" although undoing the coloniality of power that converted differences into values and
hierarchies. "The existential dimension of African philosophy's challenge to Western philosophy in
general and Continental philosophy in particular is located in the need to decolonize the mind. This task
is at least as important for [End Page 71] the colonizer as it is for the colonized. For Africans,
decolonizing the mind takes place not only in facing the experience of colonialism, but also in
recognizing the precolonial, which established the destructive importance of so-called
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ethnophilosophy." 50 The double bind requires also a double operation from the perspective of African
philosophy, that is, an appropriation of Western philosophy and at the same time a rejection of it
grounded in the colonial difference. Bernasconi recognizes that these, however, are tasks and issues for
African philosophers. What would be similar issues for a continental philosopher? For Europeans,
Bernasconi adds, "decolonizing the colonial mind necessitates an encounter with the colonized, where
finally the European has the experience of being seen as judged by those they have denied. The extent
to which European philosophy championed colonialism, and more particularly helped to justify it
through a philosophy of history that privileged Europe, makes it apparent that such a decolonizing is an
urgent task for European thought." 51
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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)
It cannot be said of Wallerstein that he, like Vattimo or Habermas, is blind to colonialism. Unlike
continental thought, Wallerstein is not imprisoned in the Greco-Roman–modern European tradition. The
politics of location is [End Page 79] a question valid not just for minority epistemology. On the contrary,
it is the keystone of universalism in European thought. Cornel West's perception and analysis of the
"evasion of American philosophy" speaks to that politics of location that is not a blind voluntarism but a
force of westernization. 66 Although the United States assumed the leadership of Western expansion,
the historical ground for thinking was not, and could not have been, European. The "evasion of
American philosophy" shows that tension between the will to be like European philosophy and the
impossibility of being so. 67 The logic of the situation analyzed by West is similar to the logic underlined
by Bernasconi vis-á-vis African philosophy. The variance is that the evasion of American philosophy was
performed by Anglo-Creoles displaced from the classical tradition instead of native Africans who felt
the weight of a parallel epistemology.
The social sciences do have a home in the United States as well as in Europe, which is not the case for
philosophy. But the social sciences do not necessarily have a home in the Third World. Therefore,
while opening the social sciences is an important claim to make within the sphere of their gestation
and growth, it is more problematic when the colonial difference comes into the picture. To open the
social sciences is certainly an important reform, but the colonial difference also requires
decolonization . To open the social sciences is certainly an important step but is not yet sufficient, since
opening is not the same as decolonizing, as Fals-Borda claimed in the 1970s. In this sense Quijano's and
Dussel's concepts of coloniality of power and transmodernity are contributing to decolonizing the
social sciences (Quijano) and philosophy (Dussel) by forging an epistemic space from the colonial
difference. Decolonizing the social sciences and philosophy means to produce, transform, and
disseminate knowledge that is not dependent on the epistemology of North Atlantic modernity—the
norms of the disciplines and the problems of the North Atlantic—but that, on the contrary, responds to
the need of the colonial differences. Colonial expansion was also the colonial expansion of forms of
knowledge, even when such knowledges were critical to colonialism from within colonialism itself
(like Bartolome de las Casas) or to modernity from modernity itself (like Nietzsche). A critique of
Christianity by an Islamic philosopher would be a project significantly different from Nietzsche's critique
of Christianity. [End Page 80]
Alt cedes the political – the academic community cannot solely focus on obsessing
over the cultural demise – it allows for atrocities to continue
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, pg. 87-88, JZ)
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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.
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Speaking for Others
These critiques come from within a single knowledge base – no risk that their
“deconstruction” is the one desired by ones most effected – merely another form the
the colonial difference the negative critiques
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. 85-86, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
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 Spanish question but also as the beginning of modernity and European hegemony.
Both concur that Latin America and the Caribbean today are a consequence of the North Atlantic (not
just Spanish and European) hegemony. Wallerstein's critique of Eurocentrism is a critique of the social
sciences: "Social sciences has been Eurocentrism throughout its institutional history, which means since
there have been departments teaching social science within a university system." 78 Thus Wallerstein's
critique of Eurocentrism is one of epistemology through the social sciences. Quijano's and Dussel's
critiques come to Western epistemology through coloniality of power from the colonial difference.
