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Eurocentrism Cuba Neg – GDI 2013
Note – This 1ac does not read a plan, but does specifically criticize the Cuban embargo and inclusion on
the terrorism list and will agree that answers to those are Neg ground the aff has to debate.
The Eurocentrism K files has additional arguments in the answers section.
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Case Answers -
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Offense
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Embargo Racism Turn
Cuban approaches to race relations are more equal and open than American
approaches, removing the embargo risks exporting our oppressive policies.
Robinson, Lawyer, Author and Activist, 2k
(Randall Robinson, African-American lawyer, author and activist, noted as the founder of TransAfrica,
2000, “The Debt: What America owes to Blacks”, http://libgen.info/view.php?id=448737, Page 129,
Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
This is not to idealize the Cubans on race matters. White Cubans still appear very much to have the
better of things. They dominate political power. They are generally better off economically. But
having acknowledged such legacies of Cuban inequality, anyone with half a brain must conclude that
their chances of an equal society are infinitely better than ours. For whatever reason (a bequest of
the Moors or not) Cubans seem qualitatively less racist than Americans. White Cubans, as I have said,
talk with unremarkable emphasis about their African ancestry. I think Hazel would rather I not write this
because I appear to imply that I am pleased by such talk. I think many of us were, and that in itself, I
confess, is puzzling.
It could be, as well, that a lot of what one hears on these matters from Cuban government officials has
more to do with the head than the heart—ideology as opposed to sincere open- mindedness, so to
speak. I cannot know the answer to this. I do know that white Americans don’t talk or think like this,
and the end of manifest racism in America can only begin with such talk and thought. At the same
time, it is not lost on me that no such avowals were widely heard around white Cuba before 1959 or in
white Cuban Miami even now. But, whatever their motivation, white Cubans in Cuba sound sincere on
matters of race.
The Cuban embargo is a positive sanction. It compartmentalizes our influence on their
culture and prevents us from expanding cultural and economic relations with Cuba,
which only risks replicating US oppression in Cuba.
Robinson, Lawyer, Author and Activist, 2k
(Randall Robinson, African-American lawyer, author and activist, noted as the founder of TransAfrica,
2000, “The Debt: What America owes to Blacks”, http://libgen.info/view.php?id=448737, Page 133-134,
Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
***Viscera = Gut or visceral feeling
You may sense from the tone of this that we had grown, by day five of our trip, close to our black
hosts—that we had allowed them into positions of some social trust that even white Americans likely
would not have been allowed to enter, at least so uncircumspectly. Though this assessment was
entirely unvoiced, it was entirely the case nonetheless. Afro-Cubans we’d never seen before, whose
language most of us could not speak, whose political creeds our American political leaders had
unreservedly condemned, had become something close to friends.
Gullible, some would say. Well, I think not. The head tells. The head hears. The head believes or
disbelieves. But the viscera know. Especially viscera trained in pain as, sadly, ours had been for as far
back in time any of us could remember. Think what you will, but this was our reaction—which, in any
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case, says more about race relations in America than about anything about Cuba. And that is, in
essence, why I have chosen to write about our time in Cuba before my memory of it dims.
To be sure, I had my doubts—I suppose all of us did—about the truth of much of what we had heard,
even from the Afro-Cubans with us on the bus that night. While some Afro-Cubans with whom we
met had denied the existence of racism in Cuba, most had not. Even Castro himself would speak of it
to us later as a persistent and stubborn social problem warranting an equally persistent
government response beyond the mere application of law.
The larger point, however, was this. We would not stay in Cuba long enough to sort fact from fiction,
good from bad, in the Cuban government’s picture of itself and its programs, not even after listening
to Felix, Orlaida, Adelina, and Marcelino. We could not know in such a short time what Cuba was. But
we could know that it was not what American officials had said it was, or perhaps, more important,
had not said it was. We could also know from direct witness what the U nited S tates was doing to
these people, most of whom were black and innocent of anything, least of all harm to the United
States.
We were sure that Cuba had some human rights problems, but where were they on a scale of one to
ten? We ourselves had been victims of American human rights violations. From that perspective, Cuba
felt better.
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Worse Alternatives Fill In
Rejecting or eradicating Eurocentrism just allows other worse pervasive and
exclusionary form of epistemology and knowledge production from seeping in - turns
the aff
Wallerstein, is an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems
analyst, 97
(Immanuel, an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. His bimonthly
commentaries on world affairs are syndicated, 1997, Binghamton.edu "Eurocentrism and its Avatars:
The Dilemmas of Social Science," http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iweuroc.htm, Accessed:
7/6/13, LPS.)
This kind of revisionist historiography is often persuasive in detail, and certainly tends to be
cumulative. At a certain point, the debunking, or deconstructing, may become pervasive, and perhaps
a counter-theory take hold. This is, for example, what seems to be happening (or has already
happened) with the historiography of the French Revolution, where the so-called social interpretation
that had dominated the literature for at least a century and a half was challenged and then to some
degree toppled in the last thirty years. We are probably entering into such a so-called paradigmatic shift
right now in the basic historiography of modernity.
Whenever such a shift happens, however, we ought to take a deep breath, step back, and evaluate
whether the alternative hypotheses are indeed more plausible, and most of all whether they really
break with the crucial underlying premises of the formerly dominant hypotheses. This is the question I
wish to raise in relation to the historiography of European presumed achievements in the modern
world. It is under assault. What is being proposed as a replacement? And how different is this
replacement? Before, however, we can tackle this large question, we must review some of the other
critiques of Eurocentrism.
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Speaking for Others
These critiques come from within a single knowledge base – no risk that their
“deconstruction” is the one desired by ones most effected – merely another form the
the colonial difference the negative critiques
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter 2002, “The
Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference”, Pg. 85-86, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
I have mentioned that Wallerstein, Quijano, and Dussel have dependency theory as a common
reference, and my previous argument suggested that while Wallerstein brought dependency theory to
the social sciences as a discipline, Quijano and Dussel follow the political and dialectical scope of
dependency theory. The epistemic colonial difference divides one from the other. Of course, this does
not place one against the other but underlines the colonial difference as the limit of the assumed
totality of Western epistemology. That is why to open the social sciences is a welcome move, but an
insufficient one. It is possible to think, as Quijano and Dussel (among others) have, beyond and against
philosophy and the social sciences as the incarnation of Western epistemology. It is necessary to do so
in order to avoid reproducing the totality shared by their promoters and their critics. In other words,
the critiques of modernity, Western logocentrism, capitalism, Eurocentrism , and the like performed
in Western Europe and the United States cannot be valid for persons who think and live in Asia,
Africa, or Latin [End Page 85] America . Those who are not white or Christian or who have been
marginal to the foundation, expansion, and transformation of philosophy and social and natural
sciences cannot be satisfied with their identification and solidarity with the European or American
left. Nietzsche's (as a Christian) criticism of Christianity cannot satisfy Khatibi's (as a Muslim and
Maghrebian) criticism of Christianity and colonization. It is crucial for the ethics, politics, and
epistemology of the future to recognize that the totality of Western epistemology, from either the
right or the left, is no longer valid for the entire planet. The colonial difference is becoming
unavoidable. Greece can no longer be the point of reference for new utopias and new points of
arrival, as Slavoj Zizek still believes, or at least sustains. 76
If Wallerstein, Quijano, and Dussel have dependency theory as a common reference, they also share a
critique of Eurocentrism. 77 However, their motivation is different. Quijano's and Dussel's critiques of
Eurocentrism respond to the overwhelming celebration of the discovery of America, which both scholars
read not only as a Spanish question but also as the beginning of modernity and European hegemony.
Both concur that Latin America and the Caribbean today are a consequence of the North Atlantic (not
just Spanish and European) hegemony. Wallerstein's critique of Eurocentrism is a critique of the social
sciences: "Social sciences has been Eurocentrism throughout its institutional history, which means since
there have been departments teaching social science within a university system." 78 Thus Wallerstein's
critique of Eurocentrism is one of epistemology through the social sciences. Quijano's and Dussel's
critiques come to Western epistemology through coloniality of power from the colonial difference.
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Defense
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No Solvency
Aff employs eurocentrism
El-Affendi, Cambridge University Islamic Studies Professor, 12
(Abdelwahab el-Affendi, October 14, 2012, Economic and Social Research Council, “Narratives of
Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence,”http://www.esrc.ac.uk/myesrc/grants/RES-071-27-0010/outputs/Read/58ab38e7-50c3-4211-805f-a2af2e3cca91, accessed July 7,
2013, EK)
By complaining about the Eurocentrism of the Europeans, as we are doing here, are we not ourselves
directly promoting Eurocentric narratives? There is an implicit acceptance here of the postEnlightenment universalist claims of western narratives. We can be Afro-centric, Arabo-centric or
Islamo-centric, or we can speak for the Third Word. But ‘they’ cannot be Eurocentric: ‘they’ speak for
humanity as a whole. So they are cannot be permitted to be Eurocentric, and must live up to their
universalist image and role. So Eurocentrism is built in even in the critical narratives deploring it.
Critiques of Eurocentrism fail- they are reproduced from a Eurocentric form of thought
means there’s no way to solve
Wallerstein, is an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems
analyst, 97
(Immanuel, an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. His bimonthly
commentaries on world affairs are syndicated, 1997, Binghamton.edu "Eurocentrism and its Avatars:
The Dilemmas of Social Science," http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iweuroc.htm, Accessed:
7/6/13, LPS.)
The multiple forms of Eurocentrism and the multiple forms of the critique of Eurocentrism do not
necessarily add up to a coherent picture. What we might do is try to assess the central debate.
Institutionalized social science started as an activity in Europe, as we have noted. It has been charged
with painting a false picture of social reality by misreading, grossly exaggerating, and/or distorting the
historical role of Europe, particularly its historical role in the modern world.¶ The critics fundamentally
make, however, three different (and somewhat contradictory) kinds of claims. The first is that
whatever it is that Europe did, other civilizations were also in the process of doing it, up to the moment
that Europe used its geopoliticaL power to interrupt the process in other parts of the world. The second
is that whatever Europe did is nothing more than a continuation of what others had already been doing
for a long time, with the Europeans temporarily coming to the foreground. The third is that whatever
Europe did has been analyzed incorrectly and subjected to inappropriate extrapolations, which have had
dangerous consequences for both science and the political world. The first two arguments, widely
offered, seem to me to suffer from what I would term "anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism." The third
argument seems to me to be undoubtedly correct, and deserves our full attention. What kind of curious
animal could "anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism" be? Let us take each of these arguments in turn.¶ There
have been throughout the twentieth century persons who have argued that, within the framework of
say Chinese, or Indian, or Arab-Muslim "civilization," there existed both the cultural foundations and the
socio-historical pattern of development that would have led to the emergence of full-fledged modern
capitalism, or indeed was in the process of leading in that direction. In the case of Japan, the argument
is often even stronger, asserting that modern capitalism did develop there, separately but temporally
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coincident with its development in Europe. The heart of most of these arguments is a stage theory of
development (frequently its Marxist variant), from which it logically followed that different parts of the
world were all on parallel roads to modernity or capitalism. This form of argument presumed both the
distinctiveness and social autonomy of the various civilizational regions of the world on the one hand
and their common subordination to an overarching pattern on the other.¶ Since almost all the various
arguments of this kind are specific to a given cultural zone and its historical development, it would be a
massive exercise to discuss the historical plausibility of the case of each civilizational zone under
discussion. I do not propose to do so here. What I would point out is one logical limitation to this line
of argument whatever the region under discussion, and one general intellectual consequence. The
logical limitAtion is very obvious. Even if it is true that various other parts of the world were going down
the road to modernity/capitalism, perhaps were even far along this road, this still leaves us with the
problem of accounting for the fact that it was the West, or Europe, that reached there first, and was
consequently able to "conquer the world." At this point, we are back to the question as origin- ally
posed, why modernity/capitalism in the West? ¶ Of course, today there are some who are denying that
Europe in a deep sense did conquer the world on the grounds that there has| always been resistance,
but this seems to me to be stretching our reading of reality. There was after all real colonial conquest
that covered a large portion of the globe. There are after all rea military indicators of European strength.
No doubt there were always multiple forms of resistance, both active and passive, but if the resistance
were truly so formidable, there would be nothing for us to discuss today. If we insist too much on nonEuropean agency as a theme, we end up whitewashing all of Europe's sins, or at least most of them. This
seems to me not what the critics were intending.¶ In any case, however temporary we deem Europe's
domination to be, we still need to explain it. Most of the critics pursuing this line of argument are more
interested in explaining how Europe interrupted an indigenous process in their part of the world than
in| explaining how it was that Europe was able to do this. Even more to the point, by attempting to
diminish Europe's credit for this deed, this presumed "achievement," they reinforce the theme that it
was an achievement. The theory makes Europe into an "evil hero" - no doubt evil, but also no doubt a
hero in the dramatic sense of the term, for it was Europe that made the final spurt in the race and
crossed the finish line first. And worse still, there is the implication, not too far beneath the surface,
that, given half a chance, Chinese, or Indians, or Arabs not only could have, but would have, done the
same - that is, launch modernity/capitalism, conquer the world, exploit resources and people, and play
themselves the role of evil hero.¶ This view of modern history seems to be very Eurocentric in its antiEurocentrism, because it accepts the significance (that is, the value) of the European "achievement"
in precisely the terms that Europe has defined it, and merely asserts that others could have done it
too, or were doing it too. For some possibly accidental reason, Europe got a temporary edge on the
others and interfered with their development forcibly. The assertion that we others could have been
Europeans too seems to me a very feeble way of opposing Eurocentrism, and actually reinforces the
worst consequences of Eurocentric thought for social knowledge.¶ The second line of opposition to
Eurocentric analyses is that which denies that there is anything really new in what Europe did. This line
of argument starts by pointing out that, as of the late Middle Ages, and indeed for a long time before
that, western Europe was a marginal (peripheral) area of the Eurasian continent, whose historical role
and cultural achievements were below the level of various other parts of the world (such as the Arab
world or China). This is undoubtedly true, at least as a first-level generalization. A quick jump is then
made to situating modern Europe within the construction of an ecumene or world structure that has
been in creation for several thousand years (see various authors in Sanderson, 1995). This is not
implausible, but the systemic meaningfulness of this ecumene has yet to be established, in my view. We
then come to the third element in the sequence. It is said to follow from the prior marginality of western
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Europe and the millennial construction of a Eurasian world ecumene that whatever happened in
western Europe was nothing special and simply one more variant in the historical construction of a
singular system.¶ This latter argument seems to me conceptually and historically very wrong. I do not
intend however to reargue this case (see Wallerstein, 1992a). I wish merely to underline the ways in
which this is anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism. Logically, it requires arguing that capitalism is nothing new,
and indeed some of those who argue the continuity of the development of the Eurasian ecumene have
explicitly taken this position. Unlike the position of those who are arguing that a given other civilization
was also en route to capitalism when Europe interfered with this process, the argument here is that we
were all of us doing this together, and that there was no real development towards capitalism because
the whole world (or at least the whole Eurasian ecumene) was always capitalist in some sense.¶ Let me
point out first of all that this is the classic position of the liberal economists. This is not really different
from Adam Smith arguing that there exists a "propensity [in human nature] to truck, barter, and
exchange one thing for another" (1937, 13). It eliminates essential differences between different
historical systems. If the Chinese, the Egyptians, and the Western Europeans have all been doing the
same thing historically, in what sense are they different civilizations, or different historical systems? (per
contra, see Amin 1991). In eliminating credit to Europe, is there any credit left to anyone except to panhumanity? ¶ But again worst of all, by appropriating what modern Europe did for the balance-sheet of
the Eurasian ecumene, we are accepting the essential ideological argument of Eurocentrism, that
modernity (or capitalism) is miraculous, and wonderful, and merely addding that everyone has always
been doing it in one way or another. By denying European credit, we deny European blame. What is so
terrible about Europe's "conquest of the world" if it is nothing but the latest part of the ongoing march
of the ecumene? Far from being a form of argument that is critical of Europe, it implies applause that
Europe, having been a "marginal" part of the ecumene, at last learned the wisdom of the others (and
elders) and applied it successfully.¶ And the unspoken clincher follows inevitