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Eurocentrism Cuba Aff – GDI 2013
Note – this 1ac does not read a plan but does agree that arguments in favor of keeping the
embargo or the terrorist list are Nge ground the aff has to answer.
Additional cards aff & neg can be found in the Eurocentrism K file
Gonzaga Debate In 2
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1AC - Draft
In the same way that traditional policy making knowledge production is shaped
by eurocentrism- contemporary debates reflect a system of knowledge which
reinforces bankrupt epistemology
Frankzi, University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law, Graduate
Student, 12
(Hannah, Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld University, Universitat Bielefeld,
“Eurocentrism,” http://elearning.unibielefeld.de/wikifarm/fields/ges_cias/field.php/Main/Unterkapitel52, Accessed: 7/3/13, LPS.)
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
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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.
Eurocentric knowledge production justifies continuing violence - current debate
practices reinforce this epistemology and prevent us from having discussions
that include those marginalized by eurocentric practices. Questioning these
practices is integral to understanding the topic
Sundberg, University of Helsinki political science professor, 9
(Jan, Published 2009, “Eurocentrism”, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Volume
3, Pg. 638, JB)
Eurocentrism has been variously defined as an attitude, conceptual apparatus, or set of
empirical beliefs that frame Europe as the primary engine and architect of world history, the
bearer of universal values and reason, and the pinnacle and therefore model of progress and
development. In Eurocentric narratives, the superiority of Europe is evident in its achievements
in economic and political systems, technologies, and the high quality of life enjoyed by its
societies. Eurocentrism is more than banal ethnocentric prejudice, however, as it is intimately
tied to and indeed constituted in the violence and
asymmetry of colonial and imperial encounters. Eurocentrism is what makes this violence not
only possible, but also acceptable or justifiable. As such, Eurocentrism is the condition of
possibility for Orientalism, the discursive and institutional grid of power/knowledge integral to
the production and domination of the Orient as Other. Significant critiques of Eurocentrism
emerged in the context of post-World War II shifts in geopolitical power, including anticolonial
and anti-imperial revolutionary movements. Even so, Eurocentric epistemologies continue to
haunt the production of knowledge in geography in significant and disturbing ways.
In conventional Eurocentric tellings, Europe is the engineer and architect of modern
agricultural, cultural, economic, political, and scientific innovations, including capitalism,
democracy, and industrial, medical, and green revolutions. Concepts like ‘the rise of Europe’
and ‘the European miracle’ exemplify Eurocentric models of history and development. Europe’s
so-called rise is explained in terms of superior social and environmental qualities deemed
internal to it: inventiveness, rationality, capacity for abstract thought, outward looking, freedom
loving, along with advantageous climate and geographies. Many of these cultural traits are said
to be inherited from the Bible lands and ancient Greece and Rome – framed as Europe’s
ancestral hearths – though their highest development is said to have been achieved first in
imperial England and then the United States of America – hence the term ‘Euro-Americanism’.
In these narratives, progress and development ride what James Blaut calls ‘the westbound
Orient Express’.
As a consequence of the perceived historical movement of the westbound express, ‘Europe’ has
morphed into the ‘West’ and now the ‘Global North’. These fluid geographic imaginaries may
refer to not only Europe and white settler societies like the United States, Canada, and
Australia, but also Japan and any other region or group that envisions itself as the possessor or
inheritor of European culture, values, and academic, political, and economic systems. At the
same time, however, particular places within the West such as the United States are privileged
as the source of universal theory, while others like New Zealand are framed as limited by their
particularities. Latin America and the Caribbean were colonized by Europeans, but are rarely
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included in the West . In short, it may not always be clear to what exactly these geographical
imaginaries refer, but they are used as though they correspond to a commonsensical external
reality. Through their repetition in everyday speech and academic and institutional
narratives, that reality is continuously brought into being .
US policies towards Cuba - specifically the embargo and the terror list represent a systematic refusal of non-Western forms knowledge production
Slater, Professor of Geography, Loughborough University 4
(David, “The Gravity of Imperial Politics: Some Thoughts on Power and Representation”, The
Arab World Geographer/Le Geographe du monde arabe, Vo 7,No 1-2, p.97
According to the ruling perspective from Washington, the specificity of contemporary Cuba, or
more accurately of the post-1959 Castro government, has been its alliance during the Cold-War
period with the Soviet Union and its continuing adherence post-1989 to a communist political
system. This specificity has been used by the United States not only as a justification for
classifying Cuba as a threat to the United States and the Western hemisphere and, more
recently, as a "rogue state," but also as a legitimization of its embargo or blockade of Cuba—
an embargo that has been condemned by the United Nations and the Inter-American Juridical
Committee, which has ruled that such a measure against Cuba violates international law
(Chomsky 2000,2).8
The Cuban case might be considered to be too specific to act as a basis for broader
interpretations, and certainly in the context of U.S.-Latin American relations, it has a unique
geopolitical significance. However, it can also be argued that U.S.-Cuban relations express, in a
rather concentrated form, a persistent theme in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations;
for example, there are other cases of the United States assigning to itself a role that frames
relations with Latin American societies so that their sovereignty is transgressed, as is
especially evident in the case of US. policy in relation to the "war on drugs."9 However, it is
also important to point out that the positing of a shared U.S.-Cuban interest in "representative
democracy, market economy and freedom and prosperity," as well as in "self-determination"
and "self-government," finds echoes in other situations where the United States assumes the
role of defining another people's sovereignty, as can be seen in the current case of the
occupation of Iraq (see Ali 2003 and Gregory 2004). There is something significant and specific
here which relates to the issue of the particularity of U.S. imperial power and its
representations of subordinated peoples. The imperial imagination in the case of the lone
superpower has a specificity that is not always contextualized. I would argue that there are
three main elements of this imperial specificity.
Slater, Professor of Geography, Loughborough University 4
(David, “The Gravity of Imperial Politics: Some Thoughts on Power and Representation”, The
Arab World Geographer/Le Geographe du monde arabe, Vo 7,No 1-2, 91)
This article takes as its point of departure Edward Said’s consistent emphasis on the need to
examine critically and challenge the imperialism of U.S. power. In much of the literature on
globalization the specificity of U.S. imperial politics has been left out of account, and yet
today, more than ever, and especially in the wake of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it is
crucial to prioritize the analysis of U.S. imperialglobality. I discuss two intersecting dimensions
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of the imperial problematic: (a) the specificity of imperial politics as written and deployed by the
United States and (b) the interweaving of geopolitical power and the subordinating
representations of imperialized peoples. Overall, the imperial relation is defined in terms of
three interlocking elements: (a) an invasiveness of power that has effects in relation to
resources as well as culture and politics: (b) a discursive imposition of the imperial power's
own values and practices: and (c) a pervasive lack of respect and recognition of the societies
that are brought under imperial control. Above all, the gravity of imperial politics is
constituted by the effects of a power that intervenes, violates, and penetrates. The article
takes U.S.-Cuban relations as an illustrative example of the imperial encounter and concludes
by re-emphasizing the urgent need to contest those kinds of knowledges and representations
that underwrite the continuation of imperial politics.
The affirmative speech is key to open up debate on knowledge and power.
Araújo and Maeso, University of Coimbra, Center for Social Studies, 12
(Marta, Silvia, August 31, 2012, “Ethinic and Radical Studies” journal “History textbooks, racism
and the critique of Eurocentrism: beyond rectification or compensation”
http://peer.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/72/66/61/PDF/PEER_stage2_10.1080%252F01419870.2011.60
0767.pdf accesed 7-10-13, KR)
It is our view that this liberal tale of a ‘kaleidoscope’ of perspectives has been convincingly
deemed insufficient and inefficient, as the mere inclusion of ‘other’ perspectives is not
sufficient to overcome the hegemony of certain narratives. We thus argue for the need to
open up the debate on knowledge and power, engaging with the frames of interpretation
within which such perspectives are to be included. Thus, following Cornel West’s argument,
this article aims at showing the theoretical and analytical relevance of the notion of
Eurocentrism for understanding the ways in which ‘race’ and racism are rendered (in)visible in
the debate on nationhood, citizenship and democracy. We argue that the effectiveness of
Eurocentrism lies not so much in prejudiced representations of the ‘other’, but in the
depoliticisation of power relations that make plausible such (mis)representations. According
to Wendy Brown (2006): Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from
comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce
and contour it. No matter its particular form and mechanics, depoliticization always eschews
power and history in the representation of its subjects (p. 15, original emphasis).
The embargo on Cuba frames them as a threat and refuses to identify with the
people. Now instead of reaching out to Cuba, we only lift parts of the embargo
the benefit the interests of America- like ability to travel and culturally
homogenize the nation. The affirmative proposes Cuba as an example of how
Euro-centrism is the primary groundwork of American policies and action. But it
spills over to multiple areas
Our method is an approach to deconstructing Eurocentrism in the debate space,
this is key to break down normative knowledge production and supplement
scholarship on “racial, gender, and sexual minorities, inequalities of class and
status” to address the intersectionality of oppression
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
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(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
Towards a Postcolonial Approach to Political Science
The preceding section demonstrated how American political science research on the
postcolonial world reproduces older colonial stereotypes and theories. In this section, I chart
the path towards a postcolonial approach to the study of politics. Such an approach, I argue,
calls for a sustained engagement with specific non-Western contexts as well as an openness to
anthropological, historical, and area studies knowledge about them. A postcolonial approach
can take many forms, but I highlight three possibilities here:
(1) critiques of existing Eurocentric theories of comparative politics;
(2) bottom-up ethnographic and historical understandings of politics in particular contexts;
(3) re-evaluating key political concepts such as the state, democracy, nationalism, and war in
the light of different non-Western experiences.
The first of these postcolonial approaches expands on the previous section. The aim is to
examine and deconstruct mainstream political science theories about the postcolonial world
by unveiling their overt biases and blindspots. These biases and blindspots, it needs to be
demonstrated, are not arbitrary, but tied to distinctly Eurocentric visions of politics and society.
Such visions implicitly or explicitly privilege Western experiences over non-Western ones,
deny any measure of coevalness, and recast the postcolonial as backward or underdeveloped.
For instance, the study of democracy exhibited clear strains of Eurocentrism insofar as they
assumed a priori that modern West is the “natural” home of democracy and the postcolonial
world throws up inchoate versions of modern Western democracy. Similarly, the contemporary
study of civil wars is crippled by its Eurocentric view of postcolonial conflicts as a function of
structural inadequacies such as weak states, economic backwardness, and primordial ethnic
divisions.
To overcome these Eurocentric views, a second kind of postcolonial approach is warranted.
The aim of this approach is to offer alternatives to mainstream political science theories via indepth, bottom-up empirical understandings of politics in postcolonial settings. Interpretive
research relying on ethnographic and/or historical methods is particularly well-suited to achieve
this aim. Even statistical studies that are sensitive to contextual realities in the postcolonial
world can do so. The “science” underlying political science should itself be reconsidered and
revised beyond its current neo-positivist confines. Investigations of vernacular practices and
experiences of democracy in countries as diverse as Mexico, Nigeria, Yemen, and India are a part
of this approach. So, too, are meaning-centered explanations of why ordinary men and women
in postcolonial settings participate in armed social conflicts and other risky forms of collective
action.
A third kind of postcolonial approach , complementing the first two, seeks to rethink and
redefine key political concepts by ridding them of their existing Eurocentric biases. The
interpenetration of power and knowledge arguably leaves its deepest imprint on concepts,
which are vital building blocks for social-scientific theories. What “democracy” means in India
or Mexico is likely to be quite different from the United States or Canada. Difference does not,
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however, imply that one can be judged as inherently superior to another. The European or
American experience of democracy cannot, in particular, be universalized into an abstract
general model of democracy. Likewise, the notion of “civil wars” conceals a latent conviction
that only strong states that can conquer their peripheries can establish a legitimate monopoly of
violence within a certain territory. Whether in the Americas, Asia or Africa, this conviction is
inseparable from the violence wrought by European colonialism on subject populations in its
quest for political order.
Taken together, these postcolonial approaches to the study of politics call for “provincializing
Europe,” as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued recently, so that we can avoid treating European
experiences as universals. This task is simultaneously theoretical and empirical as well as
intellectual and practical. As such, it supplements ongoing efforts within the United States
and Europe to produce critical scholarship on racial, gender, and sexual minorities,
inequalities of class and status, and the interpenetration of power and knowledge in
mainstream political science. To sum up, a postcolonial approach to politics is a radical
endeavor that seeks to challenge mainstream knowledge on non-Western politics and society
via sustained engagements with them.
Our aff is a form of political engagement
Bertucci, Universidad de San Andres, et al 12
(Mariano E., Fabian Borges-Herrero, University of Southern California, Claudia Fuentes-Julio,
University of Denver, International Studies Perspectives (2012), 1–19 “Toward “Best Practices”
in Scholar–Practitioner Relations: Insights from the Field of Inter-American Affairs”, pg. 4 date
accessed 7/12/13 igm)
Ideas from academia can shape policy at all stages of public policymaking: the articulation,
formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policies. 6 The political uses of expert
knowledge are not limited to improving or modifying a given course of action. Scholarly
outputs can also help legitimate the workings of an institution and substantiate particular
policy positions while undermining others.
The efforts in recent years by the United States and Mexico to develop collaborative border
management and the work done by United States Agency for International Development’s
(USAID) Women in Development (WID) office in the late 1970s to introduce gender
considerations into development assistance policy suggest the key role expert knowledge can
play in framing issues, setting agendas, and legitimating particular courses of action.
Through the concept of “collaborative border management”—a multipronged strategy that
involves cooperative law enforcement, joint management of ports of entry, shared economic
resources, and complementary economic development strategies—scholars have contributed to
the construction of a border regime for Mexico and the United States. Academic “packaging” of
the issue helped generate a good deal of sustained attention among policymakers and led to a
presidential declaration on collaborative border management. Although scholars found that
many of their ideas were already present in border management debates and, in some cases,
were already being implemented, scholarly inputs helped assure that the needed resources kept
flowing to the border region (Olson, Shirk, and Selee 2010; Lawson 2011).
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The affirmatives de-linking of educational practices from their status in western
educational systems is the only way to solve-the aff’s move to decolonize
eduction is a pre-requistite to the dialogue
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.10, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
Interpreting modern education from a planetary horizon is oriented by the ultimate goal of
de-linking educational practices from their containment within the western civilizational
ethos in order to include knowledge , understanding, and experience of the world
subalternized within the cultural-epistemic hegemony of Eurocentric modernity. In the
present era of increasing global interconnectedness and intercivilizational contacts and
conflicts, western education can no longer be delimited within a naturalized or taken for
granted Eurocentric cosmology (Des Jarlais, 2008). In the twenty-first century, the purposes of
formal education should now include the capacities for critical self-reflection on one’s own
civilizational consciousness and inter- and intra-civilizational dialogue. “ Dialogue can only take
place once ‘modernity’ is decolonized and dispossessed of its mythical march toward the
future. Dialogue can only take place when the monologue of one civilization (Western) is no
longer enforced” (Mignolo, 2005, p. xix). ¶ The purpose of this essay is to articulate a planetary
interpretation of modern western education as an institutional formation within the
modern/colonial world system. Current knowledge and understanding of modern education
are delimited and deluded by the problematic presumptions and practices of Eurocentric
modernity. Because modern western education emerged along with the initial formation of the
modern/colonial world system it is deeply embeddeded within Eurocentric modernity’s ongoing
civilizational projects and the civilization-savagism paradigm. The modern/colonial world system
perspective provides a more adequate, comprehensive, and critical interpretation of modern
civilization and modern education than the perspective of Eurocentric modernity. This essay
describes the modern/colonial world system perspective as providing the historical and
contemporary contexts for reinterpreting modern western education as modern/colonial
institutions.¶ The history of modern western education systems from a modern/colonial world
system perspective has not been written yet. This essay is intended as a contribution towards
such a future planetary narrative of modern education. The first part further develops the above
introduction with a characterization and critical analysis of the interpretive framework of
Eurocentric modernity. The second part locates and describes the modern/colonial world
system perspective and argues that this perspective provides a more adequate interpretation of
modern western education. The third part briefly theorizes modern education as a
modern/colonial institution that contributes to the global racial and patriarchal hierarchy of
labor control. The fourth part situates the formation and successive restructuring of modern
western education systems within four coexisting civilizational missions of western modernity
from the sixteenth century to the present. Christianizing, civilizing, modernizing, and marketizing
are interpreted as the overarching civilizational ideologies and civilizing practices orienting the
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governmentality of modern education over the past 500 years (Foucault, 1991a). These four
redemptive-civilizational missions provide a broad conceptual framework and an historical
periodization for reinterpreting the history of modern education no longer contained with the
civilizational presumptions of Eurocentric modernity. And finally, the fifth part articulates the
central implication of this reinterpretation for educational theory, policy, and practice –
recognizing and decentering the totalizing grip of Eurocentric epistemology in a pluriversal
education. A brief summary of the overall argument concludes the essay.
Latin America is the ONLY starting point- it is the crux of Eurocentric genocide
and modernity- The topic is key and our aff is the only way to evacuate the
concept of “Latin America” and solve the root cause of Eurocentrism and
decolonize our knowledge production
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.14, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
From Mexico to Argentina, the violence of the European culture of conquest and colonization
continued after decolonization in Latin America’s own self-fashioning. The nation-state’s
appearance as the agent of civilization in the nineteenth-century involves the reformation of
Eurocentric modernity in which the racialized violence linked to capitalism is rationalized as the
natural expansion of universal reason and scientific truth (Coronil, 1997, p. 74). ¶ The civilizing
alterization experience of Latin America offers a way of thinking differently about the politics
and ethics of knowledge, language, and education relevant to the experiences and histories of
all locations within the modern/colonial world system, including the system’s origin and
center – Western Europe and North America. ¶ The “discovery” of America and the genocide
of Indians and African slaves are the very foundations of “modernity,” more so than the
French or Industrial Revolutions. Better yet, they constitute the darker and hidden face of
modernity, “coloniality.” Thus, to excavate the “idea of Latin America” is, really to
understand how the West was born and how the modern world order was founded.
(Mignolo, 2005, p. xiii)¶
Jones, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, International Relations Professor, 4
(Branwen Gruffydd Jones, August 2004, University of Cambridge, “From Eurocentrism to
Epistemological Internationalism: power, knowledge and objectivity in International Relation,”
http://www.csog.group.cam.ac.uk/iacr/papers/Jones.pdf, accessed July 10, 2013, EK)
A fundamental problem which underlies the origin and reproduction of IR’s eurocentricity is
the overwhelming dominance of ideas produced in and by the west, and the wilful and
determined silencing of the voices and histories of the colonised. But the result of this
fundamental problem is flawed knowledge about the world. Eurocentricity is therefore a dual
problem concerning both the authors and the content of knowledge, and cannot be resolved
through normative commitments alone. It is not only the voices of the colonised, but the
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histories of colonialism, which have been glaring in their absence from the discipline of
International Relations.
Overcoming eurocentricity therefore requires not only concerted effort from the centre to
create space and listen to hitherto marginalised voices, but also commitment to correcting the
flaws in prevailing knowledge – and it is not only ‘the Other’ who can and should elaborate
this critique. A vitally important implication of objectivity is that it is the responsibility of
European and American, just as much as non-American or nonEuropean scholars, to
decolonise IR. The importance of objectivity in social inquiry defended here can perhaps be seen
as a form of epistemological internationalism. It is not necessary to be African to attempt to tell
a more accurate account of the history of Europe’s role in the making of the contemporary
Africa and the rest of the world, for example, or to write counter-histories of ‘the expansion of
international society’ which detail the systematic barbarity of so-called Western civilisation. It is
not necessary to have been colonised to recognise and document the violence, racism,
genocide and dispossession which have characterised European expansion over five hundred
years.
International relations studies views the world through a Eurocentric frame –
excluding other types of thought makes conflicts inevitable – studying Western
and non-Western thoughts together is a prerequisite to sound security studies
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 331-333,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
The rootedness of the current conflict in centuries of often violent interaction between North
and South is difficult to see due to security studies’ reliance on histories and geographies
which reproduce Eurocentric conceptions of world politics. This problem is not peculiar to
security studies. According to Barry Buzan and Richard Little, ‘there is no doubt that
I[nternational] R[elations] has been studied from a very Eurocentric perspective . . .’10
Eurocentrism is a complex idea but at its core is the assumption of European centrality in the
human past and present.11 On this view, Europe is conceived as separate and distinct from the
rest of the world, as self-contained and self-generating. Analysis of the past, present and
future of world politics is carried out in terms – conceptual and empirical, political and
normative – that take for granted this centrality and separation.12 Neither the content –
social, political, economic and cultural – nor the geographical location of ‘Europe’ are fixed.
Eurocentrism is about both a real and an imagined Europe. Over time, as Martin Lewis and
Kären Wigen demonstrate, the location of Europe shifts, expands and contracts, eventually
crossing the Atlantic and the Pacific and becoming synonymous with the ‘West’.13 Today, the
‘West’ is centred on the Anglophone US – a former European settler colony – and incorporates
Western Europe, North America, Japan and the British settler societies of Oceania. There are
few better examples of Eurocentrism than the notion that the end-point of development and
modernisation is defined by the contemporary West.
The Eurocentrism of conventional security studies takes different forms across the theoretic
perspectives that constitute the field. For realists, a ‘general theory of international politics is
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necessarily based on the great powers’.14 In modern history those powers are overwhelmingly
located in Europe and the West . Eurocentrism is therefore intrinsic to the way in which
realism is constructed in International Relations (IR). 15 The great antagonists of realism, the
liberals, seek to regulate conflict and alleviate its humanitarian consequences through a turn
to domestic and international institutions and norms. International institutions such as the
League of Nations, the United Nations and the nuclear non-proliferation regime are largely the
product of interstate diplomacy dominated by Western great powers.16 Moreover, liberal
democracy and the ethical principles that inform liberal opinion are the product of purportedly
European histories and intellectual trajectories, most prominently those associated with the
Enlightenments.17 Many constructivists share similar commitments as in attempts to make
sense of international order in Hobbesian, Lockean or Kantian terms.18 Recent efforts to move
beyond the realist-liberal debate, such as Critical Security Studies, draw their core concept of
human emancipation from these same intellectual traditions.19 Each of these traditions, as
postcolonial thinkers take pains to point out, rest on profoundly Eurocentric and racist
assumptions.20 As Immanuel Kant, a figure dear to both liberal and critical scholars, observed,
‘Humanity achieves its greatest perfection with the White race’.21
Eurocentrism generates a variety of difficulties for the analysis of security relations, and world
politics more generally.22 Two in particular motivate our argument here. First, as we have
noted, questions of war and peace raised by great power competition are foundational for
security thought and practice. As a result, security studies provides few categories for making
sense of the historical experiences of the weak and the powerless who comprise most of the
world’s population. By default, these experiences are conceived in categories derived from
great power politics in the North. Consequently, national liberation struggles in the post-World
War II era were thought of in Cold War terms by many US policymakers and defence
intellectuals.23 Today, this categorical error is repeated in a new form. Armed resistance to
Northern domination of the international system is subsumed largely under the category of
‘terrorism’. In contemporary usage this term legitimates state power and delegitimates the
use of force by non-state actors.24 It assumes in advance that ‘terrorist’ acts are always
illegitimate and unjustified. Understanding why the weak resist and the forms their resistance
takes is not aided by calling them names.
Second, and related, to the extent it addresses them at all, a Eurocentric security studies
regards the weak and the powerless as marginal or derivative elements of world politics, as at
best the site of liberal good intentions or at worst a potential source of threats.25 Missed are
the multiple and integral relations between the weak and the strong. Across diverse fields of
social inquiry, it is taken for granted that the weak and the strong must be placed in a common
analytic frame, as together constitutive of events, processes and structures.26 In contrast IR,
and security studies in particular, mainly proceed by attending to the powerful only. As
Stanley Hoffmann notes, IR takes an ‘Athenian’ perspective on the world.27 For realism, with its
focus on great powers, one-sided analysis of this kind is foundational. For liberal and some
critical approaches to security studies, the weak are of interest but primarily as bearers of
rights and objects of emancipation, that is, for their normative value in Western political
theoretic terms.28 Failing to study the weak and the strong together, as jointly responsible
for making history, hamstrings IR and security studies’ ability to make sense of world politics
generally and North-South relations in particular.
That the weak play an integral role in shaping world politics is harder to deny when a Southern
resistance movement strikes at the heart of Northern power. In the wake of those attacks, a
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series of developments transformed international and domestic politics around the world in
diverse ways. Wars are being fought; alliance relations reconfigured; security forces redeployed;
borders reworked; civil liberties curtailed; departments of state created; and identities remade.
Understanding security relations now requires that we discard Eurocentric assumptions about
the world and how it works.
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2AC Case Extensions
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Cuba Extensions
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Cuba Key Example
Focus on Cuba as example of US colonial imperialism crucial to interrogating
notions of Eurocentrism and power in Latin America
Slater, Professor of Geography, Loughborough University 4
(David, “The Gravity of Imperial Politics: Some Thoughts on Power and Representation”, The
Arab World Geographer/Le Geographe du monde arabe, Vo 7,No 1-2,p. 100)
A key conceptual feature of Edward Said's analytical framework has been, in my view, his
persistent and creative connection of the nature of imperial power with the forms of cultural
enframing that are crucial to the installation, embodiment, and reproduction of that power. It
was Foucault who underlined the imbrication of power and discourse, but it has been Said who
has given that link a critical and crucial contextualization in the cultural and political settings of
Western imperialism. Effectively challenging the "sanctioned ignorance" of the West's and
especially the United States' imperial project, found in much post-structuralist and postmodern
writing, Said opened up a new kind of theorization that combined the most effective ideas
from Marxism, and especially those of a Gramscian origin, with the newer ideas emanating
from contemporary discourse analysis. In this particular contribution, I have taken sustenance
from Said's criticality and connecting framework of interpretation and, in so doing, I have tried
to show how the specificity of U.S. imperial politics provides an important cornerstone of
today's global situation. In particular, I have indicated how the U.S.-Cuba encounter is
symptomatic of many salient elements of U.S. imperial politics.
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Cuba is example of Manifest Destiny
Past Cuba policies reflect racist and paternal policies – Cuba is the most recent
example of Manifest Destiny
Slater, Professor of Geography, Loughborough University 4
(David, “The Gravity of Imperial Politics: Some Thoughts on Power and Representation”, The
Arab World Geographer/Le Geographe du monde arabe, Vo 7,No 1-2, p.94-5
The projection of American power at the turn of the 20th century assumed a variety of forms,
so that while the Philippines became a colony, Cuba, until 1934, was a semi-protectorate.
Violence and racist representation figured in both instances. In the Cuban case, for example,
the U.S. undersecretary of war, J. C. Breckenridge, wrote in 1897 that the inhabitants of the
island were "generally indolent and apathetic," "indifferent to religion," and therefore
"immoral," and before any US. presence was to be institutionalized in Cuba, it would be
necessary to "clean up the country," even if this meant using the "methods of Divine
Providence used on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah " Breckenridge went on to state that
"we must destroy everything within our cannons' range of fire ... (w)e must impose a harsh
blockade so that hunger and its constant companion, disease, undermine the peaceful
population and decimate the Cuban army" (qtd. in Ricardo 1994, 45).
Geopolitical Interventionism: Historical Elements of the U.S.-Cuba Encounter
Cuba was formally placed under U.S. military rule in 1899 and this was accompanied by the
dissolution of the institutions of the Cuban independence movement—the Liberation Army, the
Provisional Government, and the Cuban Revolutionary Party, originally founded by Jose Marti.
Cuba became a republic under U.S. tutelage in 1902. The Teller Amendment of 1898 prevented
the United States from openly annexing the island. Passed by Congress when US. public opinion
regarded military assistance for Cuba's struggle against Spain as heroic, the amendment stated
that the United States disclaimed any intention of exercising sovereignty or control over the
island except for the pacification thereof. The Teller Amendment was supported by those
politicians who did not want the United States to annex an island inhabited by an "alien" people
(see Smith 2000, 49) but the amendment also aimed to protect U.S. sugar producers from
imports of cheap Cuban sugar. Senator Teller himself coming from the sugar-beet state of
Colorado.
As Cuba was brought into the orbit of U.S. power, the notion of "manifest destiny" was
invoked, as it had been invoked at the time of other U.S. interventions in the nineteenth
century; one writer asserted that "it is manifest destiny that the commerce and progress of the
island shall follow American channels and adopt American forms" (Benjamin 1990, 54). The Platt
Amendment, which was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1901, became a key part of the 1903
Permanent Treaty between the two countries. The Cuban constitutional convention was
informed that unless it added the Platt Amendment to the new constitution, U.S. military
occupation would continue (Perez, Jr. 1997, 108-11). Delegates to the convention appended the
Piatt Amendment to the Cuban constitution in 1902, but only by a margin of one vote. The Platt
Amendment had seven articles that, in their entirety, effectively turned Cuba into a U.S.
protectorate, provoking a continuous series of anti-US. protests and mobilizations throughout
the early part of the 20th century.
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The embargo on Cuba represents a remnant of Eurocentric ideals during the
cold war and is used to mask US imperialism in the area
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 338,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
Even so, US scholars still had difficulty granting the possibility of objectivity to Cuban
policymakers and scholars. The editors of Back to the Brink state that whereas the Americans
and the Soviets ‘came mainly to give and hear testimony regarding the story of the crisis . . . for
the Cubans . . . the more they learned and shared, the more profoundly embedded they
inevitably became in the overriding issues of their present situation: their highly abnormal
relations with their near neighbour and their far away ally’.57 This depiction of politicised
Cubans and apolitical Americans (and Soviets) is unsustainable. Narrowly construed, as the
study of rational crisis decision-making, US scholarly interest in the Cuban Missile Crisis also
betrays a ‘national-political approach’, one that takes US concerns for granted. The claim to
rational decision-making is frequently used by great powers to justify the possession of
nuclear weapons. Conversely, the purported lack of rationality on the part of other states,
particularly revolutionary regimes like Cuba or Iran, is routinely invoked to explain why they
cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons.58 Scholarly attention to ‘rational decision making’ –
learning the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis – serves to reproduce this demonstrably
Orientalist characterisation. In any case, ‘abnormality’ arises not only from the actions of Cuba.
The US has maintained economic and other sanctions against Cuba long after the expiry of the
Cold War strategic context. Cuba is a live issue in US politics, particularly in Florida, home to a
large and well-organised expatriate Cuban community and a key battleground in US presidential
elections. These facts of US policy and politics show that the causes and significance of the
‘highly abnormal relations’ between Cuba and the US are not confined to Cuba alone. Indeed,
locating ‘abnormality’ on Cuba effectively obscures the long history of US imperialism in Cuba
and the Caribbean.
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Cuba = Victim of Imperialism
Latin America is dominated by Eurocentric imperialism
Riddell, Marxist writer and former leader of the Revolutionary Workers League
in Canada, 9
(John, 12-4-9, Kasama Project, “Is Marxism Eurocentric? A View from Latin
America”http://kasamaproject.org/theory/1823-55is-marxism-eurocentric-a-view-from-latinamerica accessed 7-4-13 KR)
Over the past decade, a new rise of mass struggles in Latin America has sparked an encounter
between revolutionists of that region and many of those based in the imperialist countries. In
many of these struggles, as in Bolivia under the presidency of Evo Morales, Indigenous
peoples are in the lead.
Latin American revolutionists are enriching Marxism in the field of theory as well as of action.
This article offers some introductory comments indicating ways in which their ideas are linking
up with and drawing attention to important but little-known aspects of Marxist thought.
Eurocentrism
A good starting point is provided by the comment often heard from Latin American
revolutionists that much of Marxist theory is marked by a "Eurocentric" bias. They
understand Eurocentrism as the belief that Latin American nations must replicate the
evolution of Western European societies, through to the highest possible level of capitalist
development, before a socialist revolution is possible. Eurocentrism is also understood to
imply a stress on the primacy of industrialization for social progress and on the need to raise
physical production in a fashion that appears to exclude peasant and Indigenous realities and
to point toward the dissolution of Indigenous culture.1
Marx's celebrated statement that "no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces
for which there is room in it have developed"2 is sometimes cited as evidence of a Eurocentric
bias in Marxism. Karl Kautsky andGeorgi Plekhanov, Marxist theorists of the pre-1914 period,
are viewed as classic exponents of this view. Latin American writer Gustavo Pérez Hinojosa
quotes Kautsky's view that "workers can rule only where the capitalist system has achieved a
high level of development"3 -- that is, not yet in Latin America.
The pioneer Marxists in Latin American before 1917 shared that perspective. But after the
Russian Revolution a new current emerged, now often called "Latin American Marxism."
Argentine theorist NéstorKohan identifies the pioneer Peruvian Communist José
Carlos Mariátegui as its founder. Mariátegui, Kohan says, "opposed Eurocentric schemas and
populist efforts to rally workers behind different factions of the bourgeoisie" and "set about
recapturing 'Inca communism' as a precursor of socialist struggles."4
National Subjugation
Pérez Hinojosa and Kohan both take for granted that Latin American struggles today, as
in Mariátegui'stime, combine both anti-imperialist and socialist components. This viewpoint
links back to the analysis advanced by the Communist International in Lenin's time of a world
divided between imperialist nations and subjugated peoples.5 Is this framework still relevant at
a time when most poor countries have formal independence? The central role of antiimperialism in recent Latin American struggles would seem to confirm the early Communist
International's analysis.
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Pérez Hinojosa tells us that Mariátegui recognized the impossibility of national capitalist
development in semi-colonial countries like Peru. The revolution would be "socialist from its
beginnings but would go through two stages" in realizing the tasks first of bourgeois democratic
and then of socialist revolution. Moreover, the Peruvian theorist held that "this socialist
revolution would be marked by a junction with the historic basis of socialization: the Indigenous
communities, the survivals of primitive agrarian communism."6
Subsequently, says Kohan, the "brilliant team of the 1920s," which included Julio
Antonio Mella in Cuba,Farabundo Martí in El Salvador, and Rubén Dario in Nicaragua, "was
replaced . . . by the echo of Stalin's mediocre schemas in the USSR," which marked a return to a
mechanical "Eurocentrist" outlook.7
Writing from the vantage point of Bolivia's tradition of Indigenous insurgency,
Álvaro García Lineraattributes Eurocentric views in his country to Marxism as a whole, as
expressed by both Stalinist and Trotskyist currents. He states that Marxism's "ideology of
industrial modernisation" and "consolidation of the national state" implied the "'inferiority' of
the country's predominantly peasant societies."8
Cuban Revolution
In Kohan's view, the grip of "bureaucratism and dogmatism" was broken "with the rise of the
Cuban revolution and the leadership of Castro and Guevara."9 Guevara's views are often
linked to those ofMariátegui with regard to the nature of Latin American revolution -- in
Guevara's words, either "a socialist revolution or a caricature of a revolution."10 That claim was
based on convictions regarding the primacy of consciousness and leadership in revolutionary
transitions that were also held by Mariátegui.
Guevara also applied this view to his analysis of the Cuban state and of Stalinized Soviet
reality. Guevara inveighed against the claim of Soviet leaders of his time that rising material
production would bring socialism, despite the political exclusion, suffering, and oppression
imposed on the working population.11 (See "Che Guevara's Final Verdict on Soviet Economy,"
in Socialist Voice, June 9, 2008.)
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Lift the Embargo Key
Economic independence crucial to combat Eurocentric imperialism
Huberman, Monthly Review Journalist, 3
(Leo Huberman, October 1, 2003, Monthly Review, “Latin America & Underdevelopment,”
http://monthlyreview.org/2003/10/01/latin-america-underdevelopment, accessed July 10,
2013, EK)
Poverty, illiteracy, hopelessness and a sense of injustice—the conditions which breed political
and social unrest—are almost universal in the Latin American countryside.
Mr. Kennedy not only described the need, he also advised on the steps to be taken: “A program
for improved land use, education, health, and housing…. There is an immediate need for higher
and more diversified agricultural production, better distribution of wealth and income, and
wider sharing in the process of development.”
The statement of the problem by Mr. Kennedy and what must be done about it were convincing
and the Congress of the United States adopted his “Alliance for Progress” aid program. Today,
almost four years later, it has become apparent to almost everybody, that the plan has one
important defect—it won’t work. Not because the appropriation isn’t enough—the plan
wouldn’t work if the appropriation were multiplied ten times.
It won’t work because it doesn’t affect the imperialist relationship which is the fundamental
cause of the conditions which the United States says it wants to alleviate. Latin American
countries are rich in natural resources but their people are poor, because their economies are
lopsided; the wealth flowing from their natural resources is appropriated by U.S. monopoly
corporations which have distorted these economies in their concentration on the extraction of
profitable raw materials. The land which is not in the hands of foreign interests is held by the
native bourgeoisie—the traditional land-owning aristocracies now intertwined with the
financial, commercial, and manufacturing classes. Much of the land is out of production and
much of the rest is underutilized. Unless and until these two ruling groups—the foreign and
domestic capitalists—are forced to give up their power, property, and privilege, unless the
economic and social structure of these Latin American countries is radically altered, then
nothing fundamental will be changed. The people will remain hungry.
The aid program won’t do what Mr. Kennedy said it would do because it does not give the Latin
American countries genuine national independence, it does not break the economic
stranglehold that U.S. imperialism has on the whole continent. Without national independence,
the Latin American countries will remain, in effect, colonial appendages of the North
American metropolis. And their most basic difficulties arise precisely from their past history and
present status as colonial appendages.
If the Alliance for Progress won’t solve the problem for the Latin American countries, what will?
My own answer is socialism. I am convinced that Latin America, as well as the other
underdeveloped areas of the world, must have socialism because capitalism, which is
inseparable from imperialism, is incapable of generating the kind and degree of economic
development that is absolutely essential to provide rising living standards for rapidly growing
populations.
Socialism, on the other hand, would make it possible for the Latin American countries to take
the steps necessary for economic development. As I wrote in “Which Way for Latin America?” in
Monthly Review in March 1961, “Political independence, though of the utmost importance, is
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not enough; they must win economic independence too. And economic independence in the
sense of establishing their own control over their own economic surplus so they can apply it to
productive capital investment for the planned economic development of the whole nation,
involves those far-reaching social changes which spell revolution and socialism.”
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Impacts
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Education/Debate Impacts
Eurocentrism is ingrained into our educational systems – Western
understandings of the world are seen as the universal tool for making sense of
the world
Sundberg, University of Helsinki political science professor, 9
(Jan, Published 2009, “Eurocentrism”, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Volume
3, Pg. 640, JB)
These elements of Eurocentrism are alive and well in¶ schools and universities today. They are
put into action¶ through the continuing use of dualistic models that make¶ Europe or the West
the referents of analysis, the yardsticks¶ by which to analyze and represent other peoples and
places.¶ In the nineteenth century, Western scholars deployed¶ dualisms like civilized/barbaric
or advanced/backward to¶ organize the world’s people through reference to the racial¶
superiority of Europeans. Since the mid-twentieth century,¶ knowledge is organized through
dualisms like modern/¶ traditional, developed/undeveloped, core/periphery, or¶
developed/developing. These dualisms replace notions of¶ racial difference with cultural
conceptions of development¶ and progress. However, the dualisms of the past are not so¶
different from those commonly used today: both sets of¶ configurations make the West the
referent of analysis; both¶ treat each side of the dualism as a bounded and discreet¶ entity unto
itself; both posit evolutionary schemas through¶ which societies inevitably progress; and both
have their¶ genesis in colonial or imperial relations of power. The¶ discursive formations may
have shifted but the underlying¶ presumption of a superior white Western self as referent of¶
analysis remains the same. The continuing authority of¶ these dualisms as valid tools to organize
and understand the¶ world pivots on the erasure of their provincial origins.
In addition, the intersection between academia and¶ geopolitical power means that Western
scholarship defines the frames of reference with which others must¶ engage to be
intelligible/legible. European or Western¶ theories, concepts, and models are held up as
universally¶ applicable and treated as valid tools with which to¶ analyze the world in all times
and places. Social scientists¶ commonly deploy concepts like capital, class, and patriarchy as
though they can be applied universally without a¶ prior analysis of if and how they are
constituted and¶ given meaning in particular places. As a consequence,¶ argues Dipesh
Chakrabarty, European or Western thinkers are the only ones alive in the social sciences, no¶
matter how long they have been dead. For Chakrabarty,¶ this form of Eurocentrism is evident
when scholars the¶ world over must refer to European history and concepts¶ to obtain
international recognition, but Westerners are¶ not obliged to reciprocate . In short, ignorance
of the nonWestern world and its scholarship does not affect the¶ quality, objectivity, or
reception of Eurocentric work.
Status quo education focus on the view point of the powerful, and not those
marginalized by euro centrism. Learning about euro centrism is can be solved
via the affirmative.
Araújo and Maeso, University of Coimbra, Center for Social Studies, 12 (Marta,
Silvia, August 31, 2012, “Ethinic and Radical Studies” journal “History textbooks, racism and the
critique of Eurocentrism: beyond rectification or compensation”
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http://peer.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/72/66/61/PDF/PEER_stage2_10.1080%252F01419870.2011.60
0767.pdf accesed 7-10-13, KR)
Our analysis shows that the textbooks’ master narrative constitutes a power-evasive
discourse. The main discursive formula of this avoidance of ‘power and history’ is the
naturalisation of core processes such as colonialism, slavery and racism, that is, the
naturalisation of the idea of Europe and of its central role in the development of modern
capitalist world-system, scientific thought and liberal democracy, read as achievements within
a progress rationale (Wallerstein, 1997). Focusing on this evasiveness is crucial to understand
how Eurocentrism is constructed and reproduced and to challenge the idea that a more critical
pedagogy and history (as well as other disciplines) can be achieved by merely including other
perspectives and versions. Only thus can we overcome the process of critique as a matter of
‘false’ and ‘erroneous’ representations, and engage with the power relations that pervade
the production of knowledge and interpretations.
Status quo education does not approach history properly. They view “the
other” in direct opposition to the “we”. It entrenches the impacts of colonialism
and racism outside of the educational sphere
Araújo and Maeso, University of Coimbra, Center for Social Studies, 12 (Marta,
Silvia, August 31, 2012, “Ethinic and Radical Studies” journal “History textbooks, racism and the
critique of Eurocentrism: beyond rectification or compensation”
http://peer.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/72/66/61/PDF/PEER_stage2_10.1080%252F01419870.2011.60
0767.pdf accesed 7-10-13, KR)
1. Eurocentrism in textbooks: debates on power and history
In education, debates on Eurocentrism have often focused on representations without
engaging adequately with the relation between knowledge and power. In particular, curricula
and textbooks have been frequently used to study representations of the ‘other’, in binary
opposition to a ‘we’ that tends to remain implicit and unquestioned (Hall, 1992). Framed as a
matter of the absence of representation and the mis-representation of the ‘other’, such
research has important theoretical shortcomings: it approaches Eurocentrism as an equivalent
to ethnocentrism (a mere situated perspective) and it frames racism as ‘error’ or ‘ignorance’
(Lesko & Bloom, 1998). Focusing more on the incorrectness of certain representations than
analysing the frames of interpretation within which they are located, research has failed to
produce critical approaches to core processes such as colonialism, slavery and racism. This is
related, in our view, to a positivist approach to history that frames it as a question of producing
‘balanced’ narratives between ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ sides:
An individual’s identity is not predestined; it is always in a state of becoming; evolving in
response to life’s experiences. The same applies to national identity. It has been shaped by and
continues to be shaped by shared experiences – both positive and negative, glorious and dark,
admirable and shameful. Multiperspectivity in the teaching of national history focuses on how
people have come to be what they are today (Stradling, 2001: 151).
Previous research, particularly in the United States following the struggles by the Civil Rights
Movements of the mid-1960s (Apple, 2004b; Foster, 2006), has shown the limits of a positivist
approach based on the addition of multiple voices and perspectives (e.g. Swartz, 1992). Such
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compensatory approach, it is argued, fails to deal with the power arrangements that shape
the inclusion and representation of the ‘other’ in school curricula in ways that do not
challenge the ‘master script’ (id.).5
This also became clear in our preliminary analysis of Portuguese history textbooks, particularly
the section dealing with the national liberation wars that started in Angola in 1961. The
perspective of António Salazar (a key figure of the authoritarian Estado Novo that ruled Portugal
from 1926 to 1974) is contrasted to that of Amílcal Cabral (the founder of the African Party for
the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde and a leader in the struggles for national
liberation), in ways that fail to challenge the master narrative: Doc. 4 Salazar, Discourses,
Coimbra, 1957 (adapted) (...) the route followed is defined by a strategy of integration into a
Unitarian State, composed of dispersed provinces and of different races (…) We believe that
there are decadent races or races lagging behind - as one wishes -, in relation to whom we share
the duty of calling them to civilisation. Doc. 5 Amílcar Cabral, Selected Works, Lisbon, 1972
(adapted)
To Africans, Portuguese colonialism is hell. (...) Portugal is an underdeveloped country, with 40%
of illiterate people, and the lowest standards of living in Europe. If it could achieve a civilising
influence on any people it would be kind of a miracle. (...) (NH9: 179) In the same page, the
textbook features a picture entitled ‘Portuguese soldiers captured by Angolan guerrilla men’, in
which a group of uniformed soldiers and possibly locals (totalling 15 people) circles two dead
Portuguese soldiers, lying on the floor. The war is not contextualised politically, and therefore
Cabral’s discourse emerges as a critique of the incompetency of Portuguese colonialism, rather
than of colonialism itself. As a result, the legitimacy of colonialism is never questioned. This
illustrates the limits of a multiperspective approach to challenge the wider power arrangements
in which different perspectives are to be accommodated. Whereas addressing relevant issues, it
is our view that this construction of the debate - as a matter of promoting multiperspectivity
and the enlargement of school history beyond the West - has not challenged Eurocentrism as a
paradigm. Arguing that, in much work, Eurocentrism becomes an adjective or a foregone
conclusion, we propose to take further the debate and to challenge the idea of the
‘multicentred curricula’ as a panacea. In our view, the challenge to overcome the deep-seated
Eurocentric knowledge productions in Western academies is considerable. As Ramón Grosfoguel
(2009: 14) reminds us, we should remain critical of ‘an epistemic populism where knowledge
produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern’.6 We therefore reinforce the
idea that in ‘every historical period, competing paradigms and forms of knowledge coexist’
and that ‘the groups who exercise the most power within a society heavily influence what
knowledge becomes legitimized and widely disseminated’ (Banks, 2004: 29 ). Thus, while by
no means implying that other perspectives and historiographies are not necessary, we argue
that any alternative to hegemonic narratives needs to be framed within its struggle for
political legitimacy, scientific validity and educational relevance.
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Eurocentric Epistemology -> Violence
Eurocentrism frames knowledge production justifying violence – the other
forms of knowledge are forced to the periphery
Sundberg, University of Helsinki political science professor, 9
(Jan, Published 2009, “Eurocentrism”, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Volume
3, Pg. 638, JB)
Eurocentrism has been variously defined as an attitude, conceptual apparatus, or set of
empirical beliefs that frame Europe as the primary engine and architect of world history, the
bearer of universal values and reason, and the pinnacle and therefore model of progress and
development. In Eurocentric narratives, the superiority of Europe is evident in its achievements
in economic and political systems, technologies, and the high quality of life enjoyed by its
societies. Eurocentrism is more than banal ethnocentric prejudice, however, as it is intimately
tied to and indeed constituted in the violence and
asymmetry of colonial and imperial encounters. Eurocentrism is what makes this violence not
only possible, but also acceptable or justifiable. As such, Eurocentrism is the condition of
possibility for Orientalism, the discursive and institutional grid of power/knowledge integral to
the production and domination of the Orient as Other. Significant critiques of Eurocentrism
emerged in the context of post-World War II shifts in geopolitical power, including anticolonial
and anti-imperial revolutionary movements. Even so, Eurocentric epistemologies continue to
haunt the production of knowledge in geography in significant and disturbing ways.
In conventional Eurocentric tellings, Europe is the engineer and architect of modern
agricultural, cultural, economic, political, and scientific innovations, including capitalism,
democracy, and industrial, medical, and green revolutions. Concepts like ‘the rise of Europe’
and ‘the European miracle’ exemplify Eurocentric models of history and development. Europe’s
so-called rise is explained in terms of superior social and environmental qualities deemed
internal to it: inventiveness, rationality, capacity for abstract thought, outward looking, freedom
loving, along with advantageous climate and geographies. Many of these cultural traits are said
to be inherited from the Bible lands and ancient Greece and Rome – framed as Europe’s
ancestral hearths – though their highest development is said to have been achieved first in
imperial England and then the United States of America – hence the term ‘Euro-Americanism’.
In these narratives, progress and development ride what James Blaut calls ‘the westbound
Orient Express’.
As a consequence of the perceived historical movement of the westbound express, ‘Europe’ has
morphed into the ‘West’ and now the ‘Global North’. These fluid geographic imaginaries may
refer to not only Europe and white settler societies like the United States, Canada, and
Australia, but also Japan and any other region or group that envisions itself as the possessor or
inheritor of European culture, values, and academic, political, and economic systems. At the
same time, however, particular places within the West such as the United States are privileged
as the source of universal theory, while others like New Zealand are framed as limited by their
particularities. Latin America and the Caribbean were colonized by Europeans, but are rarely
included in the West . In short, it may not always be clear to what exactly these geographical
imaginaries refer, but they are used as though they correspond to a commonsensical external
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reality. Through their repetition in everyday speech and academic and institutional
narratives, that reality is continuously brought into being .
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Colonial Exploitation
Colonization was a terrible violation of human rights.
Miguel, Universidade Federal de Rondônia Professor, 9
(Vinicius Valentin Raduan Miguel, August 4, 2009, Political Affairs, “Colonialism and
Underdevelopment in Latin America,” http://www.politicalaffairs.net/colonialism-andunderdevelopment-in-latin-america/, accessed July 10, 2013, EK)
“Colonialism not only deprives a society of its freedom and its wealth, but of its very
character, leaving its people intellectually and morally disoriented” (Franz Fanon, 1966).
Introduction
This essay is going to assess colonialism and the class structure inherited as a main determinant
of current development in Latin American countries. First of all, we must highlight statistics
published by the World Bank: 1.4 billion people in developing countries are living under the
extreme poverty. These countries are, in the majority, former colonies from different cycles of
expansion of the major imperialist countries.
Certainly, the processes driven by and the legacies of colonialism are multiple and cannot be
understood if reduced to only the economic dimension. However, for the purpose of this paper,
the effects of economic colonization will be stressed. The economic heritages of colonization
are the consequences of the process of conquering, controlling and possessing the specified
regions. I also avoid a discussion of the entire 20th century in order to focus on how the colonial
occupation shaped various countries.
This definition of colonialism is imprecise and broad. In an effort to be more precise, I
understand it as an external/foreign exploitation assured through political control and
dominance which led to a situation of dependency on the colonial power by the exploited
economy.
However, there are other extra-economic implications of colonialism: it is necessarily a violent
conquest and violently maintained system for the over-exploration of the conquered people.
It is an inhuman system in itself, destroying any attempt at real development of the colony.
Economically, it confiscates and reserves productive lands for the use of the colonizer. At a
psychological level, it de-humanizes the colonized, forcefully imposing a foreign culture. It is a
system sustained by a racist ideology where cultural space is developed exclusively for
relations of domination. This allows for suppression and subjugation of the colonized.
Gonzaga Debate In 30
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Indigenous Violence
Eurocentrism creates a justification for violence toward indigenous people
Sundberg, University of British Columbia Geography Professor 9
(Juanita Sundberg, 2009, “Eurocentrism,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
Volume 3, pg. 639-640, Elsevier, accessed July 12, 2013, EK)
In what ways does this mural represent Eurocentrism in action? In other words, how does this
mural reflect and reproduce a Eurocentric story? First, the mural suggests that history and
development are driven by Europe. America is nothing – naked and unorganized – until
awoken by a European man. Like many of its kind, this Eurocentric story of development
reflects gendered hierarchies: America is feminized, a Sleeping Beauty awaiting the touch and
tutelage of her Prince. Second, Father Kino appears to explore and colonize alone, without the
assistance or participation of native peoples as guides or allies. Hence, the cartographic
knowledge he produces is portrayed as the solitary outcome of his explorations. Europeans
appear to be innately capable of conquest, colonization, and accurate cartography. Third,
development is unidirectional: innovation flows from Europe to others. It is Father Kino who
brings technology to the Americans, who only have baskets and pottery, which are associated
with women’s work. In this way, native technologies are further feminized, while European
technology is pictured as a horse-drawn plow driven by a man. Fourth, Europe gives, but is not
transformed by the process. As the embodiment of European civilization, scientific
knowledge, colonial power, and religious authority, Father Kino is already a fully formed
individual. It is the naked, unnamed, and undeveloped native peoples who need formation.
Through such framings, European and Indian become fixed identities, hierarchically organized
racial categories that purport to tell the truth about their inner qualities. Fifth, the
relationship between adult and child is used as a metaphor for development and mapped
onto the racial categories of European and Indian. In the mural, native peoples are infantilized
and pictured as Father Kino’s pupils; in religious terms, he is literally their father. Through his
instruction, they are guided through the stages of growth to become mature adults. Finally,
colonialism is pictured as a benevolent process and is about spreading the fruits of European
knowledge and development. The violence of colonialism is concealed and rendered
unimportant to the overall story of progress.
Gonzaga Debate In 31
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AT: United States is not Eurocentric
It is not a question of geography, but of ideology – the US is held up as example
of the end point of Eurocentrism
Sundberg, University of British Columbia Geography Professor 9
(Juanita Sundberg, 2009, “Eurocentrism,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
Volume 3, pg. 638, Elsevier, accessed July 12, 2013, EK)
Eurocentrism has been variously defined as an attitude, conceptual apparatus, or set of
empirical beliefs that frame Europe as the primary engine and architect of world history, the
bearer of universal values and reason, and the pinnacle and therefore model of progress and
development. In Eurocentric narratives, the superiority of Europe is evident in its
achievements in economic and political systems, technologies, and the high quality of life
enjoyed by its societies. Eurocentrism is more than banal ethnocentric prejudice, however, as
it is intimately tied to and indeed constituted in the violence and asymmetry of colonial and
imperial encounters. Eurocentrism is what makes this violence not only possible, but also
acceptable or justifiable. As such, Eurocentrism is the condition of possibility for Orientalism,
the discursive and institutional grid of power/knowledge integral to the production and
domination of the Orient as Other. Significant critiques of Eurocentrism emerged in the context
of post-World War II shifts in geopolitical power, including anticolonial and anti-imperial
revolutionary movements. Even so, Eurocentric epistemologies continue to haunt the
production of knowledge in geography in significant and disturbing ways.
In conventional Eurocentric tellings, Europe is the engineer and architect of modern
agricultural, cultural, economic, political, and scientific innovations, including capitalism,
democracy, and industrial, medical, and green revolutions. Concepts like ‘the rise of Europe’
and ‘the European miracle’ exemplify Eurocentric models of history and development.
Europe’s so-called rise is explained in terms of superior social and environmental qualities
deemed internal to it: inventiveness, rationality, capacity for abstract thought, outward
looking, freedom loving, along with advantageous climate and geographies. Many of these
cultural traits are said to be inherited from the Bible lands and ancient Greece and Rome –
framed as Europe’s ancestral hearths – though their highest development is said to have been
achieved first in imperial England and then the United States of America – hence the term
‘Euro-Americanism’. In these narratives, progress and development ride what James Blaut calls
‘the westbound Orient Express’.
Gonzaga Debate In 32
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Solvency
Gonzaga Debate In 33
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Debate Key
True representations of Latin America’s history are key to show the kind of
integration of cultural differences that open communities in the real world.
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.h
tml, Accessed 7/5/13, NC)
Studying the physical and cultural borderlands where Europeans, Native Americans, Africans,
and Asians met opens important discussions about the varying and continually changing ways
humans have defined the supernatural, physical space and nature, time, value and exchange,
health and illness, community and identity, gender, and the “other.” It points to the schisms
between abstract, formal scientific knowledge and local forms of knowledge; furthermore, by
questioning the possibilities of subaltern forms of knowledge, it challenges the notion of a
universal reason. As nonwhite and non-Christian immigrants to the United States and Europe
are changing (or upsetting, in the view of many) the demographic and cultural landscape of the
West, the history of Latin America can provide illuminating examples of how heterogeneous
cultural communities came into being through interaction across boundaries of race, religion,
language, and cultural differences. If we seek to tame the violence that has characterized most
of such encounters up until now, we would do well to introduce our students to some of the
literature on cultural encounters and ethno-racial hybridity. Perhaps greater understanding of
the complexities of such encounters can help reduce the cultural myopia that breeds fear.
Eurocentrism dominates not only knowledge, but also knowledge production.
The only way to “unlearn” Eurocentrism is to understand its historical existence
and power relations
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_P
roposal_for_the_Creation_of_an_Other_School, accessed 7/12/13)
As a form of ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism is one cosmology (way of knowing, thinking, and
experiencing the world) among many. Eurocentric culture however is presumed to be
universal and superior to all other ways of knowing and being. Through the ideologies and
practices of successive redemptive civilizational missions, Eurocentric modernity imposed
itself as the universal standard of civilization through which all other cultures were measured.
Through the political, military and technological power of its foremost societies, European or
Western culture imposed its paradigmatic image and its principal cognitive elements as the
norm of orientation on all cultural development, particularly the intellectual and the artistic.
That relationship consequently became a constitutive part of the conditions of reproduction of
Gonzaga Debate In 34
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those societies and cultures that were pushed into Europeanization of everything or in part
(Quijano, 2007, p. 170).
Europeans and non-Europeans alike were instructed to assimilate into this Euro/American
cosmology (Western civilization) if they wanted to succeed in both school and work. The Other
School would teach how Eurocentrism as an epistemic framework for modernity came into
being, and how to learn and think beyond the cultural-historical enclosure. The
modern/colonial world system is the context within which the Eurocentric worldview emerged
and took hold of the world. Education in European culture under the guise that it is universal is
pedagogical domination. In the United States, Eurocentrism is the milieu in which most forms
of socialization occur. Unlearning Eurocentrism requires knowledge and understanding of the
historical existence and power relations of this dominant Western cultural matrix, which
involves the teaching and learning of the history of Western modernity and coloniality.
Discursive analysis of the history of the Americas in the setting of an open
debate is key to expose and change dominant forms of knowledge production
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 4 – 5)
In Nahuatl, a common language throughout the Valley of Mexico and beyond, te-ixtli means
"other face." During the aftermath of the first European Conquests in the mid-sixteenth century,
Nahuatl speakers began using this expression to give voice to themselves, to the newly
emerging hemispheric legacy of becoming the "Other Within" Western civilization. As the
transnational colonial transfer of civilizing missions attempted to eliminate all Pre-Columbian
ways of life, such expressions began to materialize. Nepantla, another Nahuatl concept, refers to
the interspace of feeling in between,6 the unique epistemolog-ical and textual spaces created
between Indigenous, Iberian, and neo-African traditions. This book looks to the "other face," the
alterity of the Americas, the underside of Western Hemisphere, and the survivors of global
colonialism.
Despite well-established Western feminist, neo-Marxist, and postmodern critiques of the
Greco-Latin canon, Rhetoric and Composition scholarship has yet to engage in sustained
investigations of communication practices among cultures unique to the Americas. For
Athenian and Roman rhetoricians such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, rhetoric was
confined to speech acts aimed at persuading in political, forensic, or ceremonial
environments. This edited collection, however, recognizes that every communicative act is tied
to rhetorical production, and as such works to influence specific audiences to some action
whether material or epistemological. Expanding the Creek-specific Rhetorike to include Preand Post-Columbian cultures of the Americas poses numerous methodological obstacles. In
Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing I address this very concern.
The Pre-Columbian Americas cannot be conceived as having Athenian Rhetorike, yet
conceptualizing the Americas as having lowercase "alternative rhetoric" presents a colonial
negation. This is the problem with the concept of Rhetorike once we move across cultural
borders. On the one hand, Rhetorike supposedly belongs to the West; on the other hand,
lowercase and pluralized "rhetorics" are something that the Americas might have as objects to
be studied under Western eyes. In either case, Western categories work to predetermine and
fossilize the terms of debate.7
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If the culturally provincial concept of Rhetorike is indeed the historically unavoidable point of
origin, I propose the enactment of "thinking between" multiple means of identification,
between the colonizing West and te-ixtli, the "other face" of the Americas. Crossing between
comparative and conflicting communicative strategies creates symbolic spaces beyond the
mere coming together of two halves. The strategy implied here involves thinking between the
hierarchical tensions of Western and American traditions to embrace different ways of
knowing and communicating, where individual and collective expressions merge. I have no
investment in naive attempts to reconstruct "authentic" Pre-Columbian epistemologies, and
thus I cautiously defend the application of the term "rhetoric" while remaining attentive to
potential colonial dangers in doing so, dangers that speak directly to current debates on
globalization, empire, and assimilation. Contemporary problems related to scenarios of
neoliberalism, transnationalism, migration, social movements, and cultural hybridity,
moreover, cannot be appropriately analyzed without an understanding of the Americas. In this
spirit, I now offer a brief chapter overview.
Talking about the dominant forms of education in an academic debate space is
key to developing a new form of rhetoric that is free from this narrative of
domination and opression
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.12)
Finally, in the spirit of "in xochitl in cuicatl," the Nahuatl phrase for poetics, Rafael Jesus
Gonzalez closes this book collection with "Las Cobijas/The Blankets." a bilingual narrative that
illustrates a wise humility that is at once matrilineal and material, born of a cuencente-nary of
difficult survival. Collectively, these chapters make the case that rhetorics of the Americas
significantly challenge the vanguard narrative of Occidentalism. Beyond European modernity, a
plurality of rhetorical strategies and points of origin are possible. Yet neocolonial powers
continue to de-authorize the Americas within a largely unquestioned intellectual dichotomy in
higher education: that of "high" and "low" theory. For example, "high" theories that inform
"Classical Rhetoric" and "Modern Rhetorical Theorv" hold an institutional and historical ethos
that is denied to those of the Americas. Likewise, in rhetoric curricula at every level, the
Americas hold little academic importance when placed next to modes of Athenian and Roman
argumentation. Rhetoric and Composition's macro-narrative "from Ancient Greece to Modern
America" continues to imagine the origins of rational thought and communication in the
minds of Western thinkers. This foundational myth signifies a colonial supremacy that is
incompatible with the very possibility of achieving cultural pluralities. At the same time, a
mere inclu-sion of the scholarship in this book would only add to the content of an
Occidentalist narrative and not reform the construction of the narrative itself. Even the very
concepts of "alternative rhetorics" and "rhetorics of difference" are already embedded in the
Anglo- and Euro-centered idea of modernity. Therefore, moves toward decolonizing the field's
horizons, toward moving beyond its cultural and epistemological flaws, require rhetorical
mediations that operate out of Western reason, mediations that originate from te-ixtli, from
the voices, testimonies, communicative strategies, and perspectives of the colonized. These
strategic moves not only affirm our own ideologies, cultural meanings, and historical
narratives; but they also assert that the colonial foundations of the West and its presumptions
Gonzaga Debate In 36
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of universal hegemony must be rethought and retold. These are the activities that may bring
us toward "new" rhetorics and rhetorical inquiries across the Americas, the Caribbean, and
beyond.
The aff 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.
Gonzaga Debate In 37
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3 Tier Process
Breaking down Eurocentrism in Political Science, specifically, is possible through
a 3-tier method of analysis that helps bring advocacy to marginalized voices and
to break down normativity on issues of “race, class, gender, and sexuality”
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
Conclusion
This paper has sought to argue for a distinctive postcolonial approach to the study of politics.
My argument rests, on the one hand, on a critique of dominant Eurocentric concepts and
theories within post-WWII American political science, and on the other hand, on outlining
alternatives to these theories and concepts that can help decolonize the production of socialscientific knowledge on the postcolonial world. The argument acquires a fresh significance
when one considers that, unlike disciplines such as history, anthropology or literary criticism,
political science has been singularly heedless to postcolonial criticism until date.
In defense of my argument, I clarified at the outset what I meant by a postcolonial approach to
politics, drawing on Said’s Orientalism, the Subaltern Studies collective, and other critical anticolonial writings. Thereafter, I deconstructed mainstream political science literatures on
democracy and civil wars in postcolonial contexts, highlighting how their latent assumptions
and prejudices perpetuate the colonial tendency to take the Euroamerican experience as
natural and universal in contrast to the inchoate articulations of modernity in the ex-colonial
world. Even as I critiqued these bodies of scholarship from a postcolonial perspective, I
consciously noted voices in the margins of the discipline that were, indeed, friendly to
postcolonial critiques. These marginal voices, I believe, offer us the best opportunity to
articulate a full-fledged postcolonial approach to the study of politics. Such an approach can
take many forms, but I sketched three possibilities in particular: firstly, to deconstruct the
Eurocentric biases and blindspots of comparative political science insofar as it concerns
knowledge claims about the postcolonial world; secondly, to offer in-depth, bottom-up
empirical alternatives to mainstream American political science research on politics in
postcolonial settings; thirdly, to redefine key political concepts so that they reflect not merely
European or American experiences and practices, but those from across the postcolonial world
too.
A postcolonial approach to politics is, therefore, a kind of radical intellectual practice that
challenges the dominant ways of producing knowledge about the so-called developing or Third
world. It is an approach that is in solidarity with other radical intellectual trends within
political science that, for example, make the case for interpretive methods, critical studies of
race, class, gender, and sexuality, and constructivist theories of politics and society.
Decolonizing knowledge within political science , in other words, ought to be seen as part of
a wider project of decentering the discipline by undermining what is seen today as dominant
or “mainstream.”
Gonzaga Debate In 38
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Gonzaga Debate In 39
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Rethinking Solves
Only a “radical rethinking of knowledge and social identities authored and
authorized by colonialism and Western domination” can hope to “undo
Eurocentrism”- This thought process is key to grant political agency to those
silenced by colonialism
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
Following Said, the Subaltern Studies collective significantly influenced humanistic disciplines
that had welcomed the postcolonial turn marked by Said’s Orientalism. The Subalternists, led by
Ranajit Guha, drew attention to the “small voice of history” : poor peasants, migrants,
industrial workers, indigenous peoples and others who had suffered under colonialism and its
aftermath. When, in 1988, a collection of essays selected from the first five volumes of
Subaltern Studies was published in the United States, Edward Said himself wrote the foreword
to the volume. For Guha and his compatriots, following the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio
Gramsci, “ subaltern” groups were locked in a range of struggles against the forces of
colonialism, but social scientists and historians had hitherto neglected their political agency
in everyday forms of resistance as well as epochal moments of rebellion. Although focused
originally on India, the Subalternists soon initiated South-South dialogues with scholars of
Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa . They also made common cause with fringe political
scientists studying peasant rebellions and resistance across the world, most notably James C.
Scott. Collectively, the Subalternists and their allies sought a “ radical rethinking of knowledge
and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and Western domination ” in
order to “undo the Eurocentrism produced by the institution of the West’s trajectory, its
appropriation of the other as History” . In this manner, they complemented Said’s criticisms by
articulating a distinctly subaltern perspective on postcolonial politics, culture, and history that
would inform historical and social scientific scholarship.
Gonzaga Debate In 40
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Historical Focus Breaks Down Eurocentrism
Discussions of history are key to break down and understand the impacts of
euro centrism such as racism
Araújo and Maeso, University of Coimbra, Center for Social Studies, 12
(Marta, Silvia, August 31, 2012, Ethinic and Radical Studies journal “History textbooks, racism
and the critique of Eurocentrism: beyond rectification or compensation”
http://peer.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/72/66/61/PDF/PEER_stage2_10.1080%252F01419870.2011.60
0767.pdf accesed 7-10-13, KR)
The development of multiperspectivity has also been linked, mainly in European contexts (CoE,
1995, 1996; Stradling, 2001), to the concern with the transformation of national narratives,7 the
misuses of history for nationalistic purposes, and particularly with the abuses of nationalistic
history – paramount to dictatorial regimes (eventually overcome by processes of
democratisation). In Portugal, illustrative of such debate is the general focus of research on
textbooks on the dictatorial period of Estado Novo, which results in taking dictatorships as the
time of the misuses of history and in constructing as burlesque the excess of nationalism (e.g.
Almeida, 1991; Carvalho, 1997; Santos, 2007). For instance, Santos (2007) focuses on this
period to demonstrate how textbooks ‘influenced (children’s) world visions’ (p. 358). She
argues that ‘It was, thus, a nationalistic and imperialistic spirit that was being attempted to
inculcate through history’ (id.). Such approach, albeit unintentionally, paves way to the idea
that the scientific production of history was unproblematic (i.e. neutral, not-biased) both
before Estado Novo and following democratisation in the mid-1970s.
We thus defend a broader understanding of Eurocentrism that allows for the
contextualisation of textbooks as part of an epistemology of history. As Nancy Lesko and Leslie
Bloom (1998) have argued regarding multicultural education, what it is at stake is not so much
the confrontation between different versions of history, but rather the production of
interpretations which can unsettle positivist approaches to the neutrality of scientific
knowledge and the presumption of irrationality/ignorance lying behind certain ‘judgments’,
such as racism. This perspective can give us an analytical path beyond the ‘too-easy Westandthe-rest polarization’ (Spivak, 2003: 39) that merely reproduces a centre/periphery historical
narrative.
2. Portuguese History textbooks: a ‘race’/power evasive discourse
We consider Portuguese textbooks as an example of the contemporary configuration of
Eurocentrism, and therefore in this article we engage with the specificities of debates on
colonialism, ‘race’/racism and nationhood in that context.
In Portugal, the politics of history teaching and textbooks is rooted in the republican
educational project. Since the second half of the 19th Century, and strongly influenced by
positivist pedagogy, it constructed a ‘nationalist and colonialist discourse’ with the hope of
‘regenerating’ the country (Proença, 2001: 50-51). Hence political discourses and particularly
republican campaigns over colonial questions, marked by the impact of the 1890 British
Ultimatum, invested in the imaginary of ‘‘Portugal’s golden age [...] equated with the Expansion
and the spirit of the ‘Discoveries’; an epoch of national affirmation but also of scientific
pioneering and ‘modernity’’ (Vakil, 1996: 44-45). Moreover, colonial discourses and legislation
enacted the thesis of Portuguese exceptionality. This could supposedly be seen in its
Universalist and humanist colonialism and in the racial tolerance of its national character. This
Gonzaga Debate In 41
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was an argument reinvented by the dictatorial regime in the 1950s (Alexandre, 1999; Castelo,
1998)8 and since the late 1980s by sectors of the political administration and the academia
(Vakil, 1996).
Gonzaga Debate In 42
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AT: You ≠ Solve
The Neg’s claim that our cause lacks support and will fail is the same posturing
that has been a Eurocentric excuse to exclude our discourse from political
science and is another link to our kritik of Eurocentrism
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
Colonialism/Postcolonialism and Political Science
It is widely appreciated now that mainstream American political science has been impervious
to humanistic and interpretive approaches. These approaches are believed to lack “rigor” and
“objectivity,” keywords used for “gate-keeping…to control the terms of debate and to
regulate what research is going to be accorded the status of science”. As far as postcolonial
approaches are concerned, these are rarely, if ever, entertained in the discipline. Until date,
only a single work of contemporary political science has dared to explicitly use the term
“postcolonial” in its title. The upshot of these tendencies is, I argue, the perpetuation of
colonial ideas and theories within the discipline today. Moreover, the continued salience of
these ideas and theories distorts understandings of the ex-colonial world and prevents the
emergence of a decolonized, engaged political science. Two case studies, drawing on the study
of democracy and civil wars, elucidate my argument below.
Gonzaga Debate In 43
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Latin America Key
Latin America is the ONLY starting point- it is the root cause of Eurocentric
genocide and modernity- The topic is key and our movement is the only way to
evacuate the concept of “Latin America” and solve the root cause of
Eurocentrism and decolonize our knowledge production
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.14, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
From Mexico to Argentina, the violence of the European culture of conquest and colonization
continued after decolonization in Latin America’s own self-fashioning. The nation-state’s
appearance as the agent of civilization in the nineteenth-century involves the reformation of
Eurocentric modernity in which the racialized violence linked to capitalism is rationalized as the
natural expansion of universal reason and scientific truth (Coronil, 1997, p. 74). ¶ The civilizing
alterization experience of Latin America offers a way of thinking differently about the politics
and ethics of knowledge, language, and education relevant to the experiences and histories of
all locations within the modern/colonial world system, including the system’s origin and
center – Western Europe and North America. ¶ The “discovery” of America and the genocide
of Indians and African slaves are the very foundations of “modernity,” more so than the
French or Industrial Revolutions. Better yet, they constitute the darker and hidden face of
modernity, “coloniality.” Thus, to excavate the “idea of Latin America” is, really to
understand how the West was born and how the modern world order was founded.
(Mignolo, 2005, p. xiii)¶
Latin America is the key starting point
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.10, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
¶ The modern/colonial world system perspective is part of a contemporary Latin American
post-Eurocentric critique of modernity (Mignolo, 2000a, 2005, 2007; Dussel, 1993, 1995, 1998,
2000; Quijano, 2000, 2007, 2008; Escobar, 2007; Morana, Dussel, & Jauregui, 2008). As
described above, from this perspective, Eurocentric modernity is interpreted as a civilizing
project of incorporation and marginalization, based upon a civilization-savagism paradigm.
This critique shares with work in postcolonial criticism, historical sociology, and historical
geography the claim that Western Europe constituted itself as "civilization" through a political
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economy of alterization of its Others (Spivak, 1999; Delanty, 1995; Agnew, 2003). Alterity is not
just the opposite of the “same”, but the incorporation of the “same” into the fashioning of the
“other” (Mignolo, 2001, p. 184). This division between civilized and uncivilized, referred to here
as the civilization-savagism paradigm, is a consequence of early modern European identity
formation. European identity formation during the sixteenth century is the beginning of the
modern project to organize the planet according to the ideals of European civilization that
continue to dominate the present world order (Delanty, 1995). The European mission to
civilize the planet is essentially characterized by the need to protect civilization from savagism
and to design institutions that incorporate the savage into civilization. Differences between
the European image of the civilized self and the un-civilized Other are interpreted as
deficiencies and therefore requiring the subjectification of the Other to the civilizing processes
of Europeanization. Described further in part four below, Christianize, civilize, modernize and
marketize label four successive redemptive-civilizational missions of Eurocentric modernity
(Mignolo, 2000). If the Other cannot be assimilated, they become dispensible within the
universalized binary civilizational project, i.e., barbarian, savage or primitive, undeveloped,
non-competitive. ¶ “Latin America” for example, was constituted as the Other of both
Europe and the United States. European categories shape the “idea” of Latin America both
from inside (the Europeanized component of its population) and from outside (the “othering”
to which Latin America has been subjected by the Western European and US gaze) (Mignolo,
2005). ¶ The self-fashioning of Europe as the home of modernity has been premised on the
colonization of the vast regions of the world that are seen as backward and in need of
civilization. The ambivalent Latin American discourse of modernity, in its rejection of European
domination but its internalization of its civilizing mission, has taken the form of a process of selfcolonization which assumes distinct forms in different political contexts and historical periods.
(Coronil, 1997, p. 73) ¶ ¶ Latin America participated in the European civilizational project
continued by Europeans of Latin descent, in which Indians and Afros (with the exceptions of
those from Haiti and Martinique) did not participate (Ribeiro, 1971; Rojas, 2002; Mignolo, 2005).
Postindependence Columbia (1849-1878) for example, according the Cristina Rojas, was
characterized by a desire for civilization on the part of enlightened creole elite (2002, p. xxvi). ¶
In the nineteenth century Columbia, the “will to civilization” was related to the prospect of the
disappearance of old systems of hierarchy and power and the emergence of new forms that
would imitate the ideal of European civilization. The ideal of civilization materialized in the
privileging of certain economic practices, in religious and educational ideals, in habits and dress
practices, and in the dream of a civilizacion mestiza in which whiteness would remove the traces
of black and indigenous past. (Rojas, 2002, p. xxvi)
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Narratives
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Father Kino
We begin with the story of the mural of Father Kino - A supposed fearless
explorer, missionary, and colonizer – colonizing the natives of southern Mexico.
Via the power of religious instruction and technological diffusion Father Kino
was able to correct the Natives of the “errors” of their ways into “productive”
and “organized” peoples. The impact to this colonization is gender based
hierarchy construction which has led to an ingrained framework of justified
racism and sexism.
Sundberg, University of Helsinki political science professor, 9
(Jan, Published 2009, “Eurocentrism”, International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Volume
3, Pg. 639-40, JB)
The mural painted by Nereo de la Pena tells a classic¶ Eurocentric story about history,
development, and colonialism. In the segment pictured here, Father Kino is on¶ the left, a
Native American group on the right (see¶ Figure 1). Each is portrayed prior to their encounter,¶
which is depicted in the space between them. Father¶ Kino is shown sitting on his horse,
gazing into the distance, surveying the lands claimed by the Spanish Crown.¶ The maps
looming above Father Kino are indicative of¶ his assignment as Royal Cartographer; as
explained in the¶ plaque, Father Kino was a ‘‘respected scientist who discovered that Baja
California was a peninsula and not an¶ island as the cartographers of the time erroneously
believed.’’ Despite the heat of the Sonora Desert, Father¶ Kino is fully clothed in heavy black
robes. As evidenced¶ by his solitary stance in the desert, Father Kino is a¶ fearless explorer,
missionary, and colonizer.
To the far right of Father Kino is pictured a group of¶ Native Americans – portrayed as a nuclear
family – from¶ Pimeria Alta, the Spanish colonists’ name for northern¶ Sonora and southern
Arizona. In contrast to Father Kino,¶ the native people are representatives of their kind rather¶
than individuals with names. They are scantily clad: the¶ children are completely naked while
the adults cover¶ their genitals with rough skins; the woman’s prominent¶ breasts are bare.
Lying at the feet of this native group are¶ the fruits of their technological achievements:
baskets and¶ pottery. Their agriculture is portrayed as a chaotic patch¶ of maize stalks; they
appear to have no other food. The¶ man and boy hold small, rustic looking weapons. Directly¶
above the adult male’s head is a native symbol (although¶ it looks more like a brand once used
to mark slaves and¶ cattle as property).
The encounter between them is pictured between¶ these two sets of images. Here, Father Kino
is portrayed¶ as a teacher: he instructs a native man, now wearing¶ pants, how to use a horsedrawn plow, a technology used¶ in the Mediterranean. The result is a tidy, neatly arranged
agricultural field. Through religious instruction¶ and technological diffusion, the image
suggests, Native¶ Americans are civilized and transformed into orderly and¶ productive
individuals.
In what ways does this mural represent Eurocentrism in¶ action? In other words, how does this
mural reflect and¶ reproduce a Eurocentric story? First, the mural suggests¶ that history and
development are driven by Europe.¶ America is nothing – naked and unorganized – until¶
awoken by a European man. Like many of its kind, this¶ Eurocentric story of development
reflects gendered hierarchies: America is feminized, a Sleeping Beauty awaiting¶ the touch and
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tutelage of her Prince. Second, Father Kino¶ appears to explore and colonize alone, without
the assistance or participation of native peoples as guides or¶ allies. Hence, the cartographic
knowledge he produces is¶ portrayed as the solitary outcome of his explorations. Europeans
appear to be innately capable of conquest,¶ colonization, and accurate cartography. Third,
development is unidirectional: innovation flows from Europe to¶ others. It is Father Kino who
brings technology to the¶ Americans, who only have baskets and pottery, which are¶
associated with women’s work. In this way, native technologies are further feminized, while
European technology is pictured as a horse-drawn plow driven by a man.¶ Fourth, Europe gives,
but is not transformed by the process. As the embodiment of European civilization, scientific
knowledge, colonial power, and religious authority,¶ Father Kino is already a fully formed
individual. It is the¶ naked, unnamed, and undeveloped native peoples who¶ need formation .
Through such framings, European and¶ Indian become fixed identities, hierarchically
organized¶ racial categories that purport to tell the truth about their¶ inner qualities. Fifth, the
relationship between adult and¶ child is used as a metaphor for development and mapped¶
onto the racial categories of European and Indian. In the¶ mural, native peoples are infantilized
and pictured as¶ Father Kino’s pupils; in religious terms, he is literally their¶ father. Through his
instruction, they are guided through¶ the stages of growth to become mature adults. Finally,¶
colonialism is pictured as a benevolent process and is¶ about spreading the fruits of European
knowledge and¶ development. The violence of colonialism is concealed¶ and rendered
unimportant to the overall story of progress.¶ The mural points to key elements of
Eurocentrism.¶ First, Eurocentric modes of representation produce polarized and hierarchical
stories featuring the West and the¶ Rest as the primary characters. Regions outside of Europe¶
only come on the stage of world history when they are¶ colonized by Europe; their cultural and
technological¶ achievements may be appropriated, but their contributions¶ to modern
formations are occluded. As a consequence of¶ such representational practices, world regions
and cultures¶ appear as autonomous, bounded units, each with their own¶ characteristics. The
interconnections between them are¶ rendered invisible or unimportant. Second, Eurocentric¶
representations make the West the beacon of enlightenment and progress by concealing and
denying the violence, genocide, and dispossession of colonialism. Western¶ myths of
modernity, Enrique Dussel argues, justify colonialism in terms of the gifts of enlightenment and
civilization given to its victims.¶
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Gonzaga Debate In 49
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2AC Answers To:
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Framework
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2AC FW Block Draft
1. Our entire 1AC is a disad to their way of thinking—how we engage the topic
is a secondary question to how the topic has been formed-Normal policy
measures preclude discussions of colonialism- challenging the Eurocentric
nature of the resolution leads to the best form of solvency for plans, that’s
Quijano 2k
2. We meet –the affirmative proposes Cuba as an example of how Eurocentrism is the primary groundwork of American policies and action. we engage
the topic in a different way and we offer a way to solve—they’ve conceded that
our relationships to Latin America is rooted in euro centrism, where wash out
cultures in order to replace them with our own
3. Counter-interpretation— This debate should serve to find the best
epistemology
Fiat is a paradox; by hypnotizing on federal government action towards others
we only consider the Eurocentric mindset prevent our selves from actual
solvency, only through the affirmative are we able to uncover an antieurocentric mindset
We will defend all 8 minutes of the 1AC as a textual artifact, if and only if the
negative unconditionally defends theirs—solves all of their ground claims
4. The 1AC impact turns their conception of policymaking –
a. the Quijano card says that ONLY the affirmative through debates of
eurocentrism can we lead to sound policys in the future
b. As policy-makers only view things from this imperialist mindset. A
policy maker is supposed to look for what is the better policy for
everyone, not just those in his interest
5. Theoretical Reasons to prefer
a. Our interpretation is most predictable and provides topic specific
education– Mignolo explains that our history of European imperialism via
“engagement” means we only degrade the cultues of the natives and replace it with
our own
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b. Ground-by forcing us to read a plan text the negative takes away
affirmative ground for questioning the presuppositions of the resolution
and economic engagement projects-we provide them with plenty of
ground for criticism, topicality, counter advocacies, and disadvantageswe don’t skew strats by not reading a plan text
c. Brightline-We have provide a clear line as to what should and should
not be included and debated about in policy debate-by changing the way
we view our engagements on an epistemological level, we provide a
better idea of what should and should not be debated about
6. The 1AC is a prerequisite to education and fairness
a.) Their education arguments are rooted in eurocentrism—they cause inauthentic
education and justify bleaching cultures in order to pass a plan, that Besse. Our 1AC is
a starting point on re-doing our relationships with others,
b.) This means that the 1AC is a bigger internal link to their impacts – questioning our
relationship to others is the only way to solve issues of the status quo
c.) Fairness presumes that we can account for all people. Their calculus of fairness only
assumes those who benefit from imperialism, and ignore cultures of the indigenous
and others who are marginalized by euro centrism
7. Fiat is illusory – their interpretation of debate is a fantasy. We never really
pass plans. Turns out most debaters don’t even become policymakers. The
most productive role of the ballot is to analyze the ways in which we
communicate and interact with other people.
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AT: T - USFG
Status quo education endorses impacts like euro centrism and racism because
of governmental attempts to promote power.
Araújo and Maeso, University of Coimbra, Center for Social Studies, 12 (Marta,
Silvia, August 31, 2012, Ethinic and Radical Studies journal “History textbooks, racism and the
critique of Eurocentrism: beyond rectification or compensation”
http://peer.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/72/66/61/PDF/PEER_stage2_10.1080%252F01419870.2011.60
0767.pdf accesed 7-10-13, KR)
All textbooks analysed refer to racism for the first time in the period at the turn of the
20thcentury, focused on ‘Imperialism and Colonialism’ – emphasising the British and French
cases. Subsequently racism is thoroughly discussed as a prejudice characteristic of the Italian
and German totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s (LH9-1; NH9). Racism is only mentioned
again in relation to the ‘situation of minorities’ in Western societies during the 1950s and
1960s, illustrated by the Ku-Klux-Klan as an example of a ‘racist organisation’ (LH9-2: 46). We
thus consider that textbooks reinforce a Eurocentric concept of racism that associates it with
‘some form of extremism or exceptionalism, rather than something more conventional and ¶
mainstream’ (Hesse, 2004: 14; see also Gilroy, 1992). This linkage of racism and racial ¶ ¶
discourses to very specific projects, such as 19th-century’s Imperialist enterprise, locates
racism ¶ ¶ in the colonial territories while conceiving these as outside and unrelated to
Europe. Such ¶ ¶ approach hinders a broader understanding of ‘the interaction between racism
as a modern ¶ ¶ political project and the European nation-state’ (Lentin, 2004: 36), beyond the
Nazi State and ¶ ¶ anti-Semitism. Following Barnor Hesse, this can be seen as the double bind
that operates in ¶ ¶ the (Eurocentric) concept of racism: ¶ ¶
the concept of racism is doubly-bound into revealing (nationalism) and concealing (liberalism),
¶ ¶ foregrounding (sub-humanism) and foreclosing (non-Europeanism), affirming (extremist ¶
¶ ideology) and denying (routine governmentality) (Hesse, 2004: 14). Furthermore, it is
fundamental to emphasise the historical shrinkage that confines racial ¶ ¶ governmentality to
the so called ‘new Imperialism’ (LH9-1: 14) and the Western European ¶ ¶ countries ‘greed for
Africa’: ‘Europeans considered it was their duty to bring their ‘superior ¶ ¶ civilisation’ to the
less-developed peoples. Africa was thus the most desired continent’ (LH9-1: ¶ ¶ 16). The
textbooks analysed do not consider racial differentiation and racist governmentality ¶ ¶ within
the Portuguese and Spanish ‘Expansion’ and the systems of slave trade and slavery. ¶ ¶ Slave
trade is mainly depicted as part of the ‘circulation of new products’ between Europe and ¶ ¶ the
other continents. Following Ellen Swartz’s study of American history textbooks, we also ¶ ¶
consider that in the Portuguese textbooks analysed, ‘slavery discourse (…) generally serves to ¶ ¶
justify and normalise the system of slavery’ (1992: 345). Slavery thus appears ‘more as a ¶ ¶
necessity, not as a choice, implying that slavery was natural, inevitable, and unalterable’ (Ibid: ¶ ¶
345)
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AT: Must Have a Plan
We have a plan Freeley, Late, John Carroll University & Steinberg, University of Miami 8
(Austin j. Freeley, and David L Steinberg, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for
Reasoned Decision Making, p.215)
Plan The affirmative's method of solving the problems claimed in the justification as needs or
harms. It must produce the advantages claimed by the affirmative.
This plan text driven style make debate worse – rewards focus on process,
implementation and contingency over crucial ethical questions. This
educational impact trumps
Duffy ’83
[Bernard, Rhetoric PhD – Pitt, Communication Prof – Cal Poly, “The Ethics of Argumentation in
Intercollegiate Debate: A Conservative Appraisal,” National Forensics Journal, Spring, pp 65-71,
accessed at http://www.nationalforensics.org/journal/vol1no1-6.pdf]
Debate at its worst is an activity which promotes self abnegation rather than self discovery.
Intercollegiate debate ought to educate students in more than structure, credibility, and
logical reasoning. It should teach them the effective use of arguments from definition as well
as arguments from consequence, circumstance and authority. Definitional arguments, better
than others, orient students toward their own beliefs and principles. Logic, fact, and authority
wither without ethics, and debate without ethical judgments sounds hollow and contrived.
I am not proposing that debaters only make arguments they believe in. Students also learn from
articulating the principles which underlie positions they oppose. To ignore principle as a line of
argument and focus instead on mere fact and authority makes debate less effective as a
method of exploring one's own preferences and values.
It might be argued that debate is not dialectic, and that my criticisms require debate to be
something we cannot make it. After all the sophists, not Plato, gave birth to debate. Protagoras
saw it as a lesson in sophistic relativism. If one believes in the relativism of the sophists, it would
be absurd for debaters to search after principles upon which to base their arguments. Of what
use, one might ask. are the eloquently expressed propositions of a bygone era to a scientific age
winch bases decisions on calculable fact? For today's neosophists it would be foolish indeed to
think of debate as a philosophical or ethical enterprise. But in this case, why talk about the
ethics of debate at all? If the term only means observing the rules of the game, it is not
particularly significant. Debate should be a thoroughly ethical enterprise. It should educate
students in ethics, as well as requiring them to follow the rules.
Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of choice. Should we as coaches and judges permit the
steady dismantling of debate as a means of educating students? Ought we to praise students
for making sensationalistic arguments, and for relying on appeals to authority, while ignoring
arguments from principle? Should we give ballots to speakers who are the most adept at
parroting back the commonplaces they have learned and to those who can read evidence with
the greatest speed and the least visible understanding? Should we encourage debate as a
contest of evidence rather than as a meeting of minds? No matter how much lip service is given
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to the educational values of intercollegiate debate, it cannot now be claimed as an activity
which forces students to reflect upon or use their ethical beliefs in the formulation of
arguments.
We have an ethical obligation to question Eurocentrism, this is a disad to their
framework
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 postmodern 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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AT: Do it on the Neg
The affirmative speech is key to reveal the depoliticized representations of the
topic
Araújo and Maeso, University of Coimbra, Center for Social Studies, 12 (Marta,
Silvia, August 31, 2012, “Ethinic and Radical Studies” journal “History textbooks, racism and the
critique of Eurocentrism: beyond rectification or compensation”
http://peer.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/72/66/61/PDF/PEER_stage2_10.1080%252F01419870.2011.60
0767.pdf accesed 7-10-13, KR)
It is our view that this liberal tale of a ‘kaleidoscope’ of perspectives has been convincingly
deemed insufficient and inefficient, as the mere inclusion of ‘other’ perspectives is not
sufficient to overcome the hegemony of certain narratives. We thus argue for the need to
open up the debate on knowledge and power, engaging with the frames of interpretation
within which such perspectives are to be included. Thus, following Cornel West’s argument,
this article aims at showing the theoretical and analytical relevance of the notion of
Eurocentrism for understanding the ways in which ‘race’ and racism are rendered (in)visible in
the debate on nationhood, citizenship and democracy. We argue that the effectiveness of
Eurocentrism lies not so much in prejudiced representations of the ‘other’, but in the
depoliticisation of power relations that make plausible such (mis)representations. According
to Wendy Brown (2006): Depoliticization involves removing a political phenomenon from
comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the powers that produce
and contour it. No matter its particular form and mechanics, depoliticization always eschews
power and history in the representation of its subjects (p. 15, original emphasis).
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Framework Links to Eurocentrism
The negatives attempts to bracket us in under the guise of “education” only
reinforces the violent epistemology we try to change- vote aff on a risk that we
can change the status quo
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.6, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
At the center of the cultural program of Eurocentric modernity is an ongoing redemptive
civilizing mission of hierarchical assimilation and corresponding subalternization. ¶ Colonial
legacies are still alive and well as central strategies of subalternization. Subalternity,… was not
only economic but intellectual as well, as far as a concept of humanity linked to intelligence first
and the concept of reason later were attributed to certain groups of people and denied to
others. In parallel form, certain languages were considered appropriate to express certain levels
of intelligence or reason, and other languages were considered inferior, as the people who
spoke them. (Mignolo, 2001b, p. 178) ¶ The epistemic and ontological violence of
subalternization was and continues to be obscured behind and legitimated in the rhetoric of
modernity and the practices and policies of modern western education, i.e., reducing the
“achievement gap”; leaving “no child left behind”; and most recently, “race to the top” (Dillon,
2009). ¶ This post-Eurocentric, transmodern critique initiates an alternative account of
Eurocentric modernity that includes the largely overlooked power/knowledge relations of
coloniality that emerged with European colonialism in the sixteenth century. Coloniality
describes a specific kind of imperial/colonial relation that brought imperialism and capitalism
together (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2008, p. 110). Coloniality is a global model of
power/knowledge relations that names the hegemony of European knowledge and being and
the stratified incorporation and subalternization of all cultures and peoples into a Eurocentric
cultural project commonly known as “modernity” or “modern civilization”. Modern western
education, both metropolitan and colonial, emerged and remains embedded within this
inherently violent and no longer sustainable historical structure of colonial power/knowledge
relations. ¶ The construction and expansion of western modernity as a universalized
civilizational project led to the hegemony of cultural ways of knowing and being captured in the
term Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is “a specific rationality or perspective of knowledge that
was made globally hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming other previous or different
conceptual formations and their respective concrete knowledges, as much in Europe as in the
rest of the world” (Quijano, 2000, pp. 549-550). As the conceptual and epistemic framework
of western modernity, Eurocentrism is comprised of layers of mostly tacit presuppositions
embedded in discursive practices that constitute modern western education. Since the
European Renaissance, the conceptualization and production of knowledge have been
fundamental aspects of the western civilizational missions to redeem the world by imposing an
ideal model of society, economy, and being. Scientific rationality for example, became a global
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hegemonic model over the past five hundred years, as it denied rationality of all other forms of
knowledge that did not conform to its own epistemological principles and methodological rules
(Goonatilake, 1998; Santos, 2007d; Harding, 2008; Kincheloe, 2008).
The negatives education is an attempt to assimilate- don’t fall for their tricks
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.9, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
Eurocentrism involves the epistemological conceptualization of what constitutes “knowledge”
within a categorical imperative to “educate” through and into this particular conception of
knowledge . Non-western forms of knowledge that could not be assimilated were effectively
eliminated (Santos, 2007a). Europeans in their “civilizing” expansion (“England has
transformed itself into the missionary of civilization in the world,” Hegel [1970, 538] stated
triumphantly), thus felt justified in covering over, excluding, and ignoring as nonexistent all
cultures that preceded theirs, as well as those contemporary civilizations (those “peoples
without history”) not worthy of notice by “Western Culture .” This process, by which modern
Reason “excluded,” negated, and confined to “Exteriority” all it considered worthless in terms
of the modern values and “universal” criteria of civilization by which it deemed everything
should be evaluated, rapidly extended itself from the beginning of the nineteenth century to
all the non-European cultures. The results were surprisingly effective, so much so that those
who were negated – given their evident industrial inferiority – applauded through their
neocolonial elites (educated in Europe and later in the United States) a Eurocentric ideology that
until very recently has had no critical opponent. (Dussel, 2002, p. 232) ¶ The modern/colonial
world system perspective interprets western civilization as a universalized civilizational
complex in which state sponsored education plays a central role in ongoing civilizing projects
that involve the conceptualization and organization of “knowledge”. ¶ From this perspective,
the purposes of education should now include unlearning the cultural biases of the dominant
Eurocentric cosmology, particularly the western system of knowledge, and opening the western
imagination to the multiple ways of perceiving and conceiving the world that have been
occluded within the Eurocentric imaginary. Imaginary is used here to refer to all the ways a
culture has of conceiving and perceiving itself and the world.
Their framework is an attempt to disguise Eurocentrism and make it invisible the decolonization of education is the only way to solve
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.20, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
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Toward the end of the nineteenth century civilization in the singular gave way to civilizations in
the plural (Mazlish, 2004; Cox, 2002), but the recognition of different civilizations remained
within the Eurocentric horizon of interpretation. ¶ But imperialism and its accompanying
scholarship now defined the non-European civilizations as objects of knowledge. European
civilization (and its American offshoot) was to be thought of as dynamic, an active agent inspired
by the doctrine of Progress. Non-European civilizations were thought of as passive and fixed.
(Cox, 2002, pp. 158-159) ¶ ¶ With the advent of World War I in 1919, followed by the Great
Depression and the emergence of Facism, and then World War II in 1938, immediately followed
by the Cold War, all the way into the early 1990s, the recognition of different civilizations was
suppressed (Cox, 2002). The recognition of multiple civilizations today continues within the
Eurocentric framework, as in Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis and
geographical classification, where non-western civilizations remain in the past and need to be
brought into the present (Huntington, 1996). This universalist conception of civilization that
emerged with and continues to characterize western consciousness is no longer as dominant
today. There is both a changing awareness of civilizations in western thought (as this essay
reflects) along with a revival of civilizational consciousness in opposition to the latest
universalist conception – the global market civilization (Cox, 2002). Modern western schooling
however, along with the modern conceptualization of knowledge, remain mostly embedded
within a normative notion of civilization as either singular or hierarchically plural. In both
notions, “modernity” remains the ideal and model to be emulated. ¶ Until recently, in the field
of education, modernity has largely been interpreted within this Eurocentric horizon of western
civilization, whether plural or singular. Much of Anglo-American educational historiography, for
example, including the North American revisionist historians, is embedded within the
macronarrative of western civilization understood from the perspective of Eurocentric
modernity (Hook, 1946; Boyd, 1973; Butts, 1973; Gaither, 2003; Popkewitz, Pereyra & Franklin,
2001). The history of modernity and modern education have been inadequately interpreted
because modernity has been misunderstood as an exclusively European phenomenon, from an
exclusively European perspective.¶ The idea of modernity, first of all, has been conceived from
the perspective of European history and has been framed based on the historical process and
subjective experience of Western European countries and people – more specifically, on the
complicity between Western Christiandom and the emergence of capitalism as we know it
today. Europe and modernity have become synonomous and essential components of modern
European identity. Coloniality, instead, has been wiped out and made invisible in the
Eurocentered narratives as an encumbrance for the glorious march of modernity. (Mignolo,
2008)¶ ¶ Modernity has been misunderstood as separate from European colonialism and thus
the power/knowledge relations of western modernity that emerged with colonialism remain
invisible. Theories of modernity and postmodernity have largely remained uninformed by the
impact of colonialism on the construction of the conceptual apparatus of modernity and the
formation of modern power relations (Said, 1979; Pratt, 2002; Escobar, 2007; Castro-Gomez,
2008). The conceptualization and organization of “knowledge”, including the K-12 and college
and university curricula, along with the cultural ethos of schooling, remain within this
Eurocentric macronarrative of western civilization. “Science,” “mathematics,” “history,” and
“language” education continue to serve as the “core” subjects of this civilizational project (Kirch,
2007; Fasheh, 1991). ¶ Although the self-understanding of modern western schooling and the
modern system of knowledge remain embedded within the common sense narrative of
“modern civilization”, world-historical narratives are emerging today that are multi-civilizational
¶
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(Cox, 2002). Different civilizations are now considering themselves to be ontologically equal
(e.g., “because we are equal we have the right to be different”) and are resisting the continued
domination and oppression of western civilizational global designs under the latest rhetoric of
modernity. Epistemic decolonization has yet to occur, but a global movement to decolonize
knowledge and education has been emerging since the 1960s (Pieterse & Parekh, 1995;
Santos, 2006; Santos, et. al., 2007).
Education is nothing more than a tool of the colonizing movement to expand
their grip over power and knowledge
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P. 73-74, Accessed: 7/12/13, JB)
Each mission captures the overall ideology behind the purposes and practices of modern
schooling during particular historical periods in both European and non-European contexts.
These four educational missions of modernity/coloniality are powerful ideological formations
that constitute and impose particular views of the self, community, and world through the
production, representation, and dissemination of knowledge. According to Mignolo, these
four missions are global designs that constitute successive hegemonic cosmopolitan projects for
managing the planet (Mignolo, 2000a, p. 22). Beginning with the Spanish empire in the
sixteenth century, the history of the four civilizational missions is interlinked with the history
of successive world hegemonic states and their political, economic, and cultural leadership.
While “colonialism” refers to specific historical periods and places of imperial domination
(e.g., Spanish, Dutch, British, the US since the beginning of the twentieth century), “coloniality”
refers to the logical structure of colonial domination underlying the Spanish, Dutch, British, and
US control of the Atlantic economy and politics, and from there the control and management of
almost the entire planet. In each of the particular imperial periods of colonialism – whether led
by Spain (mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) or by England (from the nineteenth
century to World War II) or by the US (from the early twentieth century until now) – the same
logic was maintained; only power changed hands. (Mignolo, 2005, p. 7)
Each mission corresponds to particular European global designs that originate different local
histories responding to the same global designs (Mignolo, 2000a). The imposition and
adoption of global designs interact with local histories producing heterogeneous enactments,
not cultural homogeneity.
Gonzaga Debate In 61
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FW = Normative + Silencing
They create an even more exclusionary form of education
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.54, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
All forms of knowledge (both inside and outside of Europe) that did not fit into the epistemic
framework of modernity were classified as subordinate and marginalized within the
Eurocentric cultural-knowledge-power complex that became known as “modernity” and
“rationality”. The hegemony of the modern western “medical model” of health care is one
prominent example of this epistemological regime of truth (Foucault, 1973, 1980, 1983). Again,
according to Quijano, Eurocentrism is “a specific rationality or perspective of knowledge that
was made globally hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming other previous or different
conceptual formations and their respective concrete knowledges, as much in Europe as in the
rest of the world” (Quijano, 2000, pp. 549-550). ¶ As the epistemic framework of western
modernity, Eurocentrism involves the elimination and subordination of other ways of
¶
knowing and being through the imposition of a system of power/knowledge relations that
comprise the project of capitalist modernity and modern education. With the sixteenth
century emergence of the modern/colonial system of social classification came the need to
transform and design institutions that would maintain and expand the emerging
knowledge/power relations. The Eurocentric curriculum, along with the assimilating,
civilizational ethos of modern schooling, are among the most overt examples of modern
education’s direct and ongoing complicity in this patriarchal and racial system of domination and
exploitation. Maintaining or reproducing these racially organized knowledge/power relations
is the heart of redemptive-civilizational missions of Eurocentric modernity. The production and
dissemination of knowledge, since the European Renaissance, is a fundamental aspect of the
western civilizational missions to save the world by imposing an ideal model of society,
economy, and being. The constructions of modern/colonial schooling and the modern/colonial
curriculum are institutionalizations of this civilizational ideal. ¶ Eurocentrism is a rationale
that conceals the historical and contemporary relations between knowledge and power – the
power of modern/colonial oppression and domination.
Eurocentrism is at the core of exclusionary education- only by breaking it down
can we solve
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.56, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
Gonzaga Debate In 62
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This universalized system of social classification and differentiation is also evident in the
dichotomous categories of ordinary language found in the everyday discourses of schooling,
e.g., superior/inferior, rational/irrational, literate/illiterate, modern/traditional,
developed/underdeveloped, educated/uneducated, civilized/primitive, normal/abnormal,
etc. Barbarians, savages, primitives, underdeveloped, people of color, children, illiterates,
uneducated, at-risk, minorities, underachievers, etc., are all educational policy categories of
people subjected to the ongoing civilizing, assimilating, educational missions. Again, racism is
understood here as the classification and ranking of human beings according to a model that
corresponds with Euro-American ways of life and sensibilities (Mignolo, 1999b, 2003a). ¶ The
political purpose of compulsory education is assimilation of whole populations into EuroAmerican ways of life and sensibilities, carried out in the interest of the capitalist state,
embedded within an imperial interstate system, interlinked with the reproduction of the
capitalist world system. Modern schooling is designed to (re)produce modern subjects who will
in turn contribute to the reproduction of the modern/colonial world system through the
reproduction of the dominant cultures within particular nation-states. State mass compulsory
education is a political structure of individualization techniques and totalization procedures
(Foucault, 1983, p. 213). ¶ The school system,…is not bureaucratic and disciplinary by default,
having betrayed its mission of human self-realization to a repressive State or a rapacious
economy. It is positively and irrevocably bureaucratic and disciplinary, emerging as it does from
the exigencies of social governance and from the pastoral disciplines with which the
administrative State attempted to meet these exigencies. (Hunter, 1996, p. 149) ¶ Thoroughly
disguised behind the rhetoric of modernity (i.e., progress, freedom, self-governance, civilization,
scientific truth, rationality, equality of opportunity, meritocracy, etc.), western schooling is a
modern/colonial institution that legitimately reproduces a racially stratified social system
(Goldberg, 1993, 1994; Omni & Winant, 1986; Dirlik, 2008; Mignolo, 2003a; Grosfoguel, 2002;
Pepper, 2006; Giroux, 1998). From this perspective, modern western schooling practices are
modern/colonial institutions responsible for producing “civilized” subjectivities. Through the
imposition of this civilizing process, a racialized hierarchy of cultural assimilation that comprises
the national and international systems of labor is reproduced. ¶ “The global racial/ethnic
hierarchy of European and non-European is an integral part of the development of the capitalist
world system’s international division of labor” (Grosfoguel, 2002, p. 206). The “global
racial/ethnic hierarchy” and global racialization processes (Grosfoguel, 2002; Winant, 2001,
2006; Maldonado-Torres, 2004; Macedo & Gounari, 2006, Da Silva, 2007; Dirlik, 2008) refer to
classifications and rankings of human beings according to a model that corresponds with
Eurocentric ways of knowing and being (Mignolo, 2006). Mass education systems are among
the primary institutions responsible for the enculturation of Eurocentric ways of knowing and
being that rank order individuals according to their degree of assimilation into the dominant
geocultural system. In the taken-for-granted alliance between the state, business, and
education, degrees and diplomas exercise hegemonic control over access to employment and
life-course possibilities and identities. Eurocentric structures of knowledge and the Eurocentric
curriculum are at the center of these colonial, capitalist, and racialized, civilizational,
assimilation processes. ¶ Race and class are therefore historically interrelated through the
underlying epistemic logic of modern racism and the educational reproduction of the global
racial hierarchy (Goldberg, 1993, 2002; Silva, 2007). Epistemic and ontological differences are
European inventions that secure the supremacy of western rationality and devalue what
cannot be assimilated. ¶ At the epistemic level, the Western notion of rationality became a
Gonzaga Debate In 63
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universal measuring stick and a model of a rational human being. At the same time, it spilled
over ontology, as those who are not quite at the level of Western notion of rationality are lesser
being. This is, simply, the logic of racism: the invention of epistemic and ontological colonial
differences to secure the supremacy of Western rationality and devalue what cannot be
assimilated. And it is basically epistemological because it is invented and created rather than
“representing” epistemic and ontological differences in the world. (Mignolo, 2008, p. ) ¶
Differences (coloniality of differences) are constructed and hierarchically organized in order to
eliminate the threat of difference to the effective reproduction of the world system. The
transformation of differences into values is a machine like process, propelled by the synergy of a
civilizational ethos, instituted and managed by a globally organized dominant white, mostly
male, elite class. The imposed value hierarchy reflects the predominance of the Eurocentric
ways of knowing and being (presumed to be universal) of this capitalist, patriarchal, and racist
culture (Grosfoguel & Cervantes-Rodriquez, 2002). ¶ The parallels between the racial patterns of
educational attainment (Dei, et. al., 1997; Ladson-Billings, 1997, 1998; Orfield, 2004; Yosso, et.
Al., 2004; Stinson, 2006) and the racially stratified system of labor are part of a global model of
power relations that emerged in the sixteenth century. Aproximately twenty percent of all
Hispanic and African-American adults in the U.S. today have a college degree, compared to fifty
percent among white adults (Santora, 2009; Yosso et.al., 2004). “From kindergarten screening
through graduate level exams, minority peoples have struggled to compete successfully with
dominant populations (Bourdeaux, 1995; Gegeo & Watson-Gegeo, 1999, p. 27)” (De Jarlais,
2008, p. 43). Many elementary school districts in the U.S. test all students by the third or fourth
grades and use the results to segregate students thereafter in ways that correspond highly and
consistently with racial and class differences (Oakes, 1985). ¶ The latest round of international
educational restructuring (Daun, 2002) is part of the global restructuring of the international
system of labor control, intertwined with the reassertion of the disciplinary authority of the
existing power/knowledge relations. The variety of critiques of modernity since the 1960s
combined and interrelated with the collapse of the U.S. led modernization and development
project in the early 1970s are two of the underlying historical conditions behind the current
standards reform movement (Crozier, Huntington & Watanuki, 1975; Aronowitz and Giroux,
1991). The maintainence of the Eurocentric worldview and civilizational ethos, along with the
existing structures of knowledge and western institutions of education, are integral to the
effective governance and reproduction of the racially stratified modern/colonial world system,
undergoing another systemic crisis today (Wallerstein, 2008; Grosfoguel, 2008). ¶ Despite
decades of “multicultural education,” assimilation into the dominant ways of knowing and being
remains the underlying purpose of western mass educational systems. ¶ …approaches to cultural
and linguistic diversity in education have centered around a deficit-difference paradigm
whereby the lifeways of nondominant groups (e.g., members of racialized ethnic minority
groups, migrant and multilingual populations, the working class and the working poor, and
stigmatized religious groups) are understood as a set of cultural traits that are ascribed moral
and economic values. (Lam, 2006, p. 215) ¶ Based on the assumption and expectation of
assimilation into a supposedly superior Eurocentric system of knowledge and way of being,
western education is structurally racist and reproductive of a violent system of exploitation and
domination. Epistemic racism negates the cultural capacity of marginalized groups to produce
their own knowledge (Maldonado-Torres, 2004). From this perspective, there is no way out of
the globalized system of western racism and capitalism without de-linking knowledge from
western epistemology, in part, through the creation of a post–Eurocentric curriculum.
Education remains a modern/colonial institution, but signs of this eventual de-linking are
Gonzaga Debate In 64
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emerging. Knowledge and understanding education’s historical relations within the
ideologies and practices of the ongoing civilizing missions of Eurocentric modernity,
contributes to this eventual de-linking.
Eurocentrism bankrupts their education claims – leads to education
homogenization – accepting the multiplicity of knowledge is key to solve
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P. 74-75, Accessed: 7/12/13, JB)
The modern/colonial world system perspective claims that a hegemonic “cultural complex”
emerged in the sixteenth century that became the basis for the Eurocentric cosmology and the
first stage of the western civilizing missions. Totalizing principles of knowledge and forms of
subjectivity, the construction of a globalized hierarchy of identities based on race, the invasion
of the Americas, along with the emergence of mercantile capitalism all contributed to the
creation of the Eurocentric imaginary of the modern/colonial world system. Eurocentrism, as
characterized above, is centrally an epistemological imaginary that subalternizes all other
different (non-modern) ways of knowing and being. This focus on coloniality therefore
emphasizes what was occluded in the rise of the west and the making of the modern/colonial
world system. Understanding Eurocentrism within the history of its emergence in the sixteenth
century calls forth the creative interrelation of subaltern knowledges and corresponding ways of
being in the post-Eurocentric school curriculum.
The knowledge, critical insights, and political strategies produced from the subaltern side of
the colonial different serve as point of departure to move beyond colonialist and nationalist
discourses. Rather than underestimating the subaltern, we should take seriously their
cosmologies, thinking processes, and political strategies as a point of departure to our
knowledge production. (Grosfoguel, 2002, p. 209)
One of the most important initial implications of this historical-theoretical interpretation
therefore is recognizing modern education’s containment within the totalizing grip of western
epistemology. This recognition contributes to the impetus and the vision for redesigning
teaching and learning around the pluriversity of knowledges and ways of being in the world. A
pluriversal vision of education is conceived as a process of epistemic delinking from
Eurocentrism. Delinking from the modern formation of rationality and subjectivity involves
the re-cognition, inclusion, and re-inscription of the principles and forms of knowledge and
subjectivity that have been repressed or subalternized by modern reason in the ongoing
redemptive-civilizational missions. 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. A pluriversal education is an alternative to the current educational system of
assimilation/marginalization into a universalized cultural project. As an alternative
interpretation of western modernity, the modern/colonial world system offers a way to
demythologize the cultural narratives of western knowledge and modern education and points
towards a pluriversal reorganization of teaching and learning within an “ecology of knowledges”
(Santos, et al., 2007; Santos, 2006, 2007a, 2007b).
Gonzaga Debate In 65
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For a variety of interrelated reasons, the civilizational project of Eurocentric modernity has
reached it terminal limits (Wallerstein, 2008; Grosfoguel, 2008). In the twenty-first century, the
western civilizational project can no longer be imposed upon the whole world as if it were
universal. The legitimation crisis of western modernity involves a global awareness that the
western civilizational project is profoundly interrelated with the violence of coloniality. The
changing rhetoric of modernity has lost its persuasive appeal for more and more people around
the world today. The oppressive power/knowledge system of hierarchical cultural differences
and the huge disparities in wealth that have accumulated over the past two centuries are
consequences of this capitalist civilizational project (Robbins, 1999; Wallerstein, 1995a). From
a modern/colonial world system perspective the purpose of education now is decolonization
from the reductive, dominant, and oppressive ways of knowing and being that have been
seductively and coercively imposed throughout the world over the past five hundred years.
Gonzaga Debate In 66
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FW = Racist + Patriarichal
Their attempt to “reframe” the debate just re-entrenches Eurocentrism and
justifies Eurocentric knowledge production and the classifying, ranking,
assimilating and organizing of the Other- they encourage patriarchal and racial
binaries- we control the only external impact
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.8, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
The epistemic foundation of this modern European civilizational project can be summarized
as a Eurocentric knowledge framework for classifying, ranking, and organizing people and
places within a patriarchal and racial hierarchy interlinked with the capitalist system of
production (Quijano, 2000). The formation of this Eurocentric knowledge framework is part of
a global model of power/knowledge relations that emerged with and articulated the
modern/colonial world system. The system of knowledge, civilizational ideologies, and
civilizing practices that comprise modern western education are maintained within the
epistemic presuppositions of Eurcocentric modernity. A modern/colonial world-system
perspective provides a geo-historically grounded critique of the ways western knowledge and
education systems contribute to global processes of Euro-American cultural assimilation and
subalternization (Des Jarlais, 2008). Modern western education is a central institution within
the civilization-savagism paradigm of Eurocentric modernity.¶ This critique of Eurocentric
modernity contributes to and draws upon the contemporary revisionist scholarship in early
modern historiography (Sardar, Nandy & Wyn Davies, 1993; Wynter, 1995; Mignolo, 1995a;
Steinmetz, 1999; Gorsky, 2003; Adams, Clements & Orloff, 2004). This revisionist historicaltheoretical framework aims to re-contextualize the history of modern schooling within the
systemic-historical-discursive structures of modernity and coloniality, referred to as the
modern/colonial world system. The modern/colonial world system perspective holds
significant implications for a revised critical theory of modern western education. Reframing
modernity in relation to coloniality makes Eurocentrism a key concept for denaturalizing the
ways western educators and educational researchers learn to conceive and perceive the
world. Understood as the epistemic framework of western modernity, Eurocentrism
becomes a metaphor to denaturalize the modern paradigm of rational knowledge inherent in
the conceptualization and organization of modern schooling. Eurocentric knowledge is not just
another way of conceiving the world that is demonstratively or presumed to be better than
other ways and therefore remains dominant in the world today (Landes, 1999; Collins & O’Brien,
2003). Eurocentric modernity was constructed through an epistemic conceptual apparatus that
subalternized all other ways of conceiving and organizing knowledge.
Gonzaga Debate In 67
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Gonzaga Debate In 68
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Sequencing DA to FW
The affirmatives de-linking of educational practices from their status in western
educational systems is the only way to solve-the aff’s move to decolonize
eduction is a prerequisite to the dialogue
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.10, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
Interpreting modern education from a planetary horizon is oriented by the ultimate goal of
de-linking educational practices from their containment within the western civilizational
ethos in order to include knowledge , understanding, and experience of the world
subalternized within the cultural-epistemic hegemony of Eurocentric modernity. In the
present era of increasing global interconnectedness and intercivilizational contacts and
conflicts, western education can no longer be delimited within a naturalized or taken for
granted Eurocentric cosmology (Des Jarlais, 2008). In the twenty-first century, the purposes of
formal education should now include the capacities for critical self-reflection on one’s own
civilizational consciousness and inter- and intra-civilizational dialogue. “ Dialogue can only take
place once ‘modernity’ is decolonized and dispossessed of its mythical march toward the
future. Dialogue can only take place when the monologue of one civilization (Western) is no
longer enforced” (Mignolo, 2005, p. xix). ¶ The purpose of this essay is to articulate a planetary
interpretation of modern western education as an institutional formation within the
modern/colonial world system. Current knowledge and understanding of modern education
are delimited and deluded by the problematic presumptions and practices of Eurocentric
modernity. Because modern western education emerged along with the initial formation of the
modern/colonial world system it is deeply embeddeded within Eurocentric modernity’s ongoing
civilizational projects and the civilization-savagism paradigm. The modern/colonial world system
perspective provides a more adequate, comprehensive, and critical interpretation of modern
civilization and modern education than the perspective of Eurocentric modernity. This essay
describes the modern/colonial world system perspective as providing the historical and
contemporary contexts for reinterpreting modern western education as modern/colonial
institutions.¶ The history of modern western education systems from a modern/colonial world
system perspective has not been written yet. This essay is intended as a contribution towards
such a future planetary narrative of modern education. The first part further develops the above
introduction with a characterization and critical analysis of the interpretive framework of
Eurocentric modernity. The second part locates and describes the modern/colonial world
system perspective and argues that this perspective provides a more adequate interpretation of
modern western education. The third part briefly theorizes modern education as a
modern/colonial institution that contributes to the global racial and patriarchal hierarchy of
labor control. The fourth part situates the formation and successive restructuring of modern
Gonzaga Debate In 69
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western education systems within four coexisting civilizational missions of western modernity
from the sixteenth century to the present. Christianizing, civilizing, modernizing, and marketizing
are interpreted as the overarching civilizational ideologies and civilizing practices orienting the
governmentality of modern education over the past 500 years (Foucault, 1991a). These four
redemptive-civilizational missions provide a broad conceptual framework and an historical
periodization for reinterpreting the history of modern education no longer contained with the
civilizational presumptions of Eurocentric modernity. And finally, the fifth part articulates the
central implication of this reinterpretation for educational theory, policy, and practice –
recognizing and decentering the totalizing grip of Eurocentric epistemology in a pluriversal
education. A brief summary of the overall argument concludes the essay.
Gonzaga Debate In 70
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AT: Predictability
Western 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,
Gonzaga Debate In 71
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without understanding the complex ways in which the pursuit of knowledge is deeply
embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices.
Research ensures the divide between the West and the Other as a tool of
imperialism
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, pg. 7-8, JZ)
Part of the project of this book is ‘researching back’ in the tradition of 'writing back' or 'talking
back', that characterizes much of the post-colonial or anti-colonial literature.10 It has involved a
'knowing-ness of the colonizer* and a recovery of ourselves, an analysis of colonialism, and a
struggle for self-determination. Research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of
imperialism and colonialism is both regulated and realized. It is regulated through the formal
rules of individual scholarly disciplines and scientific paradigms, and the institutions that
support them (including the state). It is realized in the myriad of representations and
ideological constructions of the Other in scholarly and 'popular' works, and in the principles
which help to select and recontextualize those constructions in such things as the media, official
histories and school curricula. Ashis Nandy argues that the structures of colonialism contain
rules by which colonial encounters occur and are 'managed'.11 The different ways in which
these encounters happen and are managed are different realizations of the underlying rules
and codes which frame in the broadest sense what is possible and what is impossible. In a very
real sense research has been an encounter between the West and the Other. Much more is
known about one side of those encounters than is known about the other side. This book
reports to some extent on views that are held and articulated by 'the other sides'. The first part
of the book explores topics around the theme of imperialism, research and knowledge. They can
be read at one level as a narrative about a history of research and indigenous peoples but make
much more sense if read as a series of intersecting and overlapping essays around a theme.
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
(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.
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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'.
Gonzaga Debate In 73
[Type the document title]
AT: Cede the Political
We are political – none of their offense assumes we affirm certain actions.
Because we endorse the removal of protectionist measures, our criticism is
directly relevant and important to political action
Bertucci, Universidad de San Andres, et al 12 (Mariano E., Fabian Borges-Herrero,
University of Southern California, Claudia Fuentes-Julio, University of Denver, International
Studies Perspectives (2012), 1–19 “Toward “Best Practices” in Scholar–Practitioner Relations:
Insights from the Field of Inter-American Affairs”, pg. 4 date accessed 7/12/13 igm)
Ideas from academia can shape policy at all stages of public policymaking: the articulation,
formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policies. 6 The political uses of expert
knowledge are not limited to improving or modifying a given course of action. Scholarly
outputs can also help legitimate the workings of an institution and substantiate particular
policy positions while undermining others.
The efforts in recent years by the United States and Mexico to develop collaborative border
management and the work done by United States Agency for International Development’s
(USAID) Women in Development (WID) office in the late 1970s to introduce gender
considerations into development assistance policy suggest the key role expert knowledge can
play in framing issues, setting agendas, and legitimating particular courses of action.
Through the concept of “collaborative border management”—a multipronged strategy that
involves cooperative law enforcement, joint management of ports of entry, shared economic
resources, and complementary economic development strategies—scholars have contributed to
the construction of a border regime for Mexico and the United States. Academic “packaging” of
the issue helped generate a good deal of sustained attention among policymakers and led to a
presidential declaration on collaborative border management. Although scholars found that
many of their ideas were already present in border management debates and, in some cases,
were already being implemented, scholarly inputs helped assure that the needed resources kept
flowing to the border region (Olson, Shirk, and Selee 2010; Lawson 2011).
Chile proves criticism is key to assess the value of international politics – prefer
our region specific evidence
Bertucci, Universidad de San Andres, et al 12 (Mariano E., Fabian Borges-Herrero,
University of Southern California, Claudia Fuentes-Julio, University of Denver, International
Studies Perspectives (2012), 1–19 “Toward “Best Practices” in Scholar–Practitioner Relations:
Insights from the Field of Inter-American Affairs”, pg. 9 date accessed 7/12/13 igm)
Under the right circumstances, some scholars and their work have affected one or more of the
four general stages of public policy decision-making processes— the articulation, formulation,
implementation, and/or evaluation of a given policy. This discussion also suggests that the use
of expert knowledge on the part of practitioners is not reducible to instrumental considerations
aimed at modifying or altogether changing the substance of a given policy. Scholarly outputs
may also provide a legitimizing function to policymaking—as expert knowledge can enhance
an organization’s legitimacy and potentially bolster its claim to resources or jurisdiction over
Gonzaga Debate In 74
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a particular policy area, as in the case of the concept of “collaborative border management”
between Mexico and the United States and that of the Progresa/Oportunidades anti-poverty
program in Mexico. Scholarly outputs may also have a substantiating function—as expert
knowledge can help substantiate preferences over a given course of action while undermining
that of political rivals, as reflected in the case of Chile’s decision to oppose the U.S. invasion of
Iraq while awaiting U.S. congressional approval for a free trade agreement.
Analysis of policy is necessary to produce an effective engagement strategy –
empirics prove
Bertucci, Universidad de San Andres, et al 12 (Mariano E., Fabian Borges-Herrero,
University of Southern California, Claudia Fuentes-Julio, University of Denver, International
Studies Perspectives (2012), 1–19 “Toward “Best Practices” in Scholar–Practitioner Relations:
Insights from the Field of Inter-American Affairs”, pg. 2 date accessed 7/12/13 igm)
Missing from the literature on scholar–practitioner interactions in IR is a more systematic
focus on the experience of those trained social scientists with professional trajectories as such
that have often played important roles in government. 3 The experience of these “in-andouters” suggests that the gap might not be as wide as it may seem. In the field of InterAmerican affairs, for example, scholars both in Latin America and in North America often have
access to policymaking as direct as those of business interests. 4 Two of the most influential
Latin American presidents of the last 30 years, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and Ricardo
Lagos of Chile, have social science PhDs. President Rafael Correa of Ecuador has a PhD in
Economics. Three of the last four Mexican presidents— Carlos Salinas, Ernesto Zedillo, and
Felipe Calderon—have had graduate training in the social sciences. Most Latin American Finance
Ministers and Central Bank presidents in recent years have PhDs in Economics. Some of the best
known Latin American foreign policy practitioners of recent years—former For eign Ministers
Jorge G. Castaneda of Mexico and Celso Lafer of Brazil, as well as Mexico’s late Deputy Foreign
Minister Carlos Rico, and Professor Marco Aurelio Garcia of Brazil, personal foreign policy
advisor to Presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff—came from academia. Chile, which has had one
of the most noteworthy international policies in recent years, has relied heavily on social
scientists: former Foreign Ministers Jose ´ Miguel Insulza (now Secretary General of the
Organization of American States), Ignacio Walker and Juan Gabriel Valdes; former Deputy
Foreign Ministers Angel Flisfisch and Heraldo Munoz (now head of the United Nations
Development Program’s Regional Bureau for Latin America), for example.
Uncovering the effects of post-colonialism on our present politics and criticizing
them is a prerequisite to policy solutions and key to emancipatory alternatives
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
A Postcolonial Perspective: What and Why?
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Before critiquing mainstream political science views of the ex-colonial world, it is necessary
to understand what is implied by a postcolonial perspective of politics. Postcolonialism
refers, broadly, to a range of critical anti-colonial perspectives that display an awareness of
the ways in which five centuries of modern European colonialism continue to shape political
ideas and practices, including those concerning the production of knowledge. The origins of
postcolonial scholarship lie undeniably in the anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century.
Figures such as M.K. Gandhi and Franz Fanon, for instance, criticized not only the injustices and
violence wrought by European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, but also the
intellectual bases of colonial modernity everywhere. Legitimating truths of colonialism such as
racial hierarchies and the modernization of so-called backward places were, in particular,
objects of exacting analysis and criticism. Even after the formal end of colonialism, the role of
the modern state, itself a vestige of the colonial past, remains a critical target for postcolonial
scholars for its elitist and authoritarian tendencies. Equally important targets are the dominant
Western perceptions on ex-colonial societies, commonplace both in and outside them, with
their peculiar prejudices and blindspots. A postcolonial perspective of politics is thus wedded
to one or more of these strands of criticism and the search for emancipatory alternatives in
the realms of knowledge and praxis.
Criticisms of Political Science specifically are key to bring change to one of the
only disciplines not currently making progress on post-colonial questions
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
Recent scholarship has extended the scope of postcolonial studies by rethinking disciplinary
practices or established ways of doing history, anthropology, and literary criticism. Dipesh
Chakrabarty, for instance, has examined “the capacities and limitations of certain European
social and political categories in conceptualizing political modernity in the context of nonEuropean life-worlds”. By doing so, he questions not only our received understanding of
“democracy,” “state,” and “modernity,” but also of academic history-writing as an intellectual
and political practice. Both are ways of “provincializing Europe” via sustained intellectual
dialogues between Europe and its historical Others. Similarly, anthropologists such as Talal Asad,
Johannes Fabian, James Clifford, and George Marcus have been at the forefront of efforts to
undo the lasting colonial legacies within their discipline. This has meant, on the one hand,
rethinking the relationship between the self and the other in ethnographic encounters, and on
the other hand, opening up new sites of fieldwork to study, say, development aid, state
bureaucracies, and activist networks without being weighed down by the intellectual baggage
of colonialism. Literary scholars, too, have felt the need to shed their Eurocentric lenses to
revisit their canonical texts from postcolonial perspectives. For some, this has been an exercise
in uncovering hitherto neglected aspects of classic texts, whereas for others, it has been a case
of re-interpreting the canon from a new theoretical vantage point. Unlike historians,
anthropologists, and literary scholars, however, political scientists have been noticeably
Gonzaga Debate In 76
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disinterested in taking postcolonial perspectives seriously. While there are a few prominent
exceptions, the response of the overwhelming majority of the discipline has been ignorant,
scornful or both. The next section explores the implications of such disciplinary neglect, taking
the study of democracy and civil wars as my two case studies.
Criticism of imperial power is key to reclaim politics – Iraq and Afghanistan
prove that critiquing imperial policy is relevant
Slater, Professor of Geography, Loughborough University 4
(David, “The Gravity of Imperial Politics: Some Thoughts on Power and Representation”, The
Arab World Geographer/Le Geographe du monde arabe, Vo 7,No 1-2, 91)
This article takes as its point of departure Edward Said’s consistent emphasis on the need to
examine critically and challenge the imperialism of U.S. power. In much of the literature on
globalization the specificity of U.S. imperial politics has been left out of account, and yet
today, more than ever, and especially in the wake of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it is
crucial to prioritize the analysis of U.S. imperial globality. I discuss two intersecting dimensions
of the imperial problematic: (a) the specificity of imperial politics as written and deployed by the
United States and (b) the interweaving of geopolitical power and the subordinating
representations of imperialized peoples. Overall, the imperial relation is defined in terms of
three interlocking elements: (a) an invasiveness of power that has effects in relation to
resources as well as culture and politics: (b) a discursive imposition of the imperial power's
own values and practices: and (c) a pervasive lack of respect and recognition of the societies
that are brought under imperial control. Above all, the gravity of imperial politics is
constituted by the effects of a power that intervenes, violates, and penetrates. The article
takes U.S.-Cuban relations as an illustrative example of the imperial encounter and concludes
by re-emphasizing the urgent need to contest those kinds of knowledges and representations
that underwrite the continuation of imperial politics.
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AT: Education
Their education standards are false- they’ll say they are better for debate but
they just perpetuate Eurocentric education and maintain the status quo
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.5, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
The dominant ideologies and practices of modern western schooling form part of this
ethnocentric civilizing process of assimilation/marginalization in the ongoing reproduction of
“civilization”. For example, according to the British analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell,
“Teachers are more than any other class the guardians of civilization. They should be
intimately aware of what civilization is, and desirous of imparting a civilized attitude to their
pupils” (Russell, 1950, pp. 117-118). Modernity has been inadequately understood within the
field of education, in part because the knowledge and practices that comprise education are
themselves constitutive of the civilizational project of Eurocentric modernity. The mostly
unconscious or “common sense” relationships between modern education and western
civilization are profound, yet they are not fully recognized and explored in educational theory.
The modern/colonial world system perspective can be understood as a civilizational analytic
(Patterson, 1997; Mandalios, 1999; Ribeiro, 1968, 1971; Elias, 1974, 1982; Abdel-Malek, 1981;
Zea, 1992; Braudel, 1994; Sanderson, 1995; Wallerstein, 1984, 1991; Rojas, 2002; Cox, 2001,
2002; Mazlish, 2004; Mignolo, 2000a, 2005; Mennell, 2007; Jones, 2007). The conceptualization
and self-ascription of European identity as “civilization” first emerged in the early modern
period along with the modern/colonial world system (Gorsky, 2003; Delanty, 1995).
“Civilization” is an invention of the modern/colonial world system (Mignolo, 2000a; Patterson,
1997). Analytically defined, “civilizations are the media through which people have come to
organize themselves materially and mentally to cope with their material contexts and to imagine
a collective future" (Cox, 2002, p. 162). Civilizations are communities of thought that guide our
collective understanding of and ways of being in the world (Cox, 2002). The historicaltheoretical focus of this transmodern civilizational analysis is the emergence and expansion of
modern western civilization and its consequences for different ways of understanding and being
in the world over the past five hundred years.
From a modern/colonial world system perspective, Eurocentric modernity is another name for
modern western civilization. “The core of [Eurocentric] modernity is the crystallization and
development of a mode or modes of interpretation of the world” (Eisenstadt, 2001, p. 321).
European civilizational identity emerged from and remains within a “civilization-savagism
paradigm” through which Europeanized subjects understand themselves (Adams, 1988).
Eurocentric modernity involves a distinct social imaginary with its own cultural program and
ontological vision, along with new institutional formations, such as education (Eisenstadt, 2001,
p. 321).
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Their education standard is wrong- they stem from a Eurocentered system of
knowledge production and their attempts to stop our movement creates a
worse form of education
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P. 26, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
The word civilization evokes powerful images and understandings. We in the United States have
been taught, from elementary school onward, that a few ancient people – like the Egyptians or
Greeks – were “civilized” and that civilization achieved its highest level of development here and
in other Western countries. Civilization, we are told, is beneficial, desirable – and definitely
preferable to being un-civilized. (Patterson, 1997, p. 9) ¶ In addition, Eurocentric scholarship and
disciplinary divisions normally interpret modernity and colonialism as completely separate
phenomena, upholding the myth of Eurocentric modernity. The profound effects, legacies, and
“spirit” of European colonialism have yet to be fully recognized and understood in the
Eurocentric cultures of scholarship, particularly in the parochial field of education
(Osterhammel, 1997; Ashcroft, 2001). In the United States for example, the term “colonial” has
been effectively appropriated in nationalist historiography and the public consciousness to refer
exclusively to the early “American” historical period, i.e., “colonial history”, “colonial
architecture”, “settler colonies” (Stasiulis & Yuval-Davis, 1995; Greene, 2007). Colonialism is
largely absent in the curriculum in most U.S. schools and many universities. It is also largely
absent in the historical consciousness of the Caucasian population in the United States. ¶
Drawing upon and revising the mostly state-centric educational theories of social and cultural
reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Aronowitz, 1992; Giroux, 1983, 2005; Apple, 1982a,
1982b, 1990, 1993; Popkewitz, 2000), this essay argues that schools contribute to the
reproduction of the Eurocentric imaginary of the modern/colonial world system. The cultural
narratives of Eurocentric modernity comprise the geoculture of the modern/colonial world
system. The dominant geoculture is composed of the frames of mind and ways of life lived
through particular forms of social, political, economic and religious organization. The languages,
knowledges, values, and habits inculcated through western education systems are constitutive
of the ideologies and practices of Eurocentric modernity. A thoroughly Eurocentric curriculum
and the imperial/colonial languages of instruction are among the material means of geocultural
socialization and reproduction. At the level of ideology and ethos, dominant beliefs about
schooling are conceptualized and lived through the redemptive civilizational missions of
Eurocentric modernity. ¶ The “No Child Left Behind” policy for example, tacitly presumes an
ongoing forward movement of inevitable progress and the redemptive mission of schooling to
save all children from being “left behind” in an emergent transnational civilizational project
(Robinson, 2004). This new market civilization project, described further in part four below, is
concealed and promoted as preserving national economic strength in the triumphal march of
universal history under the guise of “globalization” (Steger, 2002, 2004; Sassen, 2006).
Seemingly neutral and universal processes of teaching and learning knowledge and skills are
embedded within a hierarchical world system in which knowledge and being are deceptively
colonized (Kincheloe, 2008). “Though it is rarely discussed in educational policy, the socio-
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political, philosophical, psychological, and economic structures constructed over the past 500
years of Euro-American colonialism have a dramatic effect on what goes on in classrooms”
(Kincheloe, 2006, p. 220). ¶ Throughout the twentieth century, mass education systems
became central to both the (re)formation of modern subjectivities and the (re)formation and
management of modern economic and political organizations among Western and nonWestern nation-states throughout the world (Hunt, 1987; Timons, 1988; Popkewitz, 2000;
Manzer, 2003). The sphere of modern education is thus a necessary and increasingly important
issue in the ongoing struggles over the principles and practices upon which the political,
economic, and cultural spheres are organized, ruled, and enacted, worldwide (OECD, 1989;
Cookson, Sadovnik & Semel, 1992; Daun, 2002). Western education systems are part of the
production and reproduction of western modernity, understood broadly as a distinct
civilizational program (Eisenstadt, 2001). The history and contemporary restructuring of
modern western education systems therefore need to be situated within a planetary,
civilizational, and post-Eurocentric world historical perspective. ¶ The modern/colonial world
system perspective is a Latin American post-Eurocentric critique of western modernity that
adopts but revises the modern world-system framework associated with the historical
sociology of Immanuel Wallerstein. The “modern world-system” refers to the processes and
realities of the historical formation and change over time of the first world historical system,
from the sixteenth century to the present. From a world-system framework, the unit of analysis
is the whole world, understood as an interrelated historical system that emerged with the
emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit in the sixteenth century.
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AT: Topic Education
Education is just another tool of the “Western” worlds expansionary arsenal
used to assimilate and convert mass populations to the “civilized” way of life”
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P. 69-70, Accessed: 7/12/13, JB)
The secular civilizing mission began to emerge when a new type of mercantilism developed in
Amsterdam that prepared the ground for the emergence of France and England as new imperial
powers (Taylor, 1999). With the shift in the leadership of the Atlantic economy from Spain and
Portugal to England and France in the seventeenth century, the rhetoric of modernity changed
from Christianizing to civilizing the world during the eighteenth century. The term
“civilization” emerged in the eighteenth century as the self-description of European
Enlightenment intellectuals. The ideal of civilization was no longer contained within Christianity
and became European civilization itself. The initial religious version was still present, but played
a secondary role. Civilization became the foundation of the colonial civilizing mission and the
nineteenth century institutionalization of mass education. The hierarchy of European
civilization continued to be based in part upon racialized western educated sensibilities and
modes of comportment in contrast to “uncivilized” people, both inside and outside of Europe
and North America. Instead of barbarians, the un-civilized were now understood through
anthropological knowledge categories such as “savage” and “primitive”. The basic idea of
advancement along a linear, universal conception of history continued, but history was now
seen as the story of man’s (instead of God’s) progressive movement toward civilization (instead
of salvation). From its original meaning in the eighteenth century until the turn of the twentieth
century, the concept of “civilization” remained singular, referring only to Europe (Mazlish,
2004).
The civilizing mission marks the nineteenth century and the purposes of state schooling for
the masses. The secular civilizing mission developed throughout the nineteenth century with
the formation of western nation-states and continued into the mid-twentieth century. The
civilizing mission was entrenched with the secular concept of reason, rights of man, and
citizens. The civilizing mission is inherent in the nation-building processes that included the
formation of state sponsored schooling for the masses. “Mass public education is
fundamentally concerned with the advancement of Western civilization and national strength
through the dissemination of knowledge and skills” (Mourad, 2001, p. 739). In addition, the
European version of the civilizing mission was remade in the United States as the U.S. rose to
world power from the late nineteenth century until World War II. The U.S. version of the
universal civilizing mission was expressed in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, continued in
Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism and theories of American exceptionalism. U.S. expansion
in the Philipines and the repeated invasions in Central America and the Caribbean were justified
through universalist arguments about “civilization” and “progress” with strong racist
components (Tuathail, 1994, pp. 158-159).
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AT: Portable Skills
Educational reform an amalgamation of a neoliberal and European paradigm –
this technocratic rationality leads to system wide domination in which human
lives are reducible to human capital
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P. 71-72, Accessed: 7/12/13, JB)
The long-term trends toward privatization of public education (Hentschke & Wohlstetter, 2007;
Boyd, 2007) in the United States and the overarching educational reform rationale – “global
competition” -- illustrate the current reconfiguration of the coloniality of power concealed
within the latest civilizational rhetoric of modernity. Globalization rearticulates the civilizationsavagism paradigm in a new form of coloniality of power that is no longer contained in one
nation-state or a group of nation-states (Mignolo, 2000, p. 279). The universalized market
metaphor becomes the disciplinary mechanism to civilize subjectivities into prescribed
mentalities and ways of being. Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on the market competition
and consumption, is not just a question of economy but a new form of civilization (Mignolo,
2000, p. 22; Cox, 2002; Gill, 2003).
Probably more than ever, global capitalism appears as a civilizational paradigm encompassing all
domains of social life. The exclusion, oppression, and discrimination it produces have not only
economic, social, and political dimensions but also cultural and epistemological ones.
Accordingly, to confront this paradigm in all its dimensions is the challenge facing a new critical
theory and new emancipatory practices. Contrary to their predecessors, this theory and these
practices must start from the premise that the epistemological diversity of the world is
immense, as immense as its cultural diversity and that the recognition of such diversity must be
at the core of the global resistance against capitalism and of the formulation of alternative
forms of sociability (Santos, 2006b). (Santos, Nunnes & Meneses, 2007b, p. xviiii)
As modernity/coloniality undergoes another uncertain reconfiguration, the Enlightenment
values of truth and justice dissolve further into the technocratic criterion of system
performance while human life is more completely reduced to human capital . A technocratic
rationality interrelated with capitalism has become a de facto universalist reason. Technocratic
reason has replaced the Enlightenment ideal of emancipation with a corporate neoliberal
ideal of market rule and an imperialist project in which ideas of democracy and freedom
function as a cover for a new totalitarian form of colonization (Venn, 2006, p. 73).
Globalization is a world historical process that began with the European colonization of the
Americas and the eventual constitution of the world as a Euro/American colony (Dussel, 2006, p.
497). Contemporary neoliberal globalization discourse is an example of the restructured
continuation of five hundred years of western colonization.
We still dwell in the colonizer’s model of the world. Nation-states of the global South,
themselves largely direct or indirect products of colonialism, are rewarded for adopting a
model of development rooted in Lockean liberalism, or penalized for failing to do so (Duffield,
Gonzaga Debate In 82
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2002). Whether framed in terms of privatization and “liberalization” of economic relations,
“good” governance and democracy, population control, sustainable development, or open
borders, the norms, and the penalties for non-compliance, stem from European thought. The
spectre of the white man’s burden, albeit now shouldered by a progressively diverse global elite,
still haunts global policymaking. In the name of poverty reduction and sustainability, and often
motivated by a genuine desire to make the world better for all its inhabitants, these elites
decide what development is, and how it should be pursued. (Shepard, 2006, p. 961)
Gonzaga Debate In 83
[Type the document title]
AT: Stasis
The Neg’s framework is just a shallow attempt to re-entrench western
education engrained in the political system- the impact is stale education and
stasis- acts as an impact turn to their educational standards
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.2, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
Knowledge and understanding of the historical and contemporary relationships between
modern schools and societies are largely contained within common sense narratives of
modern western civilization. Modern western education systems are today worldwide
institutions whose origins can be traced back to the early modern period in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (Adick, 1995; Hamilton, 1989, 1990, 2001; Gorsky, 2003; Foucault, 1991;
Popkewitz, 2008). Modern western education systems are engrained within the everchanging governmental projects of western modernity (Fagerlind & Saha, 1989; Meyer,
Kamens & Benavot, 1992; Hunt, 1987; Timmons, 1988; Shea, Kahane & Sola, 1989; Adick, 1992,
1995; Ludwig, 2000; Daun, 2002; Miller, 2002; Olssen, Codd & O’Neill, 2004). Contemporary
state sponsored educational systems are indeed “modern” institutions, yet, is modernity
adequately understood? (Pratt, 2002). ¶ This essay proposes and characterizes two
contradictory historical-theoretical frameworks for interpreting modernity and modern
education: Eurocentric and planetary (Dussel, 1995, 1996). Eurocentric modernity is contained
within the self-consciousness of the west as the most advanced civilization on the planet.
Eurocentric modernity interprets the phenomenon of modernity as the result of exceptional
civilizational characteristics that allowed Western Europe and North America to supersede and
become models for all other civilizations (Dussel, 1998a). ¶ ….when one examines what the
general function of the concept of civilization really is, and what common quality causes all
these various human attitudes and activities to be described as civilized, one starts with a very
simple discovery: this concept expresses the self-consciousness of the West. One could even
say: the national consciousness. It sums up everything in which Western society of the last two
or three centuries believes itself superior to earlier societies or “more primitive” contemporary
ones. By this term Western society seeks to describe what constitutes its special character and
what it is proud of: the level of its technology, the nature of its manners, the development of its
scientific knowledge or view of the world, and much more. (Elias, 1978, pp. 3-4)¶ Planetary
modernity refers to the coexsistence of multiple, diverse, and interacting civilizational
conditions and civilizing processes with different but interrelated modes of interpreting the
world (Cox, 2002; Eisenstadt, 2000, p. 321; Dussel, 2001, p. 26). Civilizational conditions are
collective ways of organizing and interpreting the world; civilizing processes are self-reflexive
practices of self-formation (Mandalios, 1999). From a planetary framework, Eurocentric
modernity is interpreted as a universalized civilizational project and subsumed within a
multicivilizational world horizon. A planetary framework contributes to the construction of a
Gonzaga Debate In 84
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transmodern perspective that embraces equally both Eurocentric modernity and Eurocentric
modernity’s alterity – the non-modern or the un-civilized (Dussel, 1995, 1998a). As
worldwide institutions within a dynamic intercivilizational system, modern schooling needs
to be more adequately understood from a planetary interpretation of modernity, beyond the
imposing confines of the Eurocentric narrative of modern civilization ( Des Jarlais, 2008).
The purpose of this essay is to articulate a more comprehensive and relational interpretation of
modernity and modern education from the perspective of the modern/colonial world system. In
opposition to the Eurocentric narrative, the modern/colonial world system perspective
articulates a planetary interpretation of modernity as a worldwide intercivilizational system
managed by Euro-American elites through a mythically violent projection of civilizational
superiority (Mignolo, 2000a; Patterson, 1997; Dussel, 1996, 1998a). The modern/colonial worldsystem operates through various mythologies or cultural narratives, i.e., objectivist and
universalist knowledge, decolonization, development (Kincheloe, 2008). These cultural
narratives contribute to the ongoing constitution of the particular ways the world and western
education about the world have been conceptualized and understood (Grosfoguel & CervantesRodriguez, 2002; Cabrera, 2008). The modern/colonial world system perspective is a world
horizon or planetary interpretation of modernity that demythologizes and decenters
Eurocentric modernity’s hegemonic cultural narratives, expressed in the rhetoric of modernity
(i.e., salvation, progress, modernization, development, reason, literacy, science, meritocracy,
equality, technology, civilization, globalization). The modern/colonial world system perspective
renarrates the dominant cultural narratives of Eurocentric modernity within which the
ideologies and practices of modern education are embedded.
Gonzaga Debate In 85
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AT: Limits
Framework relies on a Eurocentric view of education – education as a process
of restricting and creating limits is a Eurocentric idea
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_P
roposal_for_the_Creation_of_an_Other_School, accessed 7/12/13)
As the expansion and domination of the West, modernity is not simply the expansion of
possibilities and choices. As new possibilities were constructed, old ones were destroyed (Asad,
1992, p. 337). Modernity undoubtedly brought about numerous benefits (particularly among
Europeans and North Americans) in the material, social, and political realms of everyday life
(Meyer, 2007). But, modernity also brought about the conceptualization and universalization
of the legitimate ways of thinking and being (Heidegger, 1977; Peters, 2002; Mignolo, 2003;
Maldonado-Torres, 2007). Western education, commonly viewed as one of the most prized
progressive benefits of modernity, is also responsible for the hegemony of the possibilities of
conceiving and perceiving the world in the ongoing reproduction of the Eurocentric social and
political imaginary and corresponding geo-culture. The imaginary of the modern/colonial
world system is not only what is visible and in the “ground” but what has been hidden from view
in the “underground’ by successive layers of mapping people and territories (Mignolo, 2000, p.
24). Until the 1960s, Eurocentrism, was the unquestioned narrative-cultural background in the
social and political imaginary of the modern/colonial world-system.
Modern Western education systems are both products and producers of Eurocentric
modernity, understood in part as Western expansion and domination over the past five
hundred years (Quijano, 1999; Dussel, 1993, 1995, 2002; Mignolo, 2000; Dirlik, 2003, 2005).
Western modernity/coloniality includes the rise of European imperial/colonial state powers and
the world-capitalist system, the modern interstate system, and three hundred years later, the
formation of Western nation-states and the subsequent emergence of state sponsored
schooling for the masses in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the twentieth century,
mass education systems became central to both the (re)formation of modern subjectivities
and the (re)formation and management of modern economic and political organizations
within and between Western and non-Western nation-states throughout the world (Hunt,
1987; Manzer, 2003). The sphere of modern education is thus a necessary and increasingly
important issue in the ongoing struggles over the principles and practices upon which the
political, economic, and cultural spheres are organized, ruled, and enacted, worldwide (OECD,
1989; Cookson, Sadovnik & Semel, 1992; Daun, 2002). Leaning beyond Eurocentrism is a
necessity now, if the self-destructive trajectory of the Western cultural heritage is to be
transformed (O’Sullivan, 2001).
Gonzaga Debate In 86
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AT: Role Playing
Role playing is inherently Eurocentric and results in the perpetuation of colonial
marconarratives and re-classifies Latin America as an “objective”
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.14, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
The missionary, the teacher, the anthropologist, and the tourist are examples of roles and
identities that continue to embody the colonial heritage of framing otherness in ways that
subalternize difference (Spivak, 1999). The secondary school teacher for example, as an
embassador for Eurocentric knowledge, professionally frames his or her engagement with
students, in terms of ‘enlightenment’, acquisition of, and assimilation into the priviledged
knowledge/world of western civilization, i.e., “cultural literacy”. ¶ Civilization is an idea that we
learned in school. Further, it is an elitist idea, one that is defined by creating hierarchies – of
societies, of classes, of cultures, or of races. For the elites who coined the idea, civilizations are
always class-stratified, state-based societies, and civilized peoples always belong to those
classes whose privileged existences are guaranteed by the institutions and practices of the
state. (Patterson, 1997, pp. 9-10) ¶ The defining myth of Eurocentric modernity is the claim that
European culture was “superior and more developed” and that the culture of the Other was
“inferior, crude, barbaric, and culpably immature” (Dussel, 1993). “…modernity as such was
‘born’ when Europe was in a position to pose itself against an other, when in other words,
Europe could constitute itself as a unified ego exploring, conquering, colonizing an alterity that
gave back its image of itself” (Dussel, 1993, p. ). This construction of European identity is linked
with racial myths of civilizational superiority and the construction of otherness within an
adversarial system of world-views (Delanty, 1995; Poliakox, 1974; Sardar, Nandy & Wyn Davies,
1993; Maldonado-Torres, 2008). European civilizational identity formation is also based upon
the creation of a positive (epistemic and hermeneutic) foundation for the self, which Foucault
traces back to the fifth century Christian monasteries (Foucault, 1993). ¶ I think that one of the
great problems of Western culture has been to find the possibility of founding a hermeneutics of
the self, not as it was the case in early Christianity, on the sacrifice of the self but, on the
contrary, on a positive, on the theoretical and practical, emergence of the self. That was the aim
of the juridical institutions, that was the aim also of medical and psychiatric practices, that was
the aim of political and philosophical theory – to constitute the ground of the subjectivity as the
root of the positive self, what we could call the permanent anthropologism of Western thought.
(Foucault, 1993, p. 222) ¶ ¶ This positive knowledge conception of the Christian self became the
foundation for the modern concept of the civilized “man”, upon which the “civilization-savagism
paradigm” was constructed and implemented (Adams, 1988). ¶ This new world system of
European alterization within which modern western schooling was constructed and is
maintained emerged in the fifteenth century when the world became an imaginable whole with
European “discovery” of the Americas. Along with the initial joining together of all places and
peoples of the earth in the first worldwide system came the geocultural narrative of western
Gonzaga Debate In 87
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civilization as the most advanced form of life on the planet. The continued official
commemoration of the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas in the Unites
States and Spain, for example, illustrates the powerful hold this mythical macronarrative
maintains in the Eurocentric collective imaginary. Situating the “problem of universal history”,
Max Weber articulates this self-understanding of the superiority of western civilization. ¶ To
what combination of circumstances should the fact be attributed that in Western civilization,
and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think)
lie in a line of development having universal significance and value (Weber, 1958, p. 13).¶
Eurocentric modernity interprets modernity as exclusively European, denying and obscuring
this self-constituting process of alterization along with the comparative advantages for
political-economic development and world power relations resulting from European
colonialism (Blaut, 1992; Dussel, 1996, 1998). According to this Eurocentric perspective,
“Europe had exceptional internal characteristics that allowed it to supersede, through its
rationality, all other cultures (Dussel, 1998a). Until 1960s, this Eurocentric interpretation of
modernity was the largely unquestioned cultural-narrative background in the social and political
imaginary of the modern/colonial world-system. Latin America, for example, was only
understood as an ontological, geo-political entity in the “objective” world order. This
macronarrative of western civilization first emerged in the Renaissance and consolidated during
the Enlightenment, and is today tied to contemporary historiography of the Renaissance and the
philosophy of the Enlightenment (Mignolo, 2000a). In the nineteenth century, various German
philosophers ensured its extension into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, i.e., Kant,
Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger (Dussel, 1996; Maldonado-Torres, 2005; Mignolo, 2008). ¶ Western
civilization is supposed to be something “grounded” in Greek history as is also Western
metaphysics. This reading, implicit in the Renaissance, became explicit in the Enlightenment.
Occidentalism is basically the master metaphor of colonial discourse since the sixteenth
century… (Mignolo, 2000a, p. 327) ¶ According to this macronarrative, western civilization
originated in ancient Greece and its foundations lie upon the universal principles of western
knowledge and interpretation.¶ Beginning in the sixteenth century, temporality was
reconstructed as a linear, progressive trajectory that positioned individual agency within a
rational, unitary, self-present mode of subjectivity (Venn, 2002, p. 68). Western Christian
civilization was viewed as the model of “humanity” in the historical evolution of the species
within a linear succession of events that began with ancient Greece and arrives in modern North
America. “Universal history” was conceived as a linear, evolutionary continuum from the
primitive to the civilized (Quijano, 1999, p. 50). This macronarrative of “civilization” assumes
that the achievements of the west, i.e., mathematics, science, technology, education,
economics, government, etc., represent the pinnacle of progress and development, and
legitimate western dominance (Adas, 1989). ¶
Role playing assumes the context of the European conquerer and recreates
binaries of otherization and “the west and the rest” and legitimizes
expploiatation, marginalization, and segregation and turns any external impacts
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Gonzaga Debate In 88
[Type the document title]
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.18, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
Eighteenth century European Enlightenment thinkers, for example, invoked a comparative
method that differentiated its manners and conduct as the most advanced qualities of human
civilizations from those who were at a less advanced stage of development. The latter are
differentiated as ‘barbaric’ or savage, uncivilized, and thus disqualified for participation.
(Popkewitz, 2007, p. 67) ¶ These early modern conceptions of time and subjectivity are evident
in contemporary thought such as the dichotomy between modern and traditional, the
predominance of (possessive) individualism, and presumptions of “objective” truth. These
distinctions between traditional and modern, and colonialism and modernity underlie the
disciplinary distinctions between the colonial and modern education. In mid-nineteenth century
classrooms, Anglo-American teachers told their students that all non-Europeans were
intellectually inferior to them (Blaut, 1993, p. 3). ¶ The fact that Western Europeans will
imagine themselves to be the culmination of a civilizing trajectory from a state of nature
leads them also to think of themselves as the moderns of humanity and its history, that is, as
the new, and at the same time, most advanced of the species. But since they attribute the rest
of the species to a category by nature inferior and consequently anterior, belonging to the past
in the progress of the species, the Europeans imagine themselves as the exclusive bearers,
creators, and protagonists of that modernity. What is notable about this is not that the
Europeans imagined and thought of themselves and the rest of the species in that way—
something not exclusive to Europeans—but the fact that they were capable of spreading and
establishing that historical perspective as hegemonic within the new intersubjective universe
of the global model of power. (Quijano, 2000, pp. 542-543) ¶ The contemporary connotation of
the English term “modern” as “up-to-date” or “most advanced” reveals this ingrained
pervasiveness of a cultural narrative in which a Euro-American standard of civilization becomes
the only way of constructing the world as “modern” (Taylor, 1999). In this narrative, “man”
was Euro-American man and the rest were “natives”. Underlying this conception of civilized
humanity was a particular form of subjectivity constructed from the experience and perspective
of the elite, educated, white, heterosexual, Christian, males (Elias, 1974). ¶ The western subject
(already gendered to subordinate the female and the feminine) is brought into being as a
universal norm in the process of the West’s expansion. This norm denies the subject’s
dependence upon ‘the other’ and produces the illusion of autonomy and freedom. In fact, this
abstract and universal consciousness was always embodied, male, and European, whether
indigenous or transplanted. Women and non-European men -- even if they achieved the
required education -- could enter science only as surrogates, disciples, or through passing (that
is, by adopting the languages, gestures, attitudes, values of Euro-American men). (Restivo &
Loughlin, 2000, p. 137) ¶ In the nineteenth century, bringing European cultural forms of
knowledge and ways of life to the “natives” was conceived as the civilizing mission (i.e., La
mission civilisatrice, “the white man’s burden”) of the west, both within and without Europe and
North America (Richardson & Webb, 1986; Conklin, 1997; Adams, 1988, 1995). ¶ During the
nineteenth century, as European dominance embraced the world, “civilization” became, in
European thinking, joined to “imperialism”. The civilizing process had emerged through a
European history conceived as Progress, whether in the Hegelian or the Marxian form, which
Europe was spreading to the rest of the world. (Cox, 2002, p. 176) ¶ Like “globalization” today,
“civilization” was the overarching ideology behind the formation and reformation of state
Gonzaga Debate In 89
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schooling in the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century (Adams, 1988). ¶ EuroAmerican man was supposed to possess a superior mode of reason. The ideal of western
rationality, through “proper” education, could be transferred to other human beings (both
within and outside of Europe and North America) lower in the racial/intelligence hierarchy,
unless they were determined to be incapable of being civilized, which legitimized their
exploitation, segregation, marginalization, and failure to “succeed”. For example, in the United
States, until the 1940s, “Negroes” were believed to be incapable of being civilized, justifying
their enslavement and subsequent subordinate legal status, while some “Indians” could be
civilized, legitimizing their removal from tribal lands and justifying their cultural extermination
through “education” (Goldberg, 1994; Adams, 1988, 1995). Pathologizing practices and the
“cultural deficit” paradigm, still prevalent in schools today, are continuations of this
“civilization-savagism” paradigm in the knowledge and practices of education (Bishop &
Mazawi, 2005; Heydon & Iannacci, 2008).
Role playing is the ultimate reconception of colonial domination
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.35, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
First theorized by Peruvian sociologist, Anibal Quijano, “coloniality” or “coloniality of power” is a
global model of power/knowledge relations that emerged with and as a consequence of
European colonialism and European modernity in the sixteenth century. Coloniality of power is a
principle and strategy of control and domination that is articulated though the modern/colonial
world system and remains the most general form of domination in the world today (Quijano,
2000). Coloniality identifies an overarching structure of power that has impacted all aspects of
social and political experience around the world (Quijano, 2008). The very processes and
experiences of colonization for example, contributed to the construction of the modern
European epistemological framework. The epistemic model of the knowing subject was
constituted in part during the initial stages of Spanish contact with and colonization of the
indigenous peoples in the Americas. According to Argentine philosopher of liberation, Enrique
Dussel, the early modern form of European epistemic subjectivity was the conquering self.
Both warrior and aristocrat, the ego conquiro established with the previously unknown other
an exclusionary relationship of domination (Dussel, 1995; Maldonado-Torres, 2008). This
relation of conquest and domination became part of the emerging civilizational identity of the
European elite and subsequently a central but hidden dimension of western modernity
(Maldonado-Torres, 2008). ¶ Modern subjectivity combined some of the features of the
existing humanism of the time with ideas that emerged from the discovery of the new world
and the experience of warriors and conquerors (not kings or clergy) vis-à-vis peoples regarded
as inherently inferior. From then on, a particularly modern sense of human freedom was linked
to certain relations of power that affected not only the way in which subjects perceived
themselves, but also the way in which they related to others whose bodies presumably carried
the marks of inferiority. The myth of modernity is therefore simultaneous with the emergence
of modern subjectivity itself: freedom and the ensuing sense of rationality that emanates from it
Gonzaga Debate In 90
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were tied to a particular conception of power that is premised on the alleged superiority of
some subjects over others. (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, p. 213) ¶ The contemporary consumer
market society (Slater & Tonkiss, 2001) and the destructive western cultural attitude toward
nature are “logical corollaries” of the early modern European conquest, colonization, and
destruction of people and cultures (Dussel, 1985, p. 114).¶
Gonzaga Debate In 91
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AT: FW Extinction DA (Boggs/Lundberg/McClean)
The K is a prerequisite to effective policy skills – Eurocentrism renders current
policy education useless
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_P
roposal_for_the_Creation_of_an_Other_School, accessed 7/12/13)
One rationale for implementing this decolonial educational philosophy and curriculum is the
presumption that the modern/colonial world-system has entered into a terminal crisis. There is
an urgent need to reimagine modernity in light of the present changes occurring in the world
today. We are living in the midst of an historical shift of significance comparable to the
emergence of modernity in the fifteenth century (Wallerstein, 2002, 2003; Arrighi, 1994; Arrighi
& Silver, 2001; Sassen, 2006; Mendieta, 2007). New ways of thinking and learning need to be
cultivated and institutionalized in order to inform and guide both personal and public
decisions through this period of crisis and transition (O’Sullivan, 2001).
Modern/coloniality is an alternative macro-narrative to Eurocentric modernity that can orient
an intercultural curriculum with a pluriversal ethos. Modernity/coloniality is an epistemic and
macro-narrative shift in the interpretive horizon that includes the experiences and knowledge of
those who have been marginalized by Eurocentric modernity. This is not a new abstract
universality to replace Eurocentric modernity, but an opening up to and learning from the
pluri-versality eclipsed by the projections of European 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 reproduces coloniality of power and reduces difference
for instrumental global designs.
Eurocentric education is inevitable within the State-only individual action can
solve
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.52, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
The historical context of the Eurocentric mode of production and control of knowledge and
subjectivity is the emergence and global expansion of the modern/colonial world system,
which centrally involves the modern educational apparatus, from the sixteenth century to the
present (Dussel, 1993, 1995, 1998; Mignolo, 2000a; Quijano, 1999, 2000, 2008; Hamilton, 1989,
1990, 2001; Popkewitz, 2008). The modern educational sphere (as a distinct state administrative
concern for the population within emergent territorial states) emerged within a socio-historical
Gonzaga Debate In 92
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structure in which Western Europe became the governing center of the first world wide
historical system in the sixteenth century (Boyd, 1973; Butts, 1973; Illich, 1979; Hamilton, 1989;
Adick, 1995). Modern western educational institutions emerged in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries as part of a disciplinary revolution around the same Renaissance idea of
civilized “man” that underlies the coloniality of power (Gorsky, 2003; Illich, 1978). Since the
sixteenth century, schools have been institutions that relate the state, civil (and religious)
authority and moral discipline (Foucault, 1991a; Popkewitz, 1997, p. 140). Since the sixteenth
century, schooling and the knowledge of schooling have been part of the emergence and
expansion of the modern/colonial world system. ¶ Contrary to the deeply held nationalist
assumptions and benevolent liberal intentions among contemporary educators,
administrators and policy makers, modern western education systems are part of an
imperial/colonial world historical system.
State action fails- State-based education is inherency Eurocentric and recreates
expansion, domination, and violence- turns their impact claims
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.52, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
State schooling reproduces the dominant social imaginary reflected in the geoculture of the
modern/colonial world system. Schooling practices are largely constituted by western
knowledges and Eurocentric assumptive worldviews that systemically maintain hierarchical,
unequal, and violent (symbolic and material) global power/knowledge relations. Through the
incorporation and stratification of individuals within particular ethno-cultural intersubjective
structures of knowledge and understanding, characterized broadly as Eurocentrism, schooling
reproduces the modern/colonial world system. State educational institutions are part of a
systemic civilizational apparatus in the ongoing redemptive mission of western expansion
and domination. ¶ The emergence of the modern/colonial world system involved a geoeconomic, geo-political, and geo-cultural invention and management of the planet that
centrally involves the production and organization of knowledge. Theoretical and
philosophical thought during this early modern period laid the foundations for Eurocentric
knowledge and its institutionalization within modern systems of education. Edgardo Lander
identifies four main assumptions underlying Eurocentric knowledge (Lander, 2002). First,
Eurocentric knowledge is based on the construction of multiple dichotomies or oppositions, i.e.,
reason and body, subject and object, culture and nature, masculine and feminine (Berting 1993;
Quijano 2000; Lander 2000). Second, European regional or local history is the model or
reference for every other history, the apex of humanity's progress (Dussel 2000; Quijano 2000).
Third, cultural differences are converted into value differences (Mignolo 1995), time-space
distances (Fabian, 1983), and hierarchies that define all non-European humans as inferior
(Lander, 2002). Fourth, and finally, science and technology are both the source and the proof of
western advancement toward greater control of the environment. ¶ Over the past five hundred
Gonzaga Debate In 93
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years, this epistemic framework was imposed upon the entire world and became part of the
“standards of civilization” (Gong, 1984). All other forms of knowledge and learning were
subordinated to the universalized standards, concepts, metaphors, and ideologies of western
knowledge and education. Once the correlation between subject and object was postulated it
became unthinkable to accept the idea that a knowing subject was possible beyond the subject
of knowledge postulated by the very concept of rationality put in place by modern epistemology
(Mignolo, 2000). ¶ The world became unthinkable beyond European (and, later, North Atlantic)
epistemology. The colonial difference marked the limits of thinking and theorizing, unless
modern epistemology (philosophy, social sciences, natural sciences) was exported/imported to
those places where thinking was impossible (because it was folklore, magic, wisdom, and the
like). (Mignolo, 2002, p. 90)
Gonzaga Debate In 94
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AT: State Good/Boggs
Disad to the state-The State is the reason we have stale and wrong Eurocentric
education-it is the main perpetuator of bad knowledge production- none of
their external impacts apply
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
The epistemic project of Eurocentric modernity (including the nation-state and state
education) is intertwined with the history of European colonialism from the sixteenth century
to the present (Quijano, 1999, 2000, 2008; Mignolo, 2000a, 2005; Dussel, 1993, 1995; Escobar,
2007; Castro-Gomez, 2008). The emergence of Occidentalist reason is part of the emergence of
European civilizational identity and the imperial/colonial project that became known in the
eighteenth century as “modernity” and “civilization”. ¶ This recent analysis and critique of
modernity from the perspective of coloniality has contributed to a more comprehensive (worldhistorical or planetary) interpretation of western modernity, with significant implications for
rethinking the civilizational enclosures of western education. Modernity is interpreted as a
planetary phenomenon, understood here as a worldwide system, within which a plurality of
different ways of knowing and being in the world are interrelated. Civilizations are continually
evolving and interrelated processes and conditions that form the ways different groups of
people perceive and conceive the world. The diverse pluralities of civilizational processes and
conditions in the world today all coexist within a dynamic historical system characterized by
modernity/coloniality (Dussel, 1998). Islamism, for example, is a modern expression of revolt
against the imposition of Eurocentric modernization (Sayyid, 1997; Cox, 2002; Steger, 2008). ¶
Eurocentric modernity is interpreted, in part, as a hegemonic system of domination, oppression,
and exploitation, rooted in the earliest stages of European colonial expansion and western
civilizational identity formation. Although the civilizational missions have changed from
salvation, to civilizing, to modernizing, and most recently, to marketizing, western educational
institutions and their modern system of knowledge are maintained within this predatory model
of civilization based upon a Eurocentric projection of humanity (Mignolo, 2006). Modern
western education systems have been hugely successful at reproducing this Eurocentric
macronarrative of modernity, in part through Eurocentric curricula and nation-state centered
thinking.¶ Nation-state and disciplinary centered approaches to teaching and learning
overlook the systemic-historical structures (foundational preconditions) preceding and
underlying the emergence of the modern state, disciplinary knowledges, and mass education
systems, as well as the colonial power/knowledge relations inherent in the project of
Eurocentric modernity. In the field of education, teaching exclusively from within the identity
of a single nation-state, particularly a hegemonic nation-state like the United States, and,
without problematizing the western knowledge disciplines and school subjects, contributes to
the tacit reproduction of the imaginary of Eurocentric modernity. ¶ Self-serving institutionalized
academic disciplinary boundaries, unexamined nationalist ideologies, and insufficient
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comparative research across the social sciences and humanities have all contributed to a lack of
critical awareness of the presence and limits of this modern civilizational narrative in the
historical consciousness of western modernity (Taylor, 1999; Agnew, 2003).
Their education standard is wrong- they stem from a Eurocentered system of
knowledge production and their attempts to stop our movement creates a
worse form of education
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
The word civilization evokes powerful images and understandings. We in the United States have
been taught, from elementary school onward, that a few ancient people – like the Egyptians or
Greeks – were “civilized” and that civilization achieved its highest level of development here and
in other Western countries. Civilization, we are told, is beneficial, desirable – and definitely
preferable to being un-civilized. (Patterson, 1997, p. 9) ¶ In addition, Eurocentric scholarship and
disciplinary divisions normally interpret modernity and colonialism as completely separate
phenomena, upholding the myth of Eurocentric modernity. The profound effects, legacies, and
“spirit” of European colonialism have yet to be fully recognized and understood in the
Eurocentric cultures of scholarship, particularly in the parochial field of education
(Osterhammel, 1997; Ashcroft, 2001). In the United States for example, the term “colonial” has
been effectively appropriated in nationalist historiography and the public consciousness to refer
exclusively to the early “American” historical period, i.e., “colonial history”, “colonial
architecture”, “settler colonies” (Stasiulis & Yuval-Davis, 1995; Greene, 2007). Colonialism is
largely absent in the curriculum in most U.S. schools and many universities. It is also largely
absent in the historical consciousness of the Caucasian population in the United States. ¶
Drawing upon and revising the mostly state-centric educational theories of social and cultural
reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Aronowitz, 1992; Giroux, 1983, 2005; Apple, 1982a,
1982b, 1990, 1993; Popkewitz, 2000), this essay argues that schools contribute to the
reproduction of the Eurocentric imaginary of the modern/colonial world system. The cultural
narratives of Eurocentric modernity comprise the geoculture of the modern/colonial world
system. The dominant geoculture is composed of the frames of mind and ways of life lived
through particular forms of social, political, economic and religious organization. The languages,
knowledges, values, and habits inculcated through western education systems are constitutive
of the ideologies and practices of Eurocentric modernity. A thoroughly Eurocentric curriculum
and the imperial/colonial languages of instruction are among the material means of geocultural
socialization and reproduction. At the level of ideology and ethos, dominant beliefs about
schooling are conceptualized and lived through the redemptive civilizational missions of
Eurocentric modernity. ¶ The “No Child Left Behind” policy for example, tacitly presumes an
ongoing forward movement of inevitable progress and the redemptive mission of schooling to
save all children from being “left behind” in an emergent transnational civilizational project
(Robinson, 2004). This new market civilization project, described further in part four below, is
concealed and promoted as preserving national economic strength in the triumphal march of
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universal history under the guise of “globalization” (Steger, 2002, 2004; Sassen, 2006).
Seemingly neutral and universal processes of teaching and learning knowledge and skills are
embedded within a hierarchical world system in which knowledge and being are deceptively
colonized (Kincheloe, 2008). “Though it is rarely discussed in educational policy, the sociopolitical, philosophical, psychological, and economic structures constructed over the past 500
years of Euro-American colonialism have a dramatic effect on what goes on in classrooms”
(Kincheloe, 2006, p. 220). ¶ Throughout the twentieth century, mass education systems
became central to both the (re)formation of modern subjectivities and the (re)formation and
management of modern economic and political organizations among Western and nonWestern nation-states throughout the world (Hunt, 1987; Timons, 1988; Popkewitz, 2000;
Manzer, 2003). The sphere of modern education is thus a necessary and increasingly important
issue in the ongoing struggles over the principles and practices upon which the political,
economic, and cultural spheres are organized, ruled, and enacted, worldwide (OECD, 1989;
Cookson, Sadovnik & Semel, 1992; Daun, 2002). Western education systems are part of the
production and reproduction of western modernity, understood broadly as a distinct
civilizational program (Eisenstadt, 2001). The history and contemporary restructuring of
modern western education systems therefore need to be situated within a planetary,
civilizational, and post-Eurocentric world historical perspective. ¶ The modern/colonial world
system perspective is a Latin American post-Eurocentric critique of western modernity that
adopts but revises the modern world-system framework associated with the historical
sociology of Immanuel Wallerstein. The “modern world-system” refers to the processes and
realities of the historical formation and change over time of the first world historical system,
from the sixteenth century to the present. From a world-system framework, the unit of analysis
is the whole world, understood as an interrelated historical system that emerged with the
emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit in the sixteenth century.
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AT: Disadvantages
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DA Impact Answers
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Your DAs are Fake
The systems of analysis that the Neg’s impacts rest on, like political and
economic analysis, are disciplines derived from hegemonic systems of European
dominance- The Neg’s truth claims are null and criticizing them is a prerequisite
to political action
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
Within the Western academe, the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 is often
seen as the start of a postcolonial turn, at least in the humanities and humanistic social
sciences. For Said, the “relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of
domination, of various degrees of a complex hegemony”. Orientalism is both an ensemble of
hegemonic ideas about the Orient as well as a reality that European colonizers and their
successors have sought to conjure into life. Its basis is the “flexible positional superiority,
which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without
ever losing him the relative upper hand”. To state, for example, that the pre-conditions for
democracy are lacking or corrupt is endemic in a particular postcolonial context is to generate
“objective” scientific truths that effectively efface the causal impact of colonialism in that
context. These “objective” truths about the non-West also bear an uncanny resemblance to
older colonial notions of Oriental despotism and corruption. Accordingly, to the extent that
these “truths” follow logically from the “ hegemony of European ideas about the
Orient…reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness ,” we may justifiably
count disciplines such as “economics, politics, and sociology…[as] ideological sciences” and,
hence, intrinsically “political” in form and content alike. It is these disciplines , of course,
which are the most resistant even today to the central message of Said’s writings, namely,
the need to decolonize knowledge concerning the non-Western world. The result is what Said
termed “American Social Scientese,” a new post-WWII Orientalism in which the “trained social
scientist…”applies” his science to the Orient, or anywhere else” . So long as they could “appear
scientific,” American political scientists would, therefore, “ignore the major problems of
politics” in the postcolonial world and beyond.
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Security Studies is Eurocentric
Eurocentrism in security studies prevents a complete understanding of events
and defends the imperialists – the aff is a prerequisite to understanding policy
option
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 343-344,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
To sum up, then, security studies – across a range of prominent positions in the field – rests on
and reproduces a variety of Eurocentric assumptions. As in Makers of Modern Strategy, a
Western political perspective is taken for granted. In analysis of key events, as in the Cuban
Missile Crisis, agency is assumed to reside in the great powers. Eurocentric imagined
geographies and histories, such as those through which the Second World War is known,
provide the very foundation of security studies. In and through this mutually reinforcing set of
claims, assertions, and presuppositions the oft-murderous West fashions itself as the ethical
actor in world politics.
If security studies as presently constituted is overwhelmingly Eurocentric, why is this a problem?
First, Eurocentrism in security studies produces basic difficulties in understanding the course
and nature of events, that is, in empirical analyses of security relations. Whether we wish to
understand crisis decision-making or the causes of genocide, adopting a Eurocentric set of
assumptions – about agency, objectivity, and morality – gets in the way and hinders our
efforts. Second, Eurocentrism in security studies also means that analysis winds up expressing
a taken for- granted politics that sides with the rulers, with the powerful, with the
imperialists, and not with the downtrodden, the weak, the colonised, or the post-colonised.
For many scholars and analysts, whose concern it is to shore up and defend the interests of the
powerful, this may not be an issue. For others, however, the concern may be to support and
defend the weak. Whatever the knowledge interests of individuals, we can and should be selfconscious of our presuppositions, something precluded by failing to recognise the political
implications of our categories. This means there is both a social science problem and a political
problem. We discuss these intimately interconnected problems in more detail in the next two
sections.
Security studies frame the West as rational and the non-West as the other –
simplifies the complexities of international relations
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 346-347,
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https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
What is true of Athens and Sparta is generally true of modern great powers; they were
embedded in and dependent upon imperial relations of diverse kind. There is now a large and
sophisticated historical and sociological literature tracing the mutual constitution of metropole
and colony in the era of European imperialism. The key claim is that metropole and colony
cannot be understood one without the other, they comprise a ‘single analytic field’.105 That
is, ‘what we now call Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia were constructed together in the
midst of a relationship, at once economic and cultural, military and political’.106
Eurocentrism in International Relations, the view that Europe is separate and self-producing,
renders invisible this mutual constitution of core and periphery characteristic of great
powers.107
Once vision is shifted from a fixation on the politics and policies of great powers to the ebb
and flow of the social relations through which great powers – their societies, economies,
cultures and armed forces – are constituted, reproduced and transformed, the imperial and
the non-European world more generally take on equivalent importance. Throughout the era of
European great-power politics, the source of many of security studies’ archetypal categories,
European politics and society were complexly interpenetrated with an imperial periphery. To
cite one fact of a type central to any realist account of world politics, for much of its existence as
a great power, Britain’s leading strategic reserve was the Indian army.108
What was true of European economic and military power was also true of the constitution of
European identities, which required an imaginary non-Western ‘other’.109 The West is
defined through a series of contrasts regarding rationality, progress, and development in
which the non-West is generally found lacking. To take an example from the initial period of
European expansion, Western thinkers used the notion of the ‘state of nature’ to distinguish
between their civilisation and those they encountered in the Western Hemisphere after 1492.
The ‘state of nature’ was itself a Eurocentric interpretation of these peoples which located
civilisation and law in Europe even as Europe set about destroying these peoples and their
civilisations. This metaphor, a core notion in Western political thought, only became possible as
a result of Europe’s imperial encounter with aboriginal peoples.110 At the same time, it enabled
and legitimated European dispossession and appropriation of land, resources and
populations. In this way, the ‘state of nature’ played its role in producing a world sharply
divided between Western have-lots and non-Western have-nots. This idea has continuing
significance in political theory and in discussions of contemporary security issues such as
failed states and new wars, discussions which reproduce Eurocentric understandings of world
politics.111 Contemporary violence in Africa is often explained in terms of a lack of those
institutions and attributes associated with European modernity, such as sovereignty, rather
than as a consequence of long histories of colonial and postcolonial interaction with the West.
We need to forget spatial representations and evaluate international relations
in terms of relational processes instead of assuming the world is made of
separate entities
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
Gonzaga Debate In 103
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(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 348-349,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
Recognition of the mutually constitutive character of world politics has implications for the
nature of explanation. There is a strong tendency across the social sciences to divide up the
world into a series of discrete spaces and locate the causes of events and processes in one site
or another. Security studies, as we have shown, privileges the agency of great powers, while
area studies often emphasises local factors.116 In contrast, we wish to highlight the
significance of the relations between spaces and populations, and their role in driving events
and processes, as well as in constituting seemingly discrete spaces and entities in the first place.
Methodologically, this means that it cannot be assumed in advance that events and their
explanation are always to be found in the same place, even in the case of large and powerful
states.117 ‘Contrapuntal studies’ that analyse events, developments and processes in core and
periphery together, offer one example of what is required.118
For purposes of critiquing security studies, we have deployed a set of categories, such as NorthSouth and strong-weak, that we are not fully able to develop here.119 A key feature of these
alternative categories is that they are relational in nature; you cannot have the North without
the South. Relational processes connect the world. In so doing, they remake and interconnect
spaces; they have a geographic expression. For example, as Sidney Mintz shows, Eastern
techniques of sugar production, African slave labour, English capital, and Caribbean land
together remade Europe and the New World.120 The global North and the global South were
co-produced through processes of imperial expansion and neocolonial domination. Relational
thinking provides inherent defences against Eurocentrism because it begins with the
assumption that the social world is composed of relations rather than separate objects, like
great powers or ‘the West’. Explanation is then centred on the relations rather than
apparently discrete entities. To be sure, there is no direct correlation between analytic
categories like strong and weak and spatial categories like North and South. Nonetheless,
relations between the strong and the weak have geographic consequences, some of which are
captured by the categories of North and South. The spatial categories of security studies, such as
the Third World, territorial states, great powers, failed states, and now civilisations, are typically
conceived in non-relational terms, as separate and discrete. A security studies conceived in
these terms is inadequate. The social context of armed conflict is a world of relational
processes, a world which must be studied in relational terms.
Security studies today have only taken the viewpoint of the powerful
conquerors and thus inherently Eurocentric – we need to stop otherizing the
other nations and be rid of these inequalities
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 349-351,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
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Making sense of security relations requires putting the weak and the strong in a common
analytic frame. But more is at stake in our critique of Eurocentrism in security studies than the
adequacy of social scientific analyses. In conventional form, security studies takes the
perspective of the powerful, of those who have colonised, dominated and competed over the
world. There is a politics to security studies and it is the politics of the strong. As E. H. Carr
remarked in 1977, ‘[t]he study of international relations in English speaking countries is simply a
study of the best way to run the world from positions of strength. The study of international
relations in African and Asian Universities, if it ever got going, would be a study of the
exploitation of the weaker by the stronger.’121 These considerations take on additional
significance when security studies informs a strategic studies, the rational use of force in
pursuit of objectives.
It is a common observation that security studies is overwhelmingly done in and for the most
powerful states in the international system. As a problem-solving discourse, conventional
security studies is produced out of an extensive and well-developed set of institutions and
personnel located at the intersection of the state and the academy.122 From the initial
systemisation of general staffs in the nineteenth century to the contemporary galaxy of
university departments, think tanks, and security and defence policy planning staffs, there has
emerged an extensive and sophisticated, albeit Eurocentric, body of knowledge.
That said, much contemporary writing in the field of security studies is explicitly and selfconsciously critical of the policies of Western states. How can we then claim that security
studies as a whole exhibits a Eurocentric politics? The politics of critical and human security
approaches revolve around the concept of emancipation, an idea derived from the European
Enlightenments. In this literature, the agent of emancipation is almost invariably the West,
whether in the form of Western-dominated international institutions, a Western-led global
civil society, or in the ‘ethical foreign policies’ of leading Western powers.123 Critics of
Western states find themselves in the position of relying on Western armed forces for
humanitarian interventions, especially when actual fighting is required, as Paul Hirst
demonstrates in his incisive critique of Mary Kaldor’s New and Old Wars.124 Even when the
concrete agents of emancipation are not themselves Westerners, they are conceived as the
bearers of Western ideas, whether concerning economy, politics or culture.
In our critique of the politics of conventional security studies, what we wish to emphasise is the
everywhere taken-for-granted assumption that it is the powerful, most prominently the West,
other great powers and their clients, who have the right to bear arms. A strong distinction is
drawn in international law and state practice regarding war between the conventional armed
forces of sovereign states and the kind of armed resistance the weak are generally able to
mount. Such resistance often takes the form of insurgency, ambush, raids, banditry, hostagetaking, assassination, bombings, and other tactics which reflect the exigencies of asymmetric
warfare. Violent resistance, however justified and for whatever purpose, is often ugly.
Unsurprisingly, this violence, often rational and effective for the weaker party, is
systematically delegitimated by the West. This is evident in the terms used publicly to identify
those who resort to violent weapons of the weak. For example, four years into the Malayan
Emergency, the British dropped the term ‘bandit’ for the insurgents and adopted ‘Communist
Terrorist’.125 In the wake of 9/11, the military historian Sir John Keegan drew a distinction
between Western and Oriental traditions of warfare: ‘Westerners fight face to face, in stand-up
battle . . . [observing] rules of honour. Orientals . . . shrink from pitched battle . . . preferring
ambush, surprise, treachery and deceit.’126 President G.W. Bush referred to the tactics used by
the militias opposing the invasion of Iraq in the Spring of 2003 as ‘cowardly’ and ‘terrorist’.127
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As Victor Davis Hanson observes, ‘we in the West call the few casualties we suffer from
terrorism and surprise ‘‘cowardly’’, the frightful losses we inflict through open and direct assault
‘‘fair’’ ’.128
In armed conflict between the global North and the global South, Western use of force is
legitimated in terms of a civilising mission of one kind or another. Whether ‘white man’s
burden’, humanitarian intervention in the 1990s, or the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and
Iraq, the assumption is that it is the right of the West to bear arms to liberate the ‘natives’.
This is and has always been the primary justification of imperialism in all its forms; it is about
civilising the barbarians.129 Viewed from the global South, the results of the civilising mission
over the last several centuries are at best mixed. Setting aside the mass die-offs of the initial
stages of European expansion, nineteenth-century imperialism worked to divide humanity. As
Mike Davis observes:
[W]hat we today call the ‘third world’ (a Cold War term) is the outgrowth of income and
wealth inequalities – the famous ‘development gap’ – that were shaped most decisively in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the great non-European peasantries were
initially integrated into the world economy . . . By the end of Victoria’s reign . . . the inequality
of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes. Humanity had been irrevocably
divided.130
In such conditions, and in the world of profound inequalities they produced, armed and other
resistance is only to be expected. For us, the ‘natives’ have a right to bear arms for purposes of
their own liberatory projects, even those we profoundly disagree with.
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Aff Solves K of Security Studies
Rejecting the Eurocentric conventional security studies is a prerequisite to
actually preventing impacts
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 352,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
The attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror prompt efforts to rethink security
relations. We too have used 9/11 as an incitement to discourse. For a long time, security
studies mostly relied on realism. In political theoretic terms, realism is a richer and more
diverse tradition than its instantiation in the field of IR, one concerned with stripping power of
its illusions. It is in this sense that the work of figures as diverse as Karl Marx, Max Weber and
Michel Foucault can be characterised as realist. This article relies on such a sensibility to expose
the Eurocentrism of security studies. Viewed in this light, conventional security studies sits at
the intersection of power and knowledge. Whether in terms of the historical geographies that
inform its empirical analyses, the taken-for-granted politics that structure its questions and
theories, or the role of the state in shaping its research agendas, conventional security studies
as a field of knowledge is a product of Western power. The knowledge produced out of such a
field is inadequate even to its own clientele. It is even less adequate at addressing the security
and strategic concerns of the weak, the vast majority of the people living on the planet.
Security studies, and the policies it informs, have a lot to gain by waking up to the significance of
the Melians and their kin. We all have a lot to lose if it fails to do so.
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AT: Great Power Conflicts
Conventional security studies today stems from an inherently Eurocentric root
that are insufficient in a postcolonial world
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 329-330,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
Security relations today are about the contradictions between old security logics and new
security problematics. Traditionally, security studies has been concerned with relations
between and among great powers in the international system, itself understood as composed
of stronger and weaker sovereign territorial states. The history of international relations is
conceived primarily in terms of successive struggles between great powers and the rise and
fall of powerful states.1 Questions of war and peace raised by great power competition are
foundational for security thought and practice, and because of the primacy of security, for
understanding world politics more broadly.
Recent developments in world politics challenge these verities. In the contemporary era,
Western powers face an ‘existential threat’ from a transnational network enterprise rather
than from states organised along similar lines as in the past.2 This development represents a
break with putative histories of world politics as about great power struggles. Al-Qaeda is not a
state nor a great power; it is a transnational network and more importantly an idea around
which resistance is organised globally and locally.3 Thinking derived from conventional security
studies, then, is at best a poor basis for understanding and action in contemporary security
environments.4
A major reason for this inadequacy is that security studies derives its core categories and
assumptions about world politics from a particular understanding of European experience . In
this article, we critique the Eurocentric character of security studies as it has developed since
the Second World War. As we will show, the taken-for-granted historical geographies that
underpin security studies systematically understate and misrepresent the role of what we
now call the global South in security relations.5 Eurocentrism also leads to a distorted analysis
of Europe and its place in world politics. Understanding security relations, past and present,
requires acknowledging the mutual constitution of Europe and the non-European world and
their joint role in making history. In detailing the explanatory and political problems
Eurocentrism generates, this article clears ground for the development of a non- Eurocentric
security studies.
Reframing security analysis in these terms helps make sense of contemporary developments
by drawing attention to the implication of the ‘War on Terror’ in longer histories of warfare
between the global North and the global South.6 For Osama bin Laden, ‘The west’s occupation
of our countries is old, but takes new forms. The struggle between us and them began centuries
ago, and will continue.’7 The ability of a Southern resistance movement to inflict wounding
strikes on the home territory of a leading metropolitan power is nearly unprecedented.
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Nevertheless, armed conflict between North and South is very old. In conventional security
studies, these conflicts are understood under the rubric of ‘small wars’ or asymmetric conflict
and conceived as peripheral to, and derived from, the main action among great powers.8
Now, what seemed peripheral has become central. The ‘natives’ have struck back, and are
likely to continue doing so. This marks a significant moment of postcolonial rupture in the
history of security relations.9 Previously, Southern resistance movements sought national
liberation and the end of formal and informal colonial rule in their own states. The resistance
movement taking shape around Al-Qaeda, and the reactions to it, are global in scope and not
limited to particular states or even a particular region. For us, Al-Qaeda’s spectacular
intervention and ongoing role in contemporary world politics highlights the necessity of
reformulating the categories we deploy to make sense of both past and present security
relations.
Assuming that agency lies only in the great powers of the world is Eurocentric –
we forget about the way our actions reflect on non-Western countries resulting
in scenarios like the Cuban missile crisis
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 336-338,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
One place where revolutionary war became a concern was Cuba, the site of a paradigmatic
moment in the evolution of security studies. The Cuban Missile Crisis is central to debates
concerning, among other things, the nature of deterrence, rational decision-making and the
Cold War itself. Indeed, as an object of analysis, crisis management emerges out of scholarly
and policy efforts to come to terms with the Cuban Missile Crisis. In standard accounts, the
crisis is an affair of the superpowers only: ‘For thirteen days in October 1962, the United States
and the Soviet Union stood ‘‘eyeball to eyeball’’, each with the power of mutual annihilation in
hand’.49 Cuba is conceived either as a client state of the Soviet Union, whose actions are an
extension of Soviet policy, or as simply the location of a dispute between the US and the USSR.
As Jutta Weldes comments, both in the ExComm discussions and most subsequent scholarship,
‘Cuba appeared . . . merely as a place, and a ‘‘little pipsqueak of a place’’ at that’.50
A basic difficulty with this Eurocentric construction is that in writing Cuba out of the Cuban
Missile Crisis, important dynamics and variables were overlooked by policymakers at the time
and by most subsequent scholarship. US officials meeting in the ExComm failed to recognise
the role of their own past policies towards Cuba in generating the crisis. Despite US
perceptions of Soviet allies in the Third World as mere puppets, nuclear missiles could never
have been placed in Cuba without Cuban agreement.51 Castro, realistically fearful of another
invasion after the Bay of Pigs, turned to the Soviet Union for help in defending Cuban
sovereignty and the Cuban revolution. Without these Cuban motivations, it is unlikely there
would have been a crisis; the missiles were placed onto Cuban territory in part to defend it.
Overlooking Cuban agency prevented participants and scholars from realising, until quite
recently, that Castro also played a significant role in the actual crisis. When Fyodor Burlatsky,
one of Khrushchev’s advisors, was asked by Theodore Sorensen in 1989 ‘what outside influences
Gonzaga Debate In 109
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were brought to bear on the Kremlin’s decision making’ during the crisis, he responded, ‘the
first influence was from Castro’.52
The failure to recognise the Cuban role in the crisis, both at the time and subsequently,
reproduces the Eurocentric assumption that agency – real, historically significant agency –
only resides in the great powers. Even well-resourced scholarship of the highest quality took
several decades to begin to uncover the significance of the Cubans in their own crisis. This
explains why, in 1993, Bruce Allyn, James Blight and David Welch found it necessary to argue
that ‘The Cuban missile crisis was very much a Cuban affair’.53 In the late 1980s a series of
scholarly meetings were set up to bring together the key participants in the crisis.54 It was not
until the third such meeting, held in Moscow in January 1989, that Cuban representatives were
even invited, and then only at Soviet insistence. American representatives resisted Cuban
participation on the grounds that this would turn the meeting into a ‘political circus’.55 Like
Japanese naval strategists, it was assumed that Cubans would be incapable of stepping outside a
‘national-political approach’. At this meeting, and a subsequent one attended by Castro in
Havana in January 1992, evidence of the Cuban role, some of which we mention above, began
to emerge. The crisis, for example, could not end until Castro permitted the missiles to be
removed, in exchange for a Soviet brigade to defend Cuba.56
Gonzaga Debate In 110
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AT: Regional Conflict Impacts
Political science scholarship in the US is dominated by Eurocentrism as the
dominant form of knowledge production, reject this dominant system to open
up politics to new forms of knowledge production
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
***Italics indicate quoted passages
Introduction
We live in uncertain times, but one of the few certainties today is the dominance of
Eurocentric perspectives on formerly colonized parts of the modern world. Colonial
stereotypes and social theories used to govern colonized societies now find pride of place in
academic and media discourses. Consider two commonplace assertions in contemporary
academic writing:
(1)Democracy requires certain material pre-conditions that make it difficult for poorer
countries to become and remain democratic.
(2)Civil wars occur primarily in ex-colonial territories in which the modern state has
penetrated insufficiently.
Both of these assertions, which I examine below, may be linked to a venerable body of
scholarship within American political science. This state of affairs is puzzling, on the one hand,
because the origins of these assertions lie in Europe, not the U nited S tates. Yet, on the other
hand, it is also unsurprising because the American social sciences bear the clear imprint of
older European social theories of modernization, development, culture, and history.
It would be fair to say that the post-WWII American science of politics has drawn on European
precedents even as it has domesticated these in the quest for a value-free social science . The
new science of politics was, paradoxically, both American and universal. As Edward Schatz and
Elena Maltseva put it,
While a variety of authors have examined non-American influences on the discipline, few would
deny that it has been strikingly American and has developed particularly quickly in post-War
America…the discipline is committed to producing general knowledge that transcends the
particulars of time and place, to producing knowledge that ipso facto should not be
characterized as American.
During the Cold War and its aftermath, the (re-)production of general scientific knowledge
about the former colonial world has remained indispensable to American interests. As a
consequence, the abstract, formal character of much American political science has tended to
obscure not only the colonial origins of several of its key concepts and theories, but also its
many uses in advancing American interests in the postcolonial world. This essay seeks to
reveal the origins and uses of mainstream American political science, critiquing dominant
disciplinary views of the ex-colonial world and then making the case for a distinctly postcolonial
approach to the study of politics.
Gonzaga Debate In 111
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AT: Failed State/Civil War Impact
The idea that “less democratic” and “undeveloped countries” will turn into
failed states or become entrenched in civil war recreates binaries of the West
and the “Other”
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
Civil Wars
Over the past decade, civil wars have emerged as a major subfield of comparative political
science because there has been a growing recognition that, in the post-WWII period, wars
within states far outnumber wars between states. World Bank researchers Paul Collier and
Anke Hoeffler took the lead with a pioneering article on greed and grievance as competing
micro-economic motivations for participation in civil wars. Equally important was the
rejoinder by David Laitin and James Fearon, who emphasized macro-structural factors such as
rugged terrain and weak states in their explanation of why civil wars occur. For Fearon and
Laitin, “financially, organizationally, and politically weak central governments render
insurgency more feasible and attractive due to weak local policing or inept and corrupt
counterinsurgency practices”. A similar macro-level view by Stathis Kalyvas argues that “poor,
nonmodernized states never penetrated their periphery effectively, thus failing to reduce the
salience of local cleavages…and leaving such cleavages as a resource for rebels to access”.
Once again , therefore, we find ourselves face to face with the ideological divide between
the modern West and its poor, non-modern Other. This reversion to modernization theory is
almost inevitable because civil wars today occur invariably in postcolonial contexts where the
sovereignty of the modern state is itself contested. But, instead of probing the empirical nature
of contested sovereignty in postcolonial contexts, the American political scientist’s response is
to assume a lack or deficiency in order to explain the causes of civil wars. It is difficult to miss
the neat parallel with studies of democracy discussed earlier.
Reject the Aff’s claim to solve foreign instability, fail state or civil war impacts.
All of their authors are alarmist and stuck in the American perspective and rely
on Eurocentric conceptions of “science” to back up their posturing.
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
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Neo-positivist notions of “science” play a key role in blinding scholars to the ideological precommitments expected by mainstream American political science research on civil wars.
Firstly, the very concept of “civil wars” is intentionally vague and open to abuse. The most
common definition encompasses all “armed combat taking place within the boundaries of a
recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of
the hostilities” . Political phenomena in postcolonial settings as varied as peasant revolts, social
banditry, millenarian movements, wars of national liberation, social revolutions, and pogroms
can all now be coded as “civil wars.” While such coding obviously facilitates large-n
quantitative studies of civil wars, it also invites serious concerns over “conceptual stretching”
and “concept misformation” . The author of the definition above is well aware of these
problems. He writes elsewhere: “Civil war is a naturally occurring category… Distinguishing it
from other types of conflict always involves some kind of ad-hoc or value-based judgment” .
Such questionable coding practices are, nonetheless, commonplace, arguably because they
are useful in validating ideologically pre-determined hypotheses about civil wars in
postcolonial contexts.
Secondly, although there is no statistical consensus on why civil wars occur, the dominant
tendency among American political scientists is to posit structural explanations without
attributing any meaningful human agency to postcolonial actors. Some political scientists, for
example, have explained the causes of civil wars vis-à-vis rebels’ greed for lootable wealth .
Other reductionist explanations have privileged uneven topography , ethnic differences or
poverty . This thicket of interpretive confusion follows from competing a priori conceptions of
why civil wars occur. In each case, the distant Western observer identifies structural
deficiencies, whether in postcolonial state formation, demographics or ecology, without any
attempt to explain why ordinary men and women participate at all in high-risk collective
action. The application of a neo-positivist notion of “science” dramatically depoliticizes a highly
charged political phenomenon by reducing it to a set of structural variables. A particularly
egregious variant of this problem afflicts the recent wave of interest in the “micro-foundations”
of civil wars . Although researchers of micro-foundations probe the disjunctures between
macro-level social cleavages and micro-level motivations, they are firmly committed to a
reductionist analysis that regards individuals as caught between struggles for territorial
control between state and state-like rebel groups. There is no scope here for understanding
either subaltern agency or postcolonial state-society relations. Science, therefore, masks the
perpetuation of an older colonial view of “backward” areas or peripheries as peculiarly prone
to insurgency . American political science, in other words, is expected to act, much like the
colonizers of yore, to restore political order and build stronger states.
Gonzaga Debate In 113
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AT: Terrorism Impacts
The war of terror is a testament to the ways Eurocentrism is woven in policies –
it portrays Al-Qaeda as the ultimate evil while ignoring the direct influence of
the US in shaping the organization in the first place – overcoming this mindset
is a prerequisite to solving for terrorism impacts
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 347-348,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
Part of the significance of the postcolonial rupture signalled in the attack on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 is that it forces us to recover these processes
of mutual constitution and their significance for how we make sense of security relations and
world politics more generally. For many, the War on Terror is a clash between the West and
the Islamic world. Al-Qaeda, bin Laden and his allies are conceived as ‘Islamic fundamentalists’
with a passionate hatred of everything Western. The problem with this way of framing the
conflict is that it ignores the long history of interconnection and mutual constitution out of
which bin Laden’s ideas and organisation were produced. Currents of Western, Arab and
Islamic cultures and histories, modern technologies and communications, and the policies of
various regimes and great powers combined to form crystallisations, amongst them bin Laden’s
and Al-Qaeda’s particular way of being modern. Attempting to disaggregate these phenomena
and squeeze them into boxes marked ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ will not aid understanding of the
dynamics of the War on Terror. More importantly, policies derived from such binary
understandings may create the very conditions that crystallise future bin Ladens and AlQaedas.
Bin Laden’s ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and the Al-Qaeda organisation are in fact modern, hybrid
creations of Islam’s encounter with the West.112 Two of the key figures behind contemporary
Islamic thinking, Sayyid Qutb and his brother Muhammad, who was bin Laden’s teacher at King
Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia, viewed the West as suffering from a ‘great spiritual
famine’.113 Much of their thought is a reaction against Western modernity and an attempt to
outline a new, Islamic modernity, for they did not want the same fate to befall their societies.
The West was not only an initial impetus to their ideology, they also utilised a variety of
quintessentially Western ideas. Qutb was influenced in particular by Marxism- Leninism, taking
the concept of a revolutionary vanguard and the idea that the world could be remade through
an act of will, both important intellectual bases of Al-Qaeda. His notion that Islam could serve as
a universal ideology of emancipation in modern conditions is a distinctive combination of Islamic
and Enlightenment thinking.114
The Al-Qaeda organisation itself is even more obviously of the modern world, rather than
simply a product of ‘Islam’. It is a contemporary, global and networked enterprise, with a
flattened hierarchy and cellular structure. It is comfortable with computer technology and
Gonzaga Debate In 114
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modern communications. Al-Qaeda also has direct debts to US foreign policy. Bin Laden’s
central role and his organisation developed out of the US supported resistance to the Sovietbacked regime in Kabul.115 It is through diverse forms of interaction between peoples and
places around the world that ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and Al-Qaeda came into existence; they
were mutually constituted out of hierarchical relations of interconnection.
Our point here is not to provide a full account of Al-Qaeda but rather to highlight in an initial
way the kinds of research questions as well as the larger research agenda opened up for security
studies by a focus on the mutual constitution of the strong and the weak, amid relations of
domination and subordination. For security studies after Eurocentrism, the history and politics
of warfare and struggle between what we now call the global North and the global South must
become a major focus for inquiry. Especially in the age of the War on Terror, with its avowedly
colonial projects and rhetorics in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, there needs to be greater
attention to the histories and processes of imperial subjugation and the resistance it has so
regularly generated. The imperial character of great powers – in all its dimensions – directs
inquiry to the constitutive relationship between core and periphery, and in so doing to a
reconceptualisation of what a great power is in security studies. This involves explicit
recognition and analysis of the many ways in which political, economic and military power is
produced out of relations between the strong and the weak, relations that are as necessary as
they are contested. The insight of mutual constitution is no less applicable to the character and
nature of the weak themselves, as for Al-Qaeda. They too are formed out of their relations with
the powerful.
Gonzaga Debate In 115
[Type the document title]
AT: Democracy Impact
American based conceptions of democracy are Eurocentric and deny
perpetuate Cold War binaries of colonized and colonizer
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
Democracy
Post-WWII American political science, John Gunnell has argued, took “democracy” to be the
defining feature of the United States and the so-called free world, and the rest of the globe
came to judged accordingly. Robert Dahl, for example, declared stridently that everyday power
relations in the United States were pluralistic with myriad societal interests vying for power in a
competitive political arena . By comparison, the new, emerging democracies in Asia and Africa
were seen as built on shaky foundations, often characterized by one-party regimes,
“traditional” societies in transition, and unreliable commitments to democratic government. In
the same vein, Selig Harrison predicted the collapse of the largest of these democratic regimes
in India. Another theorist of democracy, Barrington Moore Jr., puzzled over the anomalous case
of India while explaining different paths to modern democracy and dictatorship. Still another
stalwart Samuel Huntington cautioned against democracy and pushed for institutional order and
stability . More recently, the same arguments connecting democracy, modernity, and the West
have been advanced using formal models and econometrics as bulwarks.
Modernity and democracy were unproblematically regarded as the province of the West. The
non-Western or postcolonial world was, by contrast, imagined as its Other: rooted in the
traditions of the past, socially and economically backward, and unfriendly to representative
democracy. Structural-functionalist theories of society conferred scientific sanctity to these
political differences between the modern West and the traditional non-West. American
foreign policy imbued the distinction with a concrete, real-world significance: as Henry Kissinger
saw it, the world was essentially divided between societies that had “escaped the early impact
of Newtonian thinking” and those that had indeed undergone the Newtonian revolution in
scientific thinking . This Cold War distinction between the modern Western and traditional
postcolonial societies, it must be noted, mapped onto an older binary between colonizer and
colonized. John Stuart Mill had, for instance, excluded from his modern liberal doctrine “those
backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage”. This
developmentalist teleology, based on an ideological “denial of coevalness”, appeared as
commonsensical to Mill as it did to his post-WWII American political science counterparts. The
non-West, on this reading of the past, is forever placed in the “waiting room of history,”
catching up incessantly with the modern, progressive West.
Gonzaga Debate In 116
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Normative conceptions of democracy purported by the US are nothing more
than assumptions of exceptionalism, we are less democratic and more
totalitarian than those that we posit as “backwards”
Chandra, Post-Doctoral Researcher Planck Institute, 13
(Uday, Max Planck institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Department of
Religious Diversity, Post-Doc, PhD Yale, Aug 2013, Yale University, “The Case for a Postcolonial
Approach to the Study of Politics”,
http://academia.edu/2364123/The_Case_for_a_Postcolonial_Approach_to_the_Study_of_Politi
cs, Accessed 7/12/13, NC)
The normative and theoretical problems with such formulations of democracy are
exacerbated by empirical ones. Despite the patronizing preconceptions and needless
apprehensions of American political scientists, mass democracy in postcolonial societies is
flourishing today in distinctive vernacular forms. Subaltern populations, albeit lacking the full
rights of citizens, form the backbone of contemporary postcolonial democracies. For instance,
levels of mass political participation, from voter turnout to non-partisan forms of civic
activism, are appreciably higher among over two billion South Asians than in elitist
democracies such as the United States where the poor are the least likely voters. Indeed,
limited political participation is such a problem in American history that a much-celebrated
recent manual on democracy simply omits it in order to ensure that the United States can be
counted statistically as a democracy! These ideological sleights of hand that obscure our
conceptions of democracy make it even more important to understand how ordinary men and
women experience and enact democratic politics in particular times and places, particularly in
postcolonial contexts. It is in this spirit that Lisa Wedeen describes masterfully how qat chews in
Yemen serve as sites of democratic deliberation today . As Lucia Michelutti explains, “the
moment democracy enters a particular historical and socio-cultural setting it becomes
vernacularised, and through vernacularisation it produces new social relations and values which
in turn shape ‘the political’”. Without an in-depth empirical understanding of these
“vernacular codes” by which democratic values and practices get internalized in the popular
consciousness, we will continue to posit false, ideologically-loaded dichotomies between the
modern democratic West and traditional undemocratic non-West. Our normative and
theoretical commitments in the study of democracy are, in other words, inseparable from our
empirical knowledge of it.
Gonzaga Debate In 117
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AT: Empiricism Proves Predictions
The way security studies functions through analyzing the past establishes a
solely western view of the world
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 334-335,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
Security studies after 1945 is defined largely by heated disputes between realist and liberal
positions, broadly conceived. Later, the constructivists joined the fray.33 These disputes
presuppose and reproduce, separately and together, a specific set of historical periodisations
and spatial assumptions. By historical periodisations we mean the taken-for-granted
chronologies of key actors, central processes and significant events that structure the field. By
spatial assumptions, we mean the frameworks that organise the world in spatial terms and
locate these actors, processes, and events, both in relation to each other and to world politics
more generally. Taken together, these temporal and spatial assumptions produce Eurocentric
historical geographies .34 In turn, a security studies rooted in this ground inevitably expresses
a particular politics, in terms of those actors and concerns that are seen as most important. The
Anglo-American character of IR is wellestablished. 35 Unsurprisingly, conventional security
studies, the core of IR, is also shaped by the politics of a particular time and place – the post1945 Anglo-American world – even as it presents itself in the seemingly neutral and timeless
language of social science.36
Eurocentric historical geographies and periodisations are very much in evidence in the
common narratives of world history that underpin security studies. For example, the wars of
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France give way to the nineteenth century Concert of Europe,
which in turn leads to the half-century conflict to prevent German hegemony. The period after
1945 is seen as one of ‘East-West’ struggle, that is, between competing coalitions organised
around the US and the USSR. In terms of spatial assumptions, what is most evident about
these very conventional and widely accepted periodisations is that world politics is taken to
be happening almost exclusively in Europe, or latterly in the Northern hemisphere.37 To the
extent that world politics is seen as taking place elsewhere, as in the Third World during the
Cold War, it is derivative of European developments and driven by great-power competition and
the diffusion of European ideas and institutions.38
Gonzaga Debate In 118
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AT: Utilitarian Calculus
Gonzaga Debate In 119
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Utilitarianism causes Organ Farms
Utilitarian causes moral atrocities. It justifies things organ farms in the name of
the greater good of society, there are 3 warrants to this- you must reject
utilitarian framing.
Morrison, Leeds Metropolitan U Commercial & Property Law Senior Lecturer, 5
(Doug, Leeds Metropolitan University Commercial And Property Law Senior Lecturer, Spring
2005, Medical Law Review, 13, “A Holistic Approach To Clinical and Research Decision-Making:
Lessons From The UK Organ-Retention Scandals”,
http://medlaw.oxfordjournals.org/content/13/1/45.full.pdf, Pages 45–79, Accessed 7/10/13,
NC)
Developed initially as an assault on the metaphysics that characterised much of the political
philosophy of the late 18th century, utilitarianism is most commonly associated with
normative ethical theory. Proponents of this early or classical form of utilitarianism, such as
Jeremy Bentham82 and John Stuart Mill,83 took the fundamental basis of morality and justice
to be the requirement that happiness or goodness should be maximised. Underpinning this
proposition can be seen to be three central tenets. The first claims that the ‘rightness’ or the
‘wrongness’ of an action depends upon the consequences it produces, an approach sometimes
referred to as the consequentialist component. In this instance, a failure to obtain parental
consent, even coupled with the use of some deceit, in obtaining organs or tissue is
outweighed by the potential research benefits that may be afforded society, including
decreasing morbidity and mortality rates and the potential development of novel treatments for
disease.
The second principle establishes a claim with regard to who is to be considered when
estimating what the likely consequence of the act will be.84 The fundamental aim according to
this principle is the promotion of aggregate welfare or the ‘maximisation of happiness’.85
Applying this principle to the practice of non-consensual retention of organs and tissues, the
process of calculation requires the medical profession to consider and compare competing
parental claims to a deceased child and the potential for further pain and suffering at the
discovery of such retention, with society’s claim to improved healthcare.
The third principle, sometimes referred to as the evaluative component, makes a claim as to
what makes a good state of affairs good and a bad one bad. In applying this particular principle
it is necessary to rank subsequent states of affairs so that one can tell which if any of the two is
better. Applying this principle to organ-retention practices, failure to use organs or tissues
from the recently deceased for the purposes of research and education regardless of parental
or other consent would be weighed against the possible benefits that such use could bring to
society. Thus, any failure to use the material would be classified as being a bad state of affairs,
whilst its subsequent use, regardless of how the material was obtained, would be viewed as
being a good one.
Gonzaga Debate In 120
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Utilitarianism -> Holocaust and Slavery
Utilitarianism is morally bankrupt and fails in the real world for 4 reasons,
including justification of the Holocaust and Slavery. Reject framing that allows
for these atrocities.
Anderson, Georgetown Masters in Government and Writer for the Probe, 4
(Kirby, B.S., Oregon State University (Zoology), M.F.S., Yale University (Science), M.A.,
Georgetown University (Government), Kennedy Institute of Bioethics (Washington, D.C), Writer
for the Probe, 2004, The Probe, “Utilitarianism: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number”,
http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMNsEoG/b.4224805/, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
Overall, the adoption of these principles requires the agent to identify as well as count the
number of individuals affected, before calculating whether the planned action would increase
or decrease their overall happiness and then acting accordingly. Moreover, as part of this
process utilitarianism demands that each individual is counted only once, with no gradations of
importance. The impact of these principles can be seen at both Bristol and Alder Hey, where the
claims of the parents and next of kin were weighed against the competing claims of society in
order to determine what would produce the greatest aggregate good: each party registering as
one equal vote. The outcome was that the parents and next of kin of those recently deceased
were deemed to have no call over the body when weighed against society’s competing
claims— in effect, bonds of love and affection were deemed no longer relevant.
There are also a number of problems with utilitarianism. One problem with utilitarianism is
that it leads to an "end justifies the means" mentality. If any worthwhile end can justify the
means to attain it, a true ethical foundation is lost. But we all know that the end does not
justify the means. If that were so, then Hitler could justify the Holocaust because the end was
to purify the human race. Stalin could justify his slaughter of millions because he was trying
to achieve a communist utopia.
The end never justifies the means. The means must justify themselves. A particular act cannot
be judged as good simply because it may lead to a good consequence. The means must be
judged by some objective and consistent standard of morality.
Second, utilitarianism cannot protect the rights of minorities if the goal is the greatest good
for the greatest number. Americans in the eighteenth century could justify slavery on the
basis that it provided a good consequence for a majority of Americans. Certainly the majority
benefited from cheap slave labor even though the lives of black slaves were much worse.
A third problem with utilitarianism is predicting the consequences. If morality is based on
results, then we would have to have omniscience in order to accurately predict the consequence
of any action. But at best we can only guess at the future, and often these educated guesses
are wrong.
A fourth problem with utilitarianism is that consequences themselves must be judged. When
results occur, we must still ask whether they are good or bad results. Utilitarianism provides no
objective and consistent foundation to judge results because results are the mechanism used
to judge the action itself.
Gonzaga Debate In 121
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Cuba Terrorism DA
Gonzaga Debate In 122
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AT: Cuba supports Terrorism
Cuba’s presence on the list of states sponsoring terrorism is outdated,
hypocritical, manipulative,
Bolander, research fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 13
[Keith, 5/31, The Guardian, “Cuba is hardly a 'state sponsor of terror'”,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/31/cuba-us-terror-sponsors-list,
accessed 6/24/13, VJ]
While an attentive US audience watched President Obama outline his plan to wind down America's long war on terror last week, officials in
Havana were shaking their heads in bewilderment and anger over how the issue of terrorism
continues to be cynically manipulated against the island nation. What raised their ire was the
recent announcement that Cuba would remain on the State Department's controversial list of states that
sponsor terrorism. The long-awaited annual report on international terrorism from the State Department was released Thursday, and
confirmed what officials had already indicated – that Cuba is staying on the list along with Iran, Sudan and Syria. State Department spokesman Patrick
Ventrell confirmed the administration "has no current plans to remove Cuba". The
decision came as a disappointment for
those who were expecting new Secretary of State John Kerry, a long-time critic of America's counterproductive policy against the Castro government, might recommend Cuba's removal. The fact he
hasn't demonstrates how difficult it is to change the dynamics of the antagonistic relationship between these two ideological adversaries. Cuba was
originally included on the list in 1982, replacing a then-friendly Iraq. The
designation levies comprehensive economic
punishments against Havana as part of the overall strategy of regime change that includes a decades-long
economic embargo, unrelenting propaganda, extra-territorial application of American laws. For its
part, Cuba calls its continued inclusion on the list "shameful" and pandering to a small
community of former Cuban citizens who now live in Florida. Cuba also asserts that the US has
actually undertaken actions on the island that have resulted in the deaths of innocent
civilians. An official of the country's foreign relations department, MINREX, who asked to remain anonymous, complained: " It is ridiculous
that the United States continues to include Cuba on an arbitrary list of states that sponsor
terrorism, while it is Cuba that has suffered so much from terrorism – originating from the
United States." The so-called terrorism against Cuba began shortly after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. In the early 1960s
a covert CIA program known as Operation Mongoose led to the killing of teachers, farmers,
government officials and the destruction of agricultural and non-military industrial targets.
Other incidents involved attacks on villages, biological terrorism including the introduction of
Dengue 2 that resulted in the deaths of more than 100 children in 1981, and a 1997 bombing
campaign against tourist facilities in Havana and Varadero that killed Canadian-Italian tourist Fabio Di Celmo and injured dozens.
The most infamous act of terrorism occurred with the bombing of Cubana Airlines in 1976,
killing all 72 on board. One of the two recognized masterminds, former CIA agent Luis Posada
Carriles, has a long history of suspected terrorist activities against his former homeland; at one point bragging to the New York Times of his
involvement in the hotel bombings. Posada continues to live a quiet life in Miami , considered a hero among many of the
first generation exiles whose anti-revolutionary fervor has yet to diminish. The other architect of the Cubana Airlines bombing, Orlando Bosch, died
peacefully in Miami a few years ago. As a result of these terrorist activities, the Cuban government sent intelligence officers to Florida in the 1990s to
infiltrate Cuban-American organizations in an effort to thwart further acts. The agents, known as the Cuban Five, were uncovered by the FBI and are
While Cuba's status as a state sponsor of terrorism remains unchanged, other
countries that might be considered more deserving, such as North Korea and Pakistan, aren't on
the list. What makes it all the more galling for the Castro government are the arguments the
United States has advanced to justify Cuba's inclusion – the most egregious stemming from
the charge Cuba was not sufficiently supportive of the US war on terror or the invasion of Iraq,
and was unwilling to help track or seize assets allegedly held by terrorists. A 2004 State Department report
asserted that "Cuba continued to actively oppose the US-led coalition prosecuting the global war on terrorism." In reality, the Cuban
serving long prison terms.
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side has consistently denounced all forms of terrorism, including the recent Boston Marathon bombings that brought
quick condolences from the island leadership. Other rationales over the past 30 years to keep Cuba on the list have ranged from its support for leftwing rebels in Latin America, its relationship with the former Soviet Union, treatment of political prisoners and allowing members from alleged terrorist
organizations such as Columbia's FARC and Spain's separatist Basque movement ETA to reside on the island. Even when those issues were resolved,
including the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago, Cuba found its unmerited designation had not changed. One long standing
reason, that Havana permits refugees from American justice to find safe haven on the island, was re-invigorated with a ruling that was timed almost
perfectly with the announcement that Cuba would not be taken off the terrorist list. Assata Shakur, accused of killing a New Jersey state trooper 40
years ago, was suddenly labeled as a most wanted terrorist by the FBI, with a $2m price tag on her head. Shakur, who fled to Cuba in 1979 and was
given political asylum, has consistently maintained her innocence. Categorizing Shakur as a terrorist could potentially endanger her life from those
wanting to collect the bounty, and has led State Department officials to utilize her changed status as justification to keep Cuba on the list. There
is
no legitimate reason to use the arbitrary terrorism list as a political weapon against Cuba. To
continue to do so simply exposes the State Department to charges of hypocrisy and
manipulation of a serious threat based solely on ideological differences. Most importantly, it
gives insult to all those who have been actual victims of terrorism.
The field constructs terrorism from a gendered and a Eurocentric perspective
under the disguise of objectivity proving a need for the critical terrorism
studies’ constructivist approaches.
Jackson, Senior Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Radicalization and
Contemporary Political Violence, 7
[Richard, March 3, 2007, International Studies Association, “Terrorism Studies and the
Politics of State
Power,”http://cadair.aber.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/handle/2160/1951/ISA-2007-PaperCTS-Jackson2.pdf?sequence=1, accessed 6/28/13, AS]
CTS rests upon a number of specific epistemological commitments, including an ¶
understanding of knowledge as a social process constructed through language, discourse ¶ and
inter-subjective practices. From this perspective, it is understood that terrorism ¶ knowledge
always reflects the social-cultural context within which it emerges, which ¶ means among
other things that it is highly gendered and Eurocentric . CTS understands ¶ that knowledge is
always intimately connected to power, that knowledge is „always for ¶ someone and for some
purpose‟ and that „regimes of truth‟ function to entrench certain ¶ hierarchies of power and
exclude alternative, counter-hegemonic forms of knowledge and ¶ practice. CTS therefore,
starts with an acceptance of the basic insecurity of all knowledge¶ and the impossibility of
neutral or objective knowledge about terrorism.55 It also evinces ¶ an acute sensitivity to the
ways in which terrorism knowledge can be deployed as a ¶ political technology in the
furtherance of hegemonic projects and directs attention to the ¶ inerests that underlie
knowledge claims. Thus, CTS starts by asking: who is terrorism ¶ knowledge for, and what
functions does it serve in supporting their interests?¶ There are at least three practical
consequences of this broad epistemological ¶ orientation. First, similar to the field of Critical
Security Studies (CSS), CTS begins from ¶ an analysis of the epistemological and ontological
claims that make the discipline possible in the first place,¶ 56 in particular, the false
naturalism of traditional theory and the political content of all terrorism knowledge. More
specifically, its research focuses on ¶ uncovering and understanding the aims of knowledgeproduction within terrorism ¶ studies, the operation of the terrorism studies epistemic
community and more broadly, the ¶ social and political construction of terrorism knowledge.
Such analysis can be achieved ¶ using deconstructive, narrative, genealogical, ethnographic
and historical analyses, as ¶ well as neo-Gramscian and Constructivist approaches. The purpose
of such research is ¶ not simply descriptive nor is it to establish the „correct‟ or „real truth‟ of
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terrorism; rather, ¶ it aims to destabilise dominant interpretations and demonstrate the
inherently contested ¶ and political nature of the discourse. It aims to reveal the politics behind
seemingly ¶ neutral knowledge.¶ A second practical consequence for CTS research is a
continuous and transparent ¶ critical-normative reflexivity in the knowledge-production
process.57 That is, CTS ¶ research acknowledges the impossibility of neutral or objective
terrorism knowledge and ¶ evinces an acute awareness of the political use to which it can be
put, as well as its inbuilt ¶ biases and assumptions. It thus attempts to avoid the uncritical use
of labels, assumptions ¶ and narratives regarding terrorism in ways that would naturalize them
or imply that they ¶ were uncontested. Crucial in this respect is an appreciation of the
inherently gendered and ¶ Eurocentric character of dominant knowledge and discourse on
terrorism. A third consequence for CTS research is methodological and disciplinary ¶ pluralism,
in particular, a willingness to adopt post-positivist and non-international ¶ relations-based
methods and approaches. In this sense, CTS refuses to privilege ¶ materialist, rationalist and
positivist approaches to social science over interpretive and ¶ reflectivist approaches.58
Avoiding an exclusionary commitment to the narrow logic of ¶ traditional social scientific
explanation based on linear notions of cause and effect, CTS¶ accepts that Constructivist and
post-structuralist approaches which subscribe to an ¶ interpretive „logic of understanding‟ can
open space for questions and perspectives that ¶ are foreclosed by positivism and rationalism.
This stance is more than methodological; it ¶ is also political in the sense that it does not treat
one model of social science as if it were ¶ the sole bearer of legitimacy.59
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, , and Robert, , “Unthinking Eurocentrism,”
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjA
B&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings%2FUnt
hinkingEurocentrismIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjCNGzs72xcKKnpIfpEk
BPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6WnFAZPF8pes3AW7uu-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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AT: Kritiks
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Tyranny of Guilt K
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Bruckner is Wrong
Bruckner’s attempt to paint the West as the victim employs flawed
methodologies.
Shohat, New York University Cultural Studies Professor, and Stam, New York
University French Professor, 9
(Robert Stam, Ella Shohat, January 1, 2012, NYU Press, “Race in Translation: Culture Wars
Around the Postcolonial Atlantic,” Google Books, pg. 134-136, accessed July 12, 2013, EK)
Despite such crimes, Bruckner uses the language of anticolonialism in an upside-down manner
to portray the West as the real victim. Here is Bruckner:
“Indeed, there weighs on every westerner an a priori presumption of crime. We Europeans have
been brought up to hate ourselves, in the certitude that there was at the heart of our world an
essential evil which required a vengeance without any of forgiveness.... We have been led to
regard our own civilization as the worst, after our parents thought it the best. To be born after
the Second World War was to be sure that one belonged to the very dregs of humanity, to an
execrable milieu which, for centuries, in the name of a supposed spiritual adventure, had
suffocated the totality of the globe."
Poor Europeans! Poor whites! Powerless, persecuted, and penniless all over the globe,
oppressed everywhere by the color line, subject to racist taunts, disproportionately
imprisoned, harassed by police, their languages forbidden, their land stolen, stereotyped as
lazy and criminal, their culture repressed, living in poverty because of their race,'"buked and
scorned" because of nothing more than the white color of their skin! It turns out that
Bruckner really does not mind "the white man's sobs," as long as those sobs are for himself.
Anticipating the beleaguered tone of the U.S. right, presumably defending the ramparts of a
threatened Western civilization, Bruckner conveniently forgets that the West has been
overwhelmingly empowered in military, economic, cultural, political, and mediatic terms. It is
as if Bruckner has lived the seismic shift and decolonization of culture as a trauma of personal
and collective relativization, a mourning for a lost moral grandeur. But rather than offer a selfreflexive analysis of such feelings of loss, Bruckner recrowns the West and demeans the Rest, in
what amounts to a return to the Eurocentric status quo ante.
Like U.S. rightists, Bruckner resuscitates colonialist nostrums as it they were courageous forays
in truth telling. He resurrects the hoary canard that the West alone is capable of self-criticism
and of "seeing itself through others'eyes."1* Bruckner proclaims Europe's willingness to
criticize itself, ironically, at the same time that he displays his own hypersensitivity to
criticisms against the West. Bruckner makes this argument, curiously, shortly after
demonstrating his own incapacity to see Europe through the eyes of its others, thus
undermining his own claims about a unique European capacity for self-critique. The subtitle of
Bruckner's book—"The Third World, Culpability, and Self-Hatred''—reflects a psychologistic
emphasis on the "imbecilic masochism" and needless feelings of guilt supposedly forced on
white Westerners. The issue, ultimately, is not so much one of guilt over the West's past and
present actions—although guilt is on one level a perfectly normal reaction to the conjugated
histories of anti-Semitism, slavery, and colonialism—but rather of lucidity and responsibility to
make sure that such ills do not occur again and that their memory be preserved.
The dominant emotion among Third Worldists in the 1960s, whether in Paris or Rio or Berkeley,
as Kristin Ross points out, was not guilt but anger:
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Third-worldist discourse, far from being masochistic or self-hating in its attention to the
unevenness and disequilibrium between rich and poor nations, was an aggressive new way of
accusing the capitalist system—multinational firms, aid programs from the United States or
Western Europe—the whole neo-imperialist apparatus, culminating in Vietnam. Third-worldists
did not feel "personally" responsible for third-world misery, as Bruckner asserts; rather, they
were actively pointing a finger at those—the military, state leaders, big business—who they
thought indeed were responsible.14
Is Bruckner suggesting, Ross asks, that the United States did well to drop more bombs on
Vietnam than were dropped by the Allies during all of World War II or that the French empire
in Vietnam and Algeria should have been maintained at all cost? Bruckner develops a hysterical
discourse of victimization in defense of a West presumably on the verge of extermination yet
in fact as dominant as ever, whether in its U.S."bad cop" form (Iraq, Guantanamo, etc.) or its
European "good cop" form."
Bruckner’s victimization of Europe is flawed
Hawley, Santa Clara University English Professor, and Krishnaswamy, San Jose
State University, 8
(Revathi Krishnaswamy and John Charles Hawley, 2008, University of Minnesota Press, “The
Postcolonial and the Global,” Google Books,pg. 124-125, accessed July 12, 3013, EK)
An important anticipatory figure in this sense was Pascal Bruckner and his 1983 book Le Sanglot
de LHommc Blanc (The White Mans Sobs). A veteran of May 1968, Bruckner used the language
of third-worldism (i.e., of third world victimization) in an upside-down manner to make the
West the real victim. In a kind of inverted camera obscura Fanonianism, Bruckner offers the
white man’s version of Fanons (1952) Black Skin, White Mask. Whereas Fanon spoke of the
colonialist and racist mechanisms that generated self-hatred on the part of blacks, Bruckner
speaks of the ways that third-worldism itself has supposedly oppressed white Europeans by
imbuing them with irrational guilt. Bruckner rejects what he calls Fanons "ridiculous" plea to
"go beyond" Europe, arguing that "it is impossible to go beyond" democracy. "If the peoples
of the third world are to become themselves." Bruckner warns, "they must become more
Western" (Bruckner 1983, 156). This equation of Europe and democracy is, of course, a staple of
Eurocentric discourses. Yet Bruckner makes this equation just four decades after the advent, in
the very heart of Europe, of the dictatorships of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Petain. He makes
it just three decades after Algerians under French colonialism had either no vote at all or one
that represented a fraction of the vote of a European in Algeria. Yet Bruckner equates Europe
with "democracy": Fanon had called for going "beyond Europe" precisely because Europe had
not been democratic. Bruckner also resurrects the old narcissistic cliche—going at least as far
back as Hegel—that only the West is self-critical and "capable of seeing itself through others'
eyes" (156). Interestingly. Bruckner makes this claim shortly after demonstrating that he
himself is incapable of seeing Europe through third-worldist eyes. But in any case, these claims
of a unique capacity for self-criticism—coming just after Bruckner has displayed his own
hypersensitivity to criticisms of the West—seem very strange. How did Bruckner acquire such
transhistorical God-like powers? Or is he just a latter-day avatar of the West's "Prospero
complex"? Has he, like Ines in Sartre's No Exit, looked into others' eyes only to see himself?
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Alt Fails
Bruckner’s alternative fails
Nelson, World Magazine Correspondent 11
(Caleb Nelson, September 24, 2011, World Magazine, “Review: The Tyranny of
Guilt,”http://www.worldmag.com/2011/09/review_the_tyranny_of_guilt, accessed July 8, 2013,
EK)
Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (Princeton University
Press, 2010) gets half the story right: It dissects the West's current obsession with victimhood,
making several powerful statements, but it does not seem to understand what to do about
guilt.
Guilt is, according to Bruckner, a mixed blessing with its chief purpose to enable us to correct
our mistakes and move on. But guilt maintained past those limits is a bad thing, he says, with
guilt becoming a pastime in the modern West, especially in Bruckner's native France. Suffering is
perceived there as a form of righteousness, meaning that the world owes something to those
who have suffered. Guilt, too, has become a tool that Europeans use to feel better about
themselves. They try to absolve themselves by feeling bad. Therefore, guilt has become the
solution to guilt.
Despite his clear mind, sharp eyes, and even sharper pen, Bruckner fails to suggest anything
better than the paradigm he criticizes. His only solution to guilt is to stop feeling guilty. He
admits that Europe has done many bad things, including slavery, genocide, and colonization.
Yet he says that Europe has "not only transcended but delegitimized" those activities. If we
continue being good for long enough, then at some point, he implies, guilt-and the
corresponding desire for real justice-will simply go away.
Forgetting the harms of the past cannot solve.
Kortright, University of Region Anthropology Professor, 3
(Chris Kortright, January 1, 2003, The Anarchist Library, “Colonization and Identity,”
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/chris-kortright-colonization-and-identity, accessed July 10,
2013, EK)
The present global stratification and make-up has been dictated in totality by the colonization
and conquest of European nations. Although direct colonialism has largely ended, we can see
that the ideology of colonialism has lingered in the identity of people within the general
cultural sphere as well as the institutions of political, economic, and social practices.
Colonization or the “colonial complex” is: (1) colonization begins with a forced, involuntary
entry; (2) the colonizing power alters basically or destroys the indigenous culture; (3) members
of the colonized group tends to be governed by representatives of the dominate group; and (4)
the system of dominant-subordinate relationship is buttressed by a racist ideology. (Marger,
2000:132) This process has created the identities of both the colonized and the colonizer with
pathological effects. It has destroyed both the lives and the cultures of the colonized and
implanted a culture of destruction upon all inhabitants, both the colonized and the colonizer.
There are two reasons for exploring the pathology of colonization. First we must understand
the creation of the present social, political and economic dichotomy we face, but more
importantly we must understand the psychological problems created by colonization, so we as
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humans can deconstruct the present Leviathan we live in and create a world based on cultural
diversity, liberty, and mutual aid.
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Perm Solves
Permutation solves
Sundberg, University of British Columbia Geography Professor 9
(Juanita Sundberg, 2009, “Eurocentrism,” International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
Volume 3, pg. 641, Elsevier, accessed July 12, 2013, EK)
Although these influential critiques have sparked new lines of inquiry in geography, Eurocentric
versions of history and development continue to overshadow the discipline, structuring
silences and limiting the kinds of questions that will be asked. In James Blaut’s view, the
continued acceptance of Eurocentric interpretations must be understood in the context of the
West’s powerful position in global geopolitics. Eurocentrism, Blaut argues, is simply ‘‘the
colonizers model of the world.’’ As such, criticizing Eurocentrism on the grounds that it is built
upon factual errors, untruthful beliefs, or ahistorical visions of development will not lead to its
undoing. Contesting Eurocentrism and challenging its on-going hegemony in geography
necessitates analyzing the discipline itself at institutional and epistemological levels.
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Euro-Narcissism
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2AC
The only way to resolve Eurocentricity is through meaningful discussion of the
problem, the K would rather us ignore the problem and allow this to continue
Jones, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, International Relations Professor, 4
(Branwen Gruffydd Jones, August 2004, University of Cambridge, “From Eurocentrism to
Epistemological Internationalism: power, knowledge and objectivity in International Relation,”
http://www.csog.group.cam.ac.uk/iacr/papers/Jones.pdf, accessed July 10, 2013, EK)
A fundamental problem which underlies the origin and reproduction of IR’s eurocentricity is
the overwhelming dominance of ideas produced in and by the west, and the wilful and
determined silencing of the voices and histories of the colonised. But the result of this
fundamental problem is flawed knowledge about the world. Eurocentricity is therefore a dual
problem concerning both the authors and the content of knowledge, and cannot be resolved
through normative commitments alone. It is not only the voices of the colonised, but the
histories of colonialism, which have been glaring in their absence from the discipline of
International Relations.
Overcoming eurocentricity therefore requires not only concerted effort from the centre to
create space and listen to hitherto marginalised voices, but also commitment to correcting the
flaws in prevailing knowledge – and it is not only ‘the Other’ who can and should elaborate this
critique. A vitally important implication of objectivity is that it is the responsibility of European
and American, just as much as non-American or nonEuropean scholars, to decolonise IR. The
importance of objectivity in social inquiry defended here can perhaps be seen as a form of
epistemological internationalism. It is not necessary to be African to attempt to tell a more
accurate account of the history of Europe’s role in the making of the contemporary Africa and
the rest of the world, for example, or to write counter-histories of ‘the expansion of
international society’ which detail the systematic barbarity of so-called Western civilisation. It is
not necessary to have been colonised to recognise and document the violence, racism, genocide
and dispossession which have characterised European expansion over five hundred years.
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Cap
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No link
Capitalism and Eurocentrism run parallel- we solve the impact
Baker, graduate Student, Education and Human Development, University of
Rodchester, ‘9
(Michael, Graduate Student at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human
Development at the University of Rodchester, June 2009, Unpublished Paper,“Situating Modern
Western Education Within the Modern/Colonial World System,”
http://rochester.academia.edu/MichaelBaker, P.48, Accessed: 7/12/13, LPS.)
This interpretation of modernity as intertwined with coloniality of power offers an original
critique of the Eurocentric production of knowledge and subjectivity, global racial formation,
and their interrelated links in the history of the world capitalist system. Modern epistemology
and modern economic ideology are intertwined in the relation between a subject and an
object, and the economical relation between a subject and its private property (Quijano,
1999). Western epistemology “runs parallel to the history of capitalism” (Mignolo, 2002, p.
78) and is complicit with racism, sexism, and universalism. The subject-object western
epistemological model that organizes mentalities and lives in the modern world grew out of
the historical process of colonial and economic dominance and has, in turn, provided an
ideological justification for this dominance (Quijano, 2000; Dussel, 1993; Mignolo, 2000a). The
philosophical foundation of Eurocentric modernity was built on the knowing subject that was
constructed from the prototype of White, heterosexual, European male. This particular ethnocultural way of knowing the world was universalized as the only or best way of being.
Consequently, knowledges and experiences of all those who are not White, heterosexual,
European men were and are excluded, unless they are willing and able to acculturate (Mignolo,
2005, p. 138). This Eurocentric conception of knowledge provides the powerful justification for
assuming the inferiority of all other knowing subjects who are not White, heterosexual, male,
and European (or of European descent) (Mignolo, 2005, p. 139). ¶ Coloniality essentially names
the hegemony of European knowledge and being through the hierarchical incorporation of all
other cultures into a Eurocentric cultural project.¶ The incorporation of such diverse and
heterogenous cultural histories into a single world dominated by Europe signified a cultural and
intellectual intersubjective configuration equivalent to the articulation of all forms of labor
control around capital, a configuration that established world capitalism. In effect, all the
experiences, histories, resources, and cultural products ended up in one global order revolving
around European or Western hegemony. Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global
power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge
and the production of knowledge under its hegemony. (Quijano, 2008, pp. 188-189) ¶ Coloniality
of power is thus a principle and strategy of control and domination that is constitutive of
western modernity as a long series of political, economic, cultural and educational projects.
“The concept of coloniality has opened up the re-construction and the restitution of silenced
histories, repressed subjectivities, subalternized knowledges and languages performed by the
Totality depicted under the names of modernity and rationality” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 451). The
critique of coloniality must therefore entail the critique of its epistemic nucleus (Eurocentrism),
that is, a critique of the type of knowledge that contributed to the legitimation of European
colonial domination and its pretenses of universal validation. Understanding Eurocentrism
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within the history of its emergence in the sixteenth century calls forth the creative inclusion and
integration of subaltern knowledges and corresponding ways of being in the post-Eurocentric
curriculum.
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Permutation
Eurocentrism lies at the root of capitalism – history proves that dealing with
capitalism requires a confrontation of Western epistemologies
Mignolo, Duke University Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 10
(Walter, “The communal and the decolonial” http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence5/decolonial/, date accessed 7/13/13 igm)
Imagine the world around 1500. It was a polycentric and non-capitalist world. There were
many civilisations, from China to sub-Saharan Africa, but none of them were globally
dominant. At about this time, a radical change took place in global history that we can
summarise in two points: the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit, and the fact that
the West began to control the writing of global history. Between then and now, Western
civilisation, in the sense we understand it today, was founded and formed.
There was no such thing as Western civilisation before the European Renaissance. Greece and
Rome became part of the narrative of Western civilisation then, not before. With the
Renaissance, a double movement began. First, the colonisation of time and the invention of the
European Middle Ages. Second – with the emergence of Atlantic trade – the colonisation of
space and the invention of New and Old Worlds. This separation, seemingly so natural today, is
obviously historical: there could be no Old World without a New one – America. (Later, the Old
World would be divided into imperial – Atlantic Europe – and colonial – Asia and Africa.)
The first civilisations to suffer the consequences of the formation and expansion of Western
civilisation were the Inca, the Aztec and the Maya. One of these consequences was the
dismantling of the communal system of social organisation that some indigenous nations in
Bolivia and Ecuador today are working to reconstruct and reconfigure. From the European
perspective, the communal may sound like socialism or communism. But it is not. Socialism and
communism were born in Europe, as a response to liberalism and capitalism. Not so the
communal system. The communal systems in Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac (Inca and Aztec
territories, respectively), or societies in China before the Opium War, eventually had to deal
with capitalist and (neo-)liberal intrusion, as well as European responses to such intrusions;
but they themselves pre-existed the capitalist mode of production.
Colonization drove capitalism – the relative globalization of the slave trade and
land appropriation ensure capitalisms success, only challenging structures
underlying capitalism solves
Mignolo, Duke University Professor of Literature and Romance Studies 5 (Walter,
“The Idea of Latin America”, BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, pg. 49 igm)
What happened has much to do with the increasing complicity of Christianity (and Christian
knowledge) with the force of developing capitalism and its consequences in the cultural
industry: map making, book publishing and circulation, the authority of the printed book, etc.
Without that partnership, the outcome of capitalism and the world in which we are living in
today, with the Americas, would have certainly been different. History is an institution that
legitimizes the telling of stories of happenings simultaneously silencing other stories, as well
Gonzaga Debate In 139
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as stories of the silence of histories. 18 How did Christianity and capitalism come together in
America? Indeed, Christianity and capital came together before, more clearly toward the middle
of the fifteenth century. But America propelled capital into capitalism. How come? Again, the
massive appropriation of land, massive exploitation of labor, and massive slave trade came
together with a common goal (to produce the commodities of a global market, from gold to
tobacco and sugar) and a dramatic consequence (the expendability – dispensability – of human
lives in the pursuit of commodity production and capital accumulation). Capital turned into
capitalism when the radical changes in land appropriation, labor exploitation, and massive
commodity produ tion were conceived in the rhetoric of modernity as an advancement of
humanity (in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith would be the first in theorizing political
economy starting from the Atlantic commercial circuits). The consequences of the conversion of
capital into capitalism were the devaluation of human lives and and the naturalization of human
expendability. That is the beginning of a type of racism that is still well and alive today(as
evidenced in the treatment of immigrants in Europe and the US, as well as the expendability of
people’s lives in Iraq).
Alternative alone can’t solve – capitalism in Latin America must be analyzed
alongside Eurocentrism to understand unique labor formations
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, P.538, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
The fact is that from the very beginning of the colonization of America, Europeans associated
nonpaid or nonwaged labor with the dom- inated races because theywere “inferior” races.
The vast genocide of the Indians in the first decades of colonization was not caused principally
by the violence of the conquest nor by the plagues the conquistadors brought, but took place
because so many American Indians were used as disposable manual labor and forced to work
until death. The elimination of this colo- nial practice did not end until the defeat of the
encomenderos in the middle of the sixteenth century. The subsequent Iberian colonialism
involved a new politics of population reorganization, a reorganization of the Indians and their
relations with the colonizers. But this did not advance American Indi- ans as free and waged
laborers. From then on, they were assigned the status of unpaid serfs. The serfdom of the
American Indians could not, however, be compared with feudal serfdom in Europe, since it
included neither the supposed protection of a feudal lord nor, necessarily, the possession of a
piece of land to cultivate instead of wages. Before independence, the Indian labor force of serfs
reproduced itself in the communities, but more than one hundred years after independence, a
large part of the Indian serfs was still obliged to reproduce the labor force on its own. 8 The
other form of 539 Quijano . Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America unwaged or, simplyput,
unpaid labor, slavery, was assigned exclusivelyto the “black” population brought from Africa. The
racial classification of the population and the earlyassocia- tion of the new racial identities of the
colonized with the forms of control of unpaid, unwaged labor developed among the Europeans
the singular perception that paid labor was the whites’ privilege. The racial inferiority of the
colonized implied that theywere not worthyof wages. Theywere naturallyobliged to work for the
profit of their owners. It is not difficult to find, to this veryday, this attitude spread out among
the white property owners of anyplace in the world. Furthermore, the lower wages “inferior
Gonzaga Debate In 140
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races” receive in the present capitalist centers for the same work as done by whites cannot be
explained as detached from the racist social classification of the world’s population—in other
words, as detached from the global capitalist colonialityof power. The control of labor in the new
model of global power was con- stituted thus, articulating all historical forms of labor control
around the capitalist wage-labor relation. This articulation was constitutivelycolonial, based on
first the assignment of all forms of unpaid labor to colonial races (originallyAmerican Indians,
blacks, and, in a more complex way, mesti- zos) in America and, later on, to the remaining
colonized races in the rest of the world, olives and yellows. Second, labor was controlled through
the assignment of salaried labor to the colonizing whites. Coloniality of labor control
determined the geographic distribu- tion of each one of the integrated forms of labor
controlling local capitalism. In other words, it determined the social geography of capitalism:
capital, as a social formation for control of wage labor, was the axis around which all
remaining forms of labor control, resources, and products were articulated. But, at the same
time, capital’s specific social configuration was geographi- callyand socially concentrated in
Europe and, above all, among Europeans in the whole world of capitalism. Through these
measures, Europe and the European constituted themselves as the center of the capitalist world
economy
Criticisms of Eurocentrism short-circuit the necessity of criticizing capitalism;
addressing issues of Eurocentrism allow us to unlock new forms of
epistemology.
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative
Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's
Studies at Binghamton University in New York, Spring 2008, “The Coloniality of Gender”,
http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wpcontent/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf, Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
Quijano understands “modernity”, the other axis of global Eurocentered capitalism, as “the
fusing of the experiences of colonialism and coloniality with the necessities of capitalism,
creating a specific universe of intersubjective relations of domination under a Eurocentered
hegemony. “(Quijano, 2000b, 343) In characterizing modernity, Quijano focuses on the
production of a way of knowing, labeled rational, arising from within this subjective universe
since the XVII century in the main hegemonic centers of this world system of power (Holland and
England). This way of knowing is Eurocentered .By “Eurocentrism” Quijano understands the
cognitive perspective not of Europeans only, but of the Eurocentered world, of those educated
under the hegemony of world capitalism. “Eurocentrism naturalizes the experience of people
within this model of power.” (2000b, 343)
The cognitive needs of capitalism and the naturalizing of the identities and relations of
coloniality and of the geocultural distribution of world capitalist power have guided the
production of this way of knowing. The cognitive needs of capitalism include “measurement,
quantification, externalization (or objectification) of what is knowable with respect to the
knower so as to control the relations among people and nature and among them with respect
to it, in particular the property in means of production.” This way of knowing was imposed on
the whole of the capitalist world as the only valid rationality and as emblematic of modernity.
Gonzaga Debate In 141
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Criticisms of Eurocentrism allow us to deconstruct dominant forms of
knowledge production and historical myths that presuppose the rest of the
world as irrational and primitive
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative
Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's
Studies at Binghamton University in New York, Spring 2008, “The Coloniality of Gender”,
http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wpcontent/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf, Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
Europe was mythologically understood to pre-exist this pattern of power as a world capitalist
center that colonized the rest of the world and as such the most advanced moment in the
linear, unidirectional, continuous path of the species. A conception of humanity was
consolidated according to which the world's population was differentiated in two groups:
superior and inferior, rational and irrational, primitive and civilized, traditional and modern.
"Primitive" referred to a prior time in the history of the species, in terms of evolutionary time.
Europe came to be mythically conceived as preexisting colonial, global, capitalism and as
having achieved a very advanced level in the continuous, linear, unidirectional path. Thus,
from within this mythical starting point, other human inhabitants of the planet came to be
mythically conceived not as dominated through conquest, nor as inferior in terms of wealth or
political power, but as an anterior stage in the history of the species, in this unidirectional path.
That is the meaning of the qualification "primitive." (Quijano, 2000b, 343-4) We can see then
the structural fit of the elements constituting Eurocentered, global capitalism in Quijano’s
model (pattern). Modernity and coloniality afford a complex understanding of the
organization of labor. They enable us to see the fit between the thorough racialization of the
division of labor and the production of knowledge. The pattern allows for heterogeneity and
discontinuity. Quijano argues that the structure is not a closed totality. (Quijnao, 2000b, 355)
Gonzaga Debate In 142
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Aff Solves Impact
Our methodology is required – decolonization of education is key to achieving
anti-capitalist goals in Latin America
Mignolo, Duke University Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 10
(Walter, “The communal and the decolonial” http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence5/decolonial/, date accessed 7/13/13 igm)
The communal is not grounded on the idea of the ‘common’, nor that of the ‘commune’,
although the latter has been taken up in Bolivia of late – notably, not by Aymara and Quechua
intellectuals, but by members of the criolla or mestiza population. The communal is something
else. It derives from forms of social organisation that existed prior to the Incas and Aztecs, and
also from the Incas’ and Aztecs’ experiences of their 500-year relative survival, first under
Spanish colonial rule and later under independent nation states. To be done justice, it must be
understood not as a leftwing project (in the European sense), but as a de-colonial one .
De-coloniality is akin to de-Westernisation, which was a strong element of the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, and remains an active ideological element in East and Southeast Asia. DeWesternisation is neither left nor right: it questions Occidentalism, racism, a totalitarian and
unilateral globality and an imperialist epistemology. The difference is that de-coloniality
frontally questions the capitalist economy, whereas de-Westernisation only questions who
controls capitalism – the West or ‘emerging’ economies.
Gonzaga Debate In 143
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Alt Fails
Only perm can solve - Leftist struggles against capitalism fail – universalizing
forms of governing inevitably shut down other thought processes, the aff’s
transition toward a pluri-versal modal is required
Mignolo, Duke University Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 10
(Walter, “The communal and the decolonial” http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence5/decolonial/, date accessed 7/13/13 igm)
This idea of a communal system as an alternative to the (neo-)liberal system today, which
emerged from the memories and lived experiences of Andean communities, has a global scope.
This does not, however, mean that the ayllu system should be exported in a manner similar to
other, previous models (Christian, liberal or Marxist). Rather, it is an invitation to organise and
re-inscribe communal systems all over the world – systems that have been erased and
dismantled by the increasing expansion of the capitalist economy , which the European left
has been unable to halt . If ayllus and markas are the singular memory and organisation of
communities in the Andes, then it is the other memories of communal organisation around the
globe which predate and survived the advent of capitalism which make possible the idea of a
communal system today – one not mapped out in advance by any ideology, or any simple return
to the past. The Zapatista dictum of the need for ‘a world in which many worlds fit’ springs to
mind as we try to imagine a planet of communal systems in a pluri-versal, not uni-versal,
world order.
It is for this reason that Patzi Paco’s proposal of the communal should figure in the discussion
for a pluri-national state. The left, with its European genealogy of thought, cannot have the
monopoly over the right to imagine what a non-capitalist future shall be. There are many noncapitalist pasts that can be drawn from, many experiences and memories that perhaps do not
wish to be civilised – neither by the right nor by the left. The progressive left’s ignoring of Patzi
Paco’s proposal may end up as an excuse to prevent indigenous and peasant leaders and
communities from intervening in de-colonising the current mono-cultural state – which the
white (criolla/mestiza) right and left continue to fight over. A pluri-national state must be more
than just the left in power, with the support of the indigenous, against the right, with its support
from the international market.
Eurocentrism ensures the alt is coopted – colonization was the original driving
force of capitalism, and a critique of capitalism that fails to address this is
ineffective
Mignolo, Duke University Professor of Literature and Romance Studies 5 (Walter,
“The Idea of Latin America”, BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, pg. 31 igm)
The logic of coloniality can be understood as working through four wide domains of human
experience: (1) the economic: appro priation of land, exploitation of labor, and control of
finance; (2) the political: control of authority; () the civic: control of gender and sexuality; (4)
the epistemic and the subjective/personal: control of knowledge and subjectivity. The logic of
coloniality has been in place from the conquest and colonization of Mexico and Peru until and
beyond the war in Iraq, despite superficial changes in the scale and agents of
Gonzaga Debate In 144
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exploitation/control in the past five hundred years of history. Each domain is interwoven with
the others, since appropria tion of land or exploitation of labor also involves the control of
finance, of authority, of gender, and of knowledge and subjectivity. 8 The operation of the
colonial matrix is invisible to distracted eyes, and even when it surfaces, it is explained through
the rhetoric of modernity that the situation can be “corrected” with “development,”
“democracy,” a “strong economy,” etc. What some will see as “lies” from the US presidential
administration are not so much lies as part of a very well-codified “rhetoric of modernity,”
promising salvation for everybody in order to divert attention from the increasingly oppressive
consequences of the logic of coloniality. To implement the logic of coloniality requires the
celebratory rhetoric of modernity, as the case of Iraq has illustrated from day one. As capital
and power concentrate in fewer and fewer hands and poverty increases all over the word, the
logic of coloniality becomes ever more oppressive and merciless. Since the sixteenth century,
the rhetoric of modernity has relied on the vocabulary of salvation, which was accompanied
by the massive appropriation of land in the New World and the massive exploitation of Indian
and African slave labor, justified by a belief in the dispensability of human life – the lives of the
slaves. Thus, while some Christians today, for example, beat the drum of “pro-life values,” they
reproduce a rhetoric that diverts attention from the increasing “devaluation of human life” that
the thousands dead in Iraq demonstrate. Thus, it is not modernity that will overcome
coloniality, because it is precisely modernity that needs and produces coloniality .
Gonzaga Debate In 145
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Neg links to Eurocentrism K
Marx’s theory stems from an Eurocentric root, portraying the East as a
fundamentally unprogressive place and excluding it from any vision of a
communist future
Hobson, University of Sheffield Politics and International Relations Professor, 5
(John M., September 2005, “Deconstructing Rosenberg'sContribution to the Critique of Global
Political Economy': A (re) view from a non-Eurocentric bridge of the world”, International
Politics, 42:3, 374-380, http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0510/0289.html,
accessed 7/5/13, JZ)
Revealing the Eurocentrism of classical Marxism
Eurocentrism or Orientalism (Said, 1978) had emerged in Europe by the 19th century. It is a
discourse that places Europe at the centre of progressive world (dare I say ‘global’?) historypast, present and future. Ultimately, Eurocentric thinkers made two critical intellectual moves.
First, they constructed a ‘line of civilizational-apartheid’ that prised apart the East and West into
two separate and self-constituting entities that stood in opposition. Second, Europe was
privileged as a superior civilization imbued with exceptional, progressive properties that made
inevitable its rise to modern capitalism. Inter alia, these included the liberal state (and, for Marx,
dialectical class struggle). This fabrication was then extrapolated back in time to Ancient Greece,
thereby constructing a new ‘Aryan’ picture of a permanently superior, self-constituting Europe
(Bernal, 1991). Conversely, being imbued only with regressive properties — most notably
Oriental despotisms — unchanging social structures, stagnation and slavery were (re)presented
as the tragic story of the ‘history-less’ East.
The upshot was the Eurocentric fabrication of an immanent logic to the rise of Western
capitalist civilization, wherein the story could be narrated as an endogenous linear
progression or unfolding of events and sequential processes that occurred solely within
Europe, beginning with Ancient Greece. Conversely, the East could not progress of its own
accord and was thereby stripped of (progressive) history. Hence, it became the duty of the
West — charged with an Occidental Messianism and fuelled by the ‘moral obligation’ of the
White Man’s Burden – to launch an imperial civilizing mission that would deliver the East from
the dark ghetto of poverty and despair to the bright dawn of (Western) history. In this way
then, the West is elevated into a Eurocentric fetish that needs to be deconstructed.
Unfortunately, to paraphrase Rosenberg, instead of interpreting and deconstructing the
Eurocentric spirit of the age, Marx amplified it by endogenizing it within his own theory. How
so?
Strangely, Marx had less to say about imperialism than our popular imagination would
suppose, and it was contained (though not exclusively) in numerous pamphlets and newspaper
articles published mainly between 1848 and 1862. In many of these, he insisted that the East
has had no (progressive) history. To wit: China was a ‘rotting semicivilizationy. vegetating in
the teeth of time’ (in Avineri, 1969, 184, 343). Thus, China’s only hope for progressive
emancipation or redemption lay with the Opium Wars and the incursion of British imperial
capitalists who would ‘open up backward’ China to the energizing impulse of Western
capitalism (in Avineri, 1969, 442–444). The picture of India was similarly disfigured through this
Orientalist lens (e.g., Avineri, 1969, 132–133; Marx, 1973, 306–307, 320). The general formula,
Gonzaga Debate In 146
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of course, found its famous expression in The Communist Manifesto, where we are told that
the Western bourgeoisie compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the [Western]
bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their
midst, ie., to become [Western] themselves. In one word, it [the Western bourgeoisie] creates
a world after its own image (Marx and Engels, 1985, 84).
In this way, the Eurocentric/Orientalist story of imperialism — as a Western civilizing mission —
found one of its clearest expressions.
But, more significantly, Marx’s dismissal of the East was found at the very heart of his theory
of capitalism developed in Capital and elsewhere. The East was monolithically represented by
the (residual) category of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ in which private property and
hence class struggle — the developmental motor of historical progress — was notably absent.
The key here was the Eurocentric theory of Oriental despotism. Thus, in Asia, ‘the direct
producersy [are] under direct subordination to a state which stands over them as their
landlordy. [Accordingly] no private ownership of land exists’ (Marx, 1959, 791, 333–334; 1954,
140, 316, 337–339). Thus, stagnation was inscribed or written into this publicly owned land
system because rents were extracted from the producers in the form of ‘taxes wrung from them
— frequently by means of torture — by a ruthless despotic state’ (Marx, 1959, 726). Thus, it was
the absorption of, and hence failure to produce, a surplus for reinvestment in the economy
that ‘supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies’ (Marx, 1954,
338). This scenario was fundamentally contrasted with the European state, which did not
stand above society but was firmly embedded within, and acted on behalf of, the dominant
economic class. Also, in allowing a space for Western capitalists to accumulate a surplus
through the exploitation of labour power, Marx reveals the key to the secret of the unique or
exceptional dynamism of Western societies.
Finally, Marx’s theory of history faithfully reproduces the Orientalist/ Eurocentric teleological
story. For example, in The German Ideology, Marx traces the origins of ‘progressive history’
back to Ancient Greece, and then recounts the story of progress forwards through a linear
succession of various European modes of production before culminating at the communist
terminus of history (Marx, 1965). At no point does the East actively contribute to the story. All
in all, then, Marx makes the mistake of elevating the West into a Eurocentric fetish and, albeit
in different ways, much the same is true for most of his many followers — ranging from
Brenner and Hobsbawm to Wallerstein and even Braudel.
Gonzaga Debate In 147
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Development K
Development must be understood as process of Eurocentrism
Miguel, Universidade Federal de Rondônia Professor, 9
(Vinicius Valentin Raduan Miguel, August 4, 2009, Political Affairs, “Colonialism and
Underdevelopment in Latin America,” http://www.politicalaffairs.net/colonialism-andunderdevelopment-in-latin-america/, accessed July 10, 2013, EK)
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.
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 In 148
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Feminism
Gonzaga Debate In 149
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Perm
Eurocentrism is the root cause of violence against the Other- specifically
normalized discourses of gender and race stem from Eurocentric values and
means of knowledge production
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, P. 559, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
Without this objectification of the body as nature, its expulsion from the sphere of the spirit
(and this is my strong thesis), the “scientific” theorization of the problem of race (as in the case
of the comte de Gob- ineau [1853–57] during the nineteenth century) would have hardly been
possible. From the Eurocentric perspective, certain races are condemned as inferior for not
being rational subjects. They are objects of study, con- sequently bodies closer to nature. In a
sense, they became dominable and exploitable. According to the myth of the state of nature and
the chain of the civilizing process that culminates in European civilization, some races— blacks,
American Indians, or yellows—are closer to nature than whites. 24 It was only within this
peculiar perspective that non-European peoples were considered as an object of knowledge
and domination/exploitation by Europeans virtually to the end of World War II. This new and
radical dualism affected not only the racial relations of domination, but the older sexual
relations of domination as well. Women, especially the women of inferior races (“women of
color”), remained stereo- typed together with the rest of the bodies, and their place was all
the more 556 Nepantla inferior for their race, so that they were considered much closer to
nature or (as was the case with black slaves) directly within nature. It is probable (al- though the
question remains to be investigated) that the new idea of gender has been elaborated after
the new and radical dualism of the Eurocentric cognitive perspective in the articulation of the
coloniality of power.
Eurocentered ideologies shape the entirety of power relations, including: “the
four basic areas of human existence: sex, labor, collective authority and
subjectivity/intersubjectivity”
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative
Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's
Studies at Binghamton University in New York, Spring 2008, “The Coloniality of Gender”,
http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wpcontent/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf, Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
Anibal Quijano thinks the intersection of race and gender in large structural terms. So, to
understand that intersection in his terms, it is necessary to understand his model of global,
Eurocentered capitalist power. Both “race” and gender find their meanings in this model
[patrón]. Quijano understands that all power is structured in relations of domination,
Gonzaga Debate In 150
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exploitation and conflict as social actors fight over control of “the four basic areas of human
existence: sex, labor, collective authority and subjectivity/intersubjectivity, their resources
and products.” (Quijano, 2001-2, p.1 )What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist
power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms, “the coloniality of power”
and “modernity.” (Quijano, 2000b, 342) The axes order the disputes over control of each area of
existence in such a way that the meaning and forms of domination in each area are thoroughly
infused by the coloniality of power and modernity. So, for Quijano, the disputes/struggles over
control of “sexual access, its resources and products” define the domain of sex/gender and
the disputes, in turn, can be understood as organized around the axes of coloniality and
modernity.
The coloniality of power has shaped gender relations of the modern world,
Eurocentrism has normalized dominant male and subordinate of female roles
and paternalist paradigm that was responsible for slavery
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative
Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's
Studies at Binghamton University in New York, Spring 2008, “The Coloniality of Gender”,
http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wpcontent/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf, Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
Though I have not found a characterization of gender in what I have read of his work, Quijano
seems to me to imply that gender difference is constituted in the disputes over control of sex,
its resources, and products. Differences are shaped through the manner in which this control
is organized. Sex, he understands, as biological attributes that become elaborated as social
categories. He contrasts the biological quality of sex with phenotype, which does not include
differential biological attributes. “ The color of one’s skin, the shape of one’s eyes and hair “do
not have any relation to the biological structure .” (Quijano, 2000b, 373) Sex, on the other
hand seems unproblematically biological to Quijano. He characterizes the “coloniality of
gender relations”, that is, the ordering of gender relations around the axis of the coloniality of
power, as follows:
1.In the whole of the colonial world, the norms and formal-ideal patterns of sexual behavior of
the genders and consequently the patterns of familial organization of “Europeans” were directly
founded on the “racial” classification: the sexual freedom of males and the fidelity of women
were, in the whole of the Eurocentered world, the counterpart of the “free”—that is, not paid
as in prostitution—access of “white” men to “black” women and “indias” in America, “black”
women in Africa, and other “colors” in the rest of the subjected world.
[En todo el mundo colonial, las normas y los patrones formal-ideales de comportamiento sexual
de los géneros y en consecuencia los patrones de organizacion familiar de los "europeos" fueron
directamente fundados en la clasificacion "racial": la libertad sexual de los varones y la fidelidad
de las mujeres fue, en todo el mundo eurocentrado, la contrapartida del "libre"-esto es, no
pagado como en la prostitución, mas antigua en la historia--acceso sexual de los varones
"blancos" a las mujeres "negras" e "indias", en America, "negras" en el Africa, y de los otros
"colores" en el resto del mundo sometido.]
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2. In Europe, instead, it was the prostitution of women, that was the counterpart of the
bourgeois family pattern.
[En Europa, en cambio, fue la prostitución de las mujeres la contrapartida del patrón de la
familia burguesa.]
3. Familial unity and integration, imposed as the axes of the model of the bourgeois family in
the Eurocentered world, were the counterpart of the continued disintegration of the parentchildren units in the “non-white” “races”, which could be held and distributed as property not
just as merchandise but as “animals.” This was particularly the case among “black” slaves,
since this form of domination over them was more explicit, immediate, and prolonged.
[La unidad e integración familiar, impuestas como ejes del patrón de familia burguesa del
mundo eurocentrado, fue la contrapartida de la continuada desintegración de las unidades de
parentesco padres-hijos en las "razas" no-"blancas," apropriables y distribuíbles no solo como
mercancias sino directamente como "animales.En particular, entre los esclavos "negros," ya que
sobre ellos esa forma de dominación fue la mas explícita, inmediata y prolongada.]
4. The hypocrisy characteristically underlying the norms and formal-ideal values of the bourgeois
family are not, since then, alien to the coloniality of power.
[La característica hipocresía subyacente a las normas y valores formal-ideales de la familia
burguesa, no es, desde entonces, ajena a la colonialidad del poder. ](Quijnao, 2000b,378) [my
translation]
As we see in this complex and important quote, Quijano’s framework restricts gender to the
organization of sex, its resources and products and he seems to make a presupposition as to
who controls access and who becomes constituted as “resources.” Quijano appears to take it
for granted that the disputes over control of sex is a dispute among men, about men’s control of
resources who are thought to be female. Men do not seem understood as the “resources” in
sexual encounters. Women are not thought to be disputing for control over sexual access. The
differences are thought of in terms of how society reads reproductive biology.
Gonzaga Debate In 152
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Alt Can’t Solve Aff
Eurocentered ideologies shape the entirety of power relations, including: “the
four basic areas of human existence: sex, labor, collective authority and
subjectivity/intersubjectivity”
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative
Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's
Studies at Binghamton University in New York, Spring 2008, “The Coloniality of Gender”,
http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wpcontent/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf, Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
Anibal Quijano thinks the intersection of race and gender in large structural terms. So, to
understand that intersection in his terms, it is necessary to understand his model of global,
Eurocentered capitalist power. Both “race” and gender find their meanings in this model
[patrón]. Quijano understands that all power is structured in relations of domination,
exploitation and conflict as social actors fight over control of “the four basic areas of human
existence: sex, labor, collective authority and subjectivity/intersubjectivity, their resources
and products.” (Quijano, 2001-2, p.1 )What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist
power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms, “the coloniality of power”
and “modernity.” (Quijano, 2000b, 342) The axes order the disputes over control of each area of
existence in such a way that the meaning and forms of domination in each area are thoroughly
infused by the coloniality of power and modernity. So, for Quijano, the disputes/struggles over
control of “sexual access, its resources and products” define the domain of sex/gender and
the disputes, in turn, can be understood as organized around the axes of coloniality and
modernity.
Gonzaga Debate In 153
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Feminism + Paternalism Impact
The coloniality of power has shaped gender relations of the modern world,
Eurocentrism has normalized dominant male and subordinate of female roles
and paternalist paradigm that was responsible for slavery
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative
Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's
Studies at Binghamton University in New York, Spring 2008, “The Coloniality of Gender”,
http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wpcontent/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf, Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
Though I have not found a characterization of gender in what I have read of his work, Quijano
seems to me to imply that gender difference is constituted in the disputes over control of sex,
its resources, and products. Differences are shaped through the manner in which this control
is organized. Sex, he understands, as biological attributes that become elaborated as social
categories. He contrasts the biological quality of sex with phenotype, which does not include
differential biological attributes. “ The color of one’s skin, the shape of one’s eyes and hair “do
not have any relation to the biological structure .” (Quijano, 2000b, 373) Sex, on the other
hand seems unproblematically biological to Quijano. He characterizes the “coloniality of
gender relations”, that is, the ordering of gender relations around the axis of the coloniality of
power, as follows:
1.In the whole of the colonial world, the norms and formal-ideal patterns of sexual behavior of
the genders and consequently the patterns of familial organization of “Europeans” were directly
founded on the “racial” classification: the sexual freedom of males and the fidelity of women
were, in the whole of the Eurocentered world, the counterpart of the “free”—that is, not paid
as in prostitution—access of “white” men to “black” women and “indias” in America, “black”
women in Africa, and other “colors” in the rest of the subjected world.
[En todo el mundo colonial, las normas y los patrones formal-ideales de comportamiento sexual
de los géneros y en consecuencia los patrones de organizacion familiar de los "europeos" fueron
directamente fundados en la clasificacion "racial": la libertad sexual de los varones y la fidelidad
de las mujeres fue, en todo el mundo eurocentrado, la contrapartida del "libre"-esto es, no
pagado como en la prostitución, mas antigua en la historia--acceso sexual de los varones
"blancos" a las mujeres "negras" e "indias", en America, "negras" en el Africa, y de los otros
"colores" en el resto del mundo sometido.]
2. In Europe, instead, it was the prostitution of women, that was the counterpart of the
bourgeois family pattern.
[En Europa, en cambio, fue la prostitución de las mujeres la contrapartida del patrón de la
familia burguesa.]
3. Familial unity and integration, imposed as the axes of the model of the bourgeois family in
the Eurocentered world, were the counterpart of the continued disintegration of the parentchildren units in the “non-white” “races”, which could be held and distributed as property not
just as merchandise but as “animals.” This was particularly the case among “black” slaves,
since this form of domination over them was more explicit, immediate, and prolonged.
Gonzaga Debate In 154
[Type the document title]
[La unidad e integración familiar, impuestas como ejes del patrón de familia burguesa del
mundo eurocentrado, fue la contrapartida de la continuada desintegración de las unidades de
parentesco padres-hijos en las "razas" no-"blancas," apropriables y distribuíbles no solo como
mercancias sino directamente como "animales.En particular, entre los esclavos "negros," ya que
sobre ellos esa forma de dominación fue la mas explícita, inmediata y prolongada.]
4. The hypocrisy characteristically underlying the norms and formal-ideal values of the bourgeois
family are not, since then, alien to the coloniality of power.
[La característica hipocresía subyacente a las normas y valores formal-ideales de la familia
burguesa, no es, desde entonces, ajena a la colonialidad del poder. ](Quijnao, 2000b,378) [my
translation]
As we see in this complex and important quote, Quijano’s framework restricts gender to the
organization of sex, its resources and products and he seems to make a presupposition as to
who controls access and who becomes constituted as “resources.” Quijano appears to take it
for granted that the disputes over control of sex is a dispute among men, about men’s control of
resources who are thought to be female. Men do not seem understood as the “resources” in
sexual encounters. Women are not thought to be disputing for control over sexual access. The
differences are thought of in terms of how society reads reproductive biology.
Gonzaga Debate In 155
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Aff Solves K
Eurocentrism is the root cause of violence against the Other- specifically
normalized discourses of gender and race stem from Eurocentric values and
means of knowledge production
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, P. 559, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
Without this objectification of the body as nature, its expulsion from the sphere of the spirit
(and this is my strong thesis), the “scientific” theorization of the problem of race (as in the case
of the comte de Gob- ineau [1853–57] during the nineteenth century) would have hardly been
possible. From the Eurocentric perspective, certain races are condemned as inferior for not
being rational subjects. They are objects of study, con- sequently bodies closer to nature. In a
sense, they became dominable and exploitable. According to the myth of the state of nature and
the chain of the civilizing process that culminates in European civilization, some races— blacks,
American Indians, or yellows—are closer to nature than whites. 24 It was only within this
peculiar perspective that non-European peoples were considered as an object of knowledge
and domination/exploitation by Europeans virtually to the end of World War II. This new and
radical dualism affected not only the racial relations of domination, but the older sexual
relations of domination as well. Women, especially the women of inferior races (“women of
color”), remained stereo- typed together with the rest of the bodies, and their place was all
the more 556 Nepantla inferior for their race, so that they were considered much closer to
nature or (as was the case with black slaves) directly within nature. It is probable (al- though the
question remains to be investigated) that the new idea of gender has been elaborated after
the new and radical dualism of the Eurocentric cognitive perspective in the articulation of the
coloniality of power.
Gonzaga Debate In 156
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Ks
Gonzaga Debate In 157
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AT: “Logic of Holocaust” Impacts
Portrayals of the Holocaust are specifically Eurocentric – assumes only great
powers have agency and uplifts the West as saviors from genocide rather than
perpetrators by otherizing Germany and the Soviet Union as non-Western –
makes solving for these impacts impossible
Barkawi, University of Cambridge Center of International Studies senior
lecturer, and Laffey, University of London politics and international relations
professor, 6
(Tarak and Mark, 2006, “The postcolonial moment in security studies”, Review of International
Studies, vol. 32, pg. 340-343,
https://umdrive.memphis.edu/rblanton/public/POLS_7508_Fall_2012/barwaki_postcolonial_RI
S_2006.pdf, accessed 7/12/13, JZ)
World War II is significant for security studies, and in particular liberal and critical approaches,
in another way as well. Realist approaches to security studies are Eurocentric in that they
locate agency and history with the great powers. Liberal approaches partake of this kind of
Eurocentrism as well, but in addition they define the West in ethical and progressive terms.
The Holocaust is central to these efforts. Across a range of positions, the Holocaust sets the
standard for what is considered unacceptable behaviour in international society and invokes
the category of ‘humanity’ in a Eurocentric fashion by ignoring previous Western imperial
genocides in the colonies.70 Simultaneously, it reinforces narratives of the ‘good war’ as
central to the self-fashioning of the West as a collective actor in world politics. After all, it was
the Allies who liberated the camps and prosecuted those responsible for the genocide. The turn
to humanitarian intervention as a defining feature of a liberal, law-governed, and civilised
‘international community’, particularly since 1989, draws on and reinforces this image of the
West as the preventer of genocides and the punisher of violators of human rights, as for
example in Kosovo.
Zygmunt Bauman argues, however, that the Holocaust is a modern, Western phenomenon .71
The Holocaust thus poses difficulties for liberal understandings of the West and its role in world
politics. ‘Whoever takes seriously the history of violence in the twentieth century will find it
hard to believe in myths of progress’.72 In order to retain liberal faith in Western myths of
progress and ethical superiority, in which the West and humanity are collapsed into one
another but the West nevertheless also leads humanity, the Holocaust must be ‘othered’ from
the West. In defining the West against the Holocaust, an imagined geography is invoked which
displaces ‘the sins of Western civilisation onto an intrusive non-European Other in our
midst’.73 In the process, Germany, that quintessentially Western society, somehow becomes
not Western.74 As Lewis and Wigan comment, ‘By the mid-twentieth century, historians across
Europe were echoing the refrain that Germany was – in its ‘‘soul’’ – a non-Western country’.75
It is in this context that we should read the otherwise incomprehensible remark of Chancellor
Gerhard Schröder that Germany has recently completed its ‘long journey to the West.’76 This
manoeuvre, othering mass slaughter from the West and from modernity, is a standard one. It
serves to preserve, in the face of any evidence to the contrary, the ethical character of the
West and, in turn, underpins claims in liberal and critical security studies that the West is a
force for good in the world.
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For example, one site of mass slaughter was the Soviet Union. There, the excesses of the Soviet
regime were often interpreted in terms of Oriental despotism.77 This reinforced the association
of communism, a modern European ideology of progress, with the East. But as John Gray
comments, ‘Soviet Communism and Nazism were each animated by ambitions that derive from
the Enlightenment’.78 To acknowledge this obvious fact is to contradict historical geographies
that locate global progress and emancipation in the West and its ideas. When mass slaughter
takes place in locales seemingly more removed from the West, as in Africa, it is also attributed
to non-Western factors such as the absence of modern political, economic and social
arrangements, as in discourses of quasi- and failed states and of ‘underdevelopment as
dangerous’, or to the peculiarities of local ethnic identities, as in the ‘new barbarism’ thesis.79
Similarly, Mary Kaldor in part attributes ‘new wars’, located in the global South or in
‘ambiguous’ border zones like the Balkans, to the absence of ‘cosmopolitan political
consciousness’.80 The hierarchical relation between the West and the rest is explicit:
‘Cosmopolitanism tends to be more widespread in the West and less widespread in the East and
the South. Nevertheless, throughout the world, in remote towns and villages, both sorts of
people are to be found’.81 Europe and the West show to the rest of the world its cosmopolitan
and peaceful future. Moreover, to the West is assigned the leading role in making that future
real, through force if necessary. There are striking parallels between analyses couched in these
terms and accounts of colonial war which, as Gottmann observed in 1943, is ‘by its very nature,
fought between adversaries of strikingly different levels of civilization’.82 Meanwhile, histories
of cosmopolitanism in non-Western sites are forgotten.83
As with the Cuban Missile Crisis and World War II, Eurocentrism generates substantial
difficulties for understanding genocide and mass slaughter. Liberals seek to erect effective
international legal and political structures for the prevention and eradication of mass
slaughter. Such a task requires what we might term a natural history of genocide, that is, an
account of the development and evolution of the modalities and practices of mass slaughter.84
Such a history is impossible if we begin from the kind of Eurocentric assumptions that mark
liberal understandings of genocide. As Bauman demonstrates, ‘every ‘‘ingredient’’ of the
Holocaust . . . was normal . . . in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know
about our civilisation, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world – and of
the proper ways to pursue human happiness together with a perfect society’.85 Another site of
mass slaughter central to any serious attempt to construct such a natural history lies in Europe’s
colonies. For Hannah Arendt, European colonial genocide is the progenitor for the
Holocaust.86
Mass slaughter and loss of life amongst the ‘natives’ was a normal and routine feature of
European expansion into and rule over the non-European world. As Sven Lindqvist observes,
‘the Holocaust was unique – in Europe. But the history of Western expansion in other parts of
the world shows many examples of total extermination of whole peoples.’87 So normal was
mass death in the colonies that even as the Allies were fighting the ‘good war’, 3.5–3.8 million
Bengalis – more than ‘half a Holocaust’ – died in 1943–44 as a predictable result of war-time
exigencies and the grain market in British India.88 Despite urgent requests from British officials
in India, London refused to reallocate shipping space from military purposes. ‘Churchill
expressed serious objection to the use of such a huge volume of transport for grain supply at the
cost of military supply to India and civil supply to England’.89 The Viceroy of India, Lord Wavell,
observed bitterly towards the end of the war that there was a ‘very different attitude towards
feeding a starving population when the population is in Europe’.90 This was not the first time
that large numbers of Indians had died as a direct result of British policies designed to produce a
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particular vision of the good life and the perfect society, organised around property rights,
markets and free trade.91 The Irish too suffered from decisions made in London and the
workings of liberal institutions.92 In the colonies, near and far, it was impossible to forget that
the West was murderous. Questioning Eurocentric historical geographies – through recovery of
these and other moments in the natural history of genocide and mass death – puts in serious
doubt liberal and critical understandings of World War II as a good war and of the West as a
force for good in world politics.
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AT: Afropessimism/Anti-Blackness
Slavery cannot be understood on the level of American exploitation of the black
body but on a larger Eurocentric mercantilist system of empire expansion
Amin, former Professor Economics Cairo, 9
(Samir, Eurocentrism, p.252-3)
All observers of true slave societies, ones that exploit the productive labor of slaves, have
remarked on the exceptional character of this mode of predatory exploitation. Slaves
reproduce only with difficulty, and it is difficult to reduce a native population to slavery. Thus,
slavery presupposes that the society that lives by it carries out raids outside its own territory.
It dies out when the possibility of such raids ceases (which is what happened, in particular, at
the end of the great pro-slavery century of the Roman Empire). In other words, slavery cannot
be understood by means of an analysis focused exclusively on what occurs inside the society
in question. The concept of a system of formations must be introduced into the analysis, some
being the societies of the slaveholders and others the societies where the hunt occurs. That is
why slavery appears most often in connection with extensive external market relations that
permit the purchase of slaves. The armed bands that engage in the hunt for human beings, and
the unstable type of society that they set up, would hardly exist without a market outlet for
their product. This type of society does not form a necessary stage in itself. It is an appendage of
a dynamic that largely escapes it.
Observe the curious coexistence between slavery and extensive market relations in classical
antiquity, lower Iraq, and America. The existence of market production is uncommon in the precapitalist world. The areas where slavery dominated, then, cannot be understood by
themselves. They are only parts of much larger wholes. Athenian slavery can only be explained
if the Greek cities are integrated into the environment in which they carried on trade. Their
specializations exist within a context that included the Orient, where slavery did not penetrate.
In the Roman West, slavery was limited to the coastal zones, where the product could be
marketed. Transportation costs prevented its extension to Gaul and Spain, proof of its
connection with trade. America had no separate existence since it was the periphery of
mercantilist Europe. That is also why slavery is associated with the most varied levels of
development of the productive forces, from Greco-Roman Antiquity, to nineteenth century
capitalism in the United States and Brazil! How could a necessary stage be found in
combination with such different levels of development of the productive forces?
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Anthropocentrism
Anthropocentrism is just another amalgamation of Eurocentrism – A critique of
eurocentrism solves both
Hostettler, University of London politics and IR lecturer, 2000
(Nick, Queen Mary University of London Politics and IR Lecturer, Published 2000, Eurocentrism:
A Marxian Critical Realist Critique, Google books, pg. 11-12, JB)
It is in this dimension of our understanding that we find the anthropocentric presuppositions
of the modern tradition. What is so striking is that the modern account of science and of
knowledge in general shares background 'beliefs' about 'man' with political and social theory,
as Taylor's work does so much to make clear. Bhaskar's work, however, makes a contribution of
equal, if not greater significance. Bhaskar's work digs more deeply into the presuppositions and
preconditions of modernity than any other. It discloses the deep Structures of the 'two
cultures', then it provides theoretical resources for understanding the contradictory structures
of modem social forms more generally. Bhaskar argues that the hermeneutic critique often
cedes too much to the dominant philosophical claims for science, and that it stops short of
pushing towards an alternative, common ontology on which hermeneutic and natural science
and political and social theory can be developed. Dialectical critical realism provides a genuinely
non-anthropocentric alternative, reconceptualising science and nature on the basis of dialectical
critical realist ontology and epistemology. Eurocentrism is arguing that this common ground
needs to be understood as anti-eurocentric and will only be developed by continually pursuing
the anti-eurocentric critique of eurocentrism. This, indeed, is just what the critique of
anthropocentrism is doing, at least in practice.
What is understood as the critique of anthropocentrism is in fact the critique of euro-centrism.
This is because the 'man' that the modern tradition puts at the centre of things is, of course,
modern European man. That is, it both imagines 'man' and it imagines his place at the centre
of things. Neither is the case; both are modem eurocentric fantasies. Disclosing and addressing
these fantasies, Eurocentrism brings together the two major strands of the critique of
anthropocentrism into a single coherent critique of eurocentrism. It draws together the
hermeneutic critique of modern modes of interpretation and the critical realist critique of the
philosophy of science, showing both modes of enframing to be essentially eurocentric. It shows
that the critique of the illicit universalism of the modem tradition is part of this critique of
anthropocentrism and that both are part of the critique of eurocentrism.
More positively, Eurocentrism critically integrates these philosophical and socio-logical critiques
(hermeneutic, critical realist and Marxian) into a general theoretical account of modernity in
terms of the illicit universalism of its forms of thought, practice and social relations. It does so by
drawing on existing traditions of thought, but pursues the deeper logic implicit in their attempts
to understand
eurocentric modernity. That deeper logic is the logic of anti-eurocentrism, driven by the
contradictions of eurocentrism to disclose and transcend them. The eurocentrism of modernity
can only be fully understood through the development of an anti-eurocentric theory which
simultaneously addresses the illicit universalism of its philosophy, theory and reality.
Gonzaga Debate In 162
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Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis has its origins in Eurocentric medical and social knowledge
production
Bondi, University of Edinburgh Social Geograpgy Professor, 7
(Liz, , Psychoanalytic theory Entry for the Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th Edition, Pg. 3, JB)
Psychoanalytic theory and practice originated in the late nineteenth century in the work of
Sigmund Freud (1956-1939). It offers a distinctive way of thinking about the human mind and
of responding to psychological distress. Psychoanalysis has travelled widely from its central
European origins, and has evolved into a complex, multi-facetted and internally fractured body
of knowledge situated at the interface between the human and natural sciences, and between
clinical practice and academic theory. Notwithstanding critiques of its Eurocentric origins,
psychoanalysis has been taken up in many different cultural contexts, perhaps most notably in
Latin America but also in India, Japan and elsewhere. Its geography and spatiality have become
topics for geographical study albeit primarily within the Anglophone literature (Cameron, 2006;
Kingsbury, 2003).
Along with the more general rise of psychological thinking, psychoanalytic ideas have had a
pervasive influence on such arenas of life as child-rearing, education and popular culture.
Within the academy, psychoanalytic theory has been taken up most extensively in the
humanities and more sporadically in the social sciences including human geography, where a
distinct subdiscipline of psychoanalytic geography has shown tentative signs of formation since
around turn of the twenty-first century.
Psychoanalysis is Eurocentric
Fourny and Emery, Ohio State University French Professors, 2000
(Jean-François and Meaghan, Published 2000, Bourdieu's “Uneasy Psychoanalysis”, Substance, vol 29,
# 3, Pg. 103, jstor, JB)
As is known, psychoanalysis, developed in Vienna around the time of the Belle Epoque (18701914), would be a form of Eurocentrism universalizing the European psychic structure and its
sexual obsessions, further contributing to psychoanalysis's crisis. Nonetheless, it seems to be
playing an increasingly important role, no less ambiguous, in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In
fact, psychoanalysis has always had a place in his texts, despite an initial degree of hostility or
serious reservations on Bourdieu's part. His reservations, however, have evolved over time,
become nuanced and modified, to ultimately assign psychoanalysis a tentative but increasingly
distinct profile as a problematic discipline. At times psychoanalysis is viewed as a rival to
Bourdieu's sociology, from which the latter must absolutely be differentiated. At others it is
seen as a kind of domain (or field) susceptible to annexation through the sociological treatment
of certain of its concepts—that is, when a possible fusion with sociology, based on an equal
footing and a clearly defined division of labor, appears hopeless.
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AT: Counterplans
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AT: Don’t Do it as Economic Engagement
Non-engagement in economic issues based in a belief that the West is superior
and leads to epistemologically closed models, opening our economic relations is
key to resolve this
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.