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AT: Quijano
Quijano’s 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)
Coloniality of Power, Dependency, and Eurocentrism
Wallerstein, Quijano, and Dussel have in common their debt to dependency theory. They are apart
(although not enemies) because of the epistemic colonial difference. Quijano's concepts of coloniality
of power and historic-structural dependency emphasize this complicity, similar to Dussel's arguments
with and against Vattimo. 68
To understand Quijano's coloniality of power, it is first necessary to accept coloniality as constitutive
of modernity and not just as a derivative of modernity—that is, first comes modernity and then
coloniality. The emergence of the commercial Atlantic circuit in the sixteenth century was the crucial
moment in which modernity, coloniality, and capitalism, as we know them today, came together.
However, the Atlantic commercial circuit did not immediately become the location of Western
hegemonic power. It was just one more commercial circuit among those existing in Asia, Africa, and
Anahuac and Tawantinsuyu in what would later become America. 69 Modernity/coloniality is the
moment of Western history linked to the Atlantic commercial circuit and the transformation of
capitalism (if we accept from Wallerstein and Arrighi that the seed of capitalism can be located in
fifteenth-century Italy) 70 and the foundation of the modern/colonial world-system.
In the preceding paragraph I purposely mixed two macronarratives. One I will call the Western
civilization macronarrative and the other the modern/colonial world-system narrative. The first emerged
in the Renaissance and was consolidated during the Enlightenment and by German philosophy in the
early nineteenth century. As such, this macronarrative is tied to historiography (the Renaissance) and
philosophy (the Enlightenment). The second macronarrative emerged during the Cold War as it is linked
to the consolidation of the social sciences. The first macronarrative has its origin in Greece; the second
in the origin of the Atlantic commercial circuit. Both macronarratives are founded in the same principles
of Western epistemology, and both have their own double personality complex (double side). For
instance, the narrative of Western civilization is at the same time celebratory of its virtues and critical
of its failings. In the same vein modernity is often celebrated as hiding coloniality and yet is critiqued
because of coloniality, its other side. Both macronarratives can also be criticized from the inside
(Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Wallerstein, Gunder Frank, etc.) and [End Page 81] from the exteriority
of the colonial difference. 71 Both coloniality of power and historico-structural dependency are key
concepts in Quijano's critique of the above macronarratives from the exteriority of the colonial
difference.
Colonialism exists on a multiplicity of levels – Quijano missed the critique of the
western civilization and the modern world
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 2
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(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter 2002, “The
Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference”, Pg. 84-85, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
Coloniality of power worked at all levels of the two macronarratives, Western civilization and modern
world-system, that I mentioned earlier. The colonized areas of the world were targets of Christianization
and the civilizing mission as the project of the narrative of Western civilization, and they became the
target of development, modernization, and the new marketplace as the project of the modern worldsystem. The internal critique of both macronarratives tended to present itself as valid for the totality,
in the sense that it is configured by the program of Western civilization and the modern world-system.
The insertion of the word colonial, as in modern/colonial world-system, makes visible what both
macronarratives previously obscured: that the production of knowledge and the critique of
modernity/coloniality from the colonial difference is a necessary move of decolonization. Otherwise,
opening the social sciences could be seen as a well-intentioned reproduction of colonialism from the
left. Similarly, a critique of Western metaphysics and logocentrism from the Arabic world may not take
into account the critical epistemic legacy and the memory of epistemic violence inscribed in Arabic
language and knowledge. Historico-structural dependency, in the narrative of the modern/colonial
world-system, presupposes the colonial difference. It is, indeed, the dependency defined and enacted by
the coloniality of power. Barbarians, primitives, underdeveloped people, and people of color are all
categories that established epistemic dependencies under different [End Page 84] global designs
(Christianization, civilizing mission, modernization and development, consumerism). Such epistemic
dependency is for Quijano the very essence of coloniality of power. 75
Both Quijano and Dussel have been proposing and claiming that the starting point of knowledge and
thinking must be the colonial difference, not the narrative of Western civilization or the narrative of
the modern world-system. Thus transmodernity and coloniality of power highlight the epistemic
colonial difference, essentially the fact that it is urgently necessary to think and produce knowledge
from the colonial difference. Paradoxically, the erasure of the colonial difference implies that one
recognize it and think from such an epistemic location—to think, that is, from the borders of the two
macronarratives, philosophy (Western civilization) and the social sciences (modern world-system). The
epistemic colonial difference cannot be erased by its recognition from the perspective of modern
epistemology. On the contrary, it requires, as Bernasconi clearly saw in the case of African philosophy,
that epistemic horizons open beyond Bacon's authoritarian assertion that "there can be no others." The
consequences of this are gigantic not only for epistemology but also for ethics and politics. I would like
to conclude by highlighting some of them in view of future discussions.
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Eurocentrism Inevitable
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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:eurocentris
m-the-basis-of-our-society-culture-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 is inevitable – its multifaceted nature makes criticism impossible
Matin, committee member of Centre for Advanced International Theory, 12 (Kamran,
European Journal of International Relations 2013 19: 353
“Redeeming the universal: Postcolonialism and the inner life of Eurocentrism”,
http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/19/2/353 pg. 359, date accessed 7/7/13 IGM)
In spite of this veritable history of anti-Eurocentric thought and practice, mounting critique, obvious
counter-facts, and logical tensions, Eurocentrism continues to exert influence in the academy, in
national and international policy making centers, and among the elites and the intelligentsia of nonWestern ‘developing’ countries (Friedman, 2006; Ganji, 2008; Jones, 2003: ix–xl; Landes, 2003; Sen,
1999). This influence is certainly closely related to the ideological dimension of Eurocentrism, the fact
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that it sustains and is sustained by the global dominance of the Western-centered configurations of
eco nomic, technological, and military power. This explains why non-Western challenges to those
configurations, for example, the strategic shift in the loci of the global concentrations of economic
power to non-Western countries such as China, India, or Brazil, can destabilize Eurocentrism too.
However, the longevity of Eurocentrism, as an intellectual mode, has also to be understood in terms of
the limitations of the critiques it has been subjected to. One key limitation of anti-Eurocentric critiques
has been an indecisive challenge to Eurocentrism’s stadial conception of development. This is
particularly important because the assumption of stadial development is the culmination of
Eurocentrism’s historical, prognostic, and normative assumptions. It contains an ideal typical concept of
modernity (Europe), a theory of history (stagist development) sustain ing the concept, and a socialscientific methodology — comparative analysis — for investigating it (Bhambra, 2007; Washbrook, 1997:
410; cf. Amin, 1989: x).
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 life-world 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 geographically, nor are its
agencies necessarily Euro- American in origin. A radical critique of Eurocentrism, in other words, must
confront contemporary questions of globalism and postcolonial- ism, and return analysis to the locations
of contemporary struggles over the life-world. I should note here that the critique of Eurocentrism is a
diffuse characteristic of all kinds of critiques of power in our day: from feminist to racial critiques. On
occasion, it seems as if the problems of the world would be solved if somehow we got rid of
Eurocentrism. This, of course, is silly. It not only misses much about Eurocentrism; it ignores even
more about the rest of the world. Not the least of what it ignores is that although the agencies that are
located in EuroAmerica may be the promoters of Eurocentrism, they are by now not the only ones, and
possibly not the most important ones. Eurocentrism may not be global destiny, but it is a problem that
needs to be confronted by any serious thinking about global des- tinies. These problems are too serious
to be left in the hands of elites to whom Eurocentrism is an issue of identity in intra-elite struggles for
power.
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Epistemology Specific
Eurocentric epistemological reproduction is inevitable
O’Brien, 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, Entanglement’s and
Eurocentrism,” http://globalhistoryatlse.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/how-do-you-study-global-historycomparisons-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 don’t 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.
Can’t solve the impact-Eurocentrism is the underlying affect of all education- it
expands beyond the west systemically means they can’t solve
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.)
Against the modern concept of man that is based on an equivocal relation between¶ experience and
knowledge, Foucault’s critique calls not for a “mixing” of the two but for a way of¶ making the
immeasurably small differences between them discontinuous and non-relational. The way¶ this is to
be done is to be found in a strategy of “double negation” that “affirms” both terms rather¶ than
combines them (Lawlor 2005, 424).¶ The problem with the modern Western¶ episteme¶ , according
to¶ The Order of Things¶ , is that a¶ fundamental equivocity and reversibility has been installed
between experience and knowledge. The¶ resolution of this amphiboly is not what concerns me here so
much as what I take to be a warning,¶ issued by archaeology to biopolitics. Biopolitics, particularly in the
part of it that lends itself to studies¶ of governmentality, always runs the risk of becoming the study of
the ‘actual experience’ of the¶ politics of life. If the problem of eurocentrism ultimately concerns a
hegemony that is mobile and¶ self-transformative, i.e., if the problem of “the West” is not limited to
the West, this is because at its¶ core lies a fundamental equivocity or amphibological confusion
between knowledge and experience.¶ Similarly, the problem of the state amounts to a way of
appropriating the amphiboly, or of capturing it,¶ under the guise of “lived experience”. Hence, to
oppose experience—actual experience, local¶ ¶ experience—against the hegemony of the West (and its
avatar, “Western theory”) ends up being a¶ strategy complicit at a broad level with the hegemonic
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logic—consolidated in the state—according to¶ which the West first gathered itself as a subject in
history.
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Eurocentrism Good
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Eurocentrism Good- Civilization
Eurocentrism is good- it’s the underlying creator of civilization, civility, progress, and
social sciences
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.)
(3) Civilization. Civilization refers to a set of social characteristics that are contrasted with
primitiveness or barbarism. Modern Europe considered itself to be more than merely one
"civilization" among several; it considered itself (uniquely or at least especially) "civilized." What
characterized this state of being civilized is not something on which there has been an obvious
consensus, even among Europeans. For some, civilization was encompassed in "modernity," that is, in
the advance of technology and the rise of productivity as well as the cultural belief in the existence of
historic development and progress. For others, civilization meant the increased autonomy of the
"individual" vis-a-vis all other social actors - the family, the community, the state, the religious
institutions. For others, civilization meant non-brutal behavior in everyday life, social manners in the
broadest sense. And for still others, civilization meant the decline or narrowing of the scope of
legitimate violence and the broadening of the definition of cruelty. And of course, for many, civilization
involved several or all of these traits in combination.¶ When French colonizers in the nineteenth century
spoke of la mission civilisatrice, they meant that, by means of colonial conquest, France (or more
generally Europe) would impose upon non-European peoples the values and norms that were
encompassed by these definitions of civilization. When, in the 1990's, various groups in Western
countries spoke of the "right to interfere" in political situations in various parts of the world, but
almost always in non-Western parts of the world, it is in the name of such values of civilization that
they are asserting such a right.¶ This set of values, however we prefer to designate them civilized
values, secular-humanist values, modern values permeate social science, as one might expect, since
social science is a product of the same historical system that has elevated these values to the pinnacle of
a hierarchy. Social scientists have incorporated such values in their definitions of the problems (the
social problems, the intellectual problems) they consider worth pursuing. They have incorporated these
values into the concepts they have invented with which to analyze the problems, and into the indicators
they utilize to measure the concepts. Social scientists no doubt have insisted, for the most part, that
they were seeking to be value-free, insofar as they claimed they were not intentionally misreading or
distorting the data because of their socio-political preferences. But to be value-free in this sense does
not at all mean that values, in the sense of decisions about the historical significance of observed
phenomena, are absent. This is of course the central argument of Heinrich Rickert (1913) about the
logical specificity of what he calls the "cultural sciences." They are unable to ignore "values" in the sense
of assessing social significance.¶ To be sure, the Western and social scientific presumptions about
"civilization" were not entirely impervious to the concept of the multiplicity of "civilizations." Whenever
one posed the question of the origin of civilized values, how it was that they have appeared originally (or
so it was argued) in the modern Western world, the answer almost inevitably was that they were the
products of long-standing and unique trends in the past of the Western world - alternatively described
as the heritage of Antiquity and/or ofthe Christian Middle Ages, the heritage of the Hebrew world, or
Gonzaga Debate Institute 2013 185
Eurocentrism K
the combined heritage of the two, the latter sometimes renamed and respecified as the Judeo-Christian
heritage.¶ Many objections can and have been made to the set of successive presumptions. Whether the
modern world, or the modern European world, is civilized in the very way the word is used in European
discourse has been challenged. There is the notable quip of Mahatma Gandhi who, when asked, "Mr.
Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?", responded, "It would be a good idea." In addition,
the assertion that the values of ancient Greece and Rome or of ancient Israel were more conducive to
laying the base for these so-called modern values than were the values of other ancient civilizations has
also been contested. And finally whether modern Europe can plausibly claim either Greece and Rome on
the one hand or ancient Israel on the other as its civilizational foreground is not self-evident. Indeed,
there has long been a debate between those who have seen Greece or Israel as alternative cultural
origins. Each side of this debate has denied the plausibility of the alternative. This debate itself casts
doubt on the plausibili- ty of the derivation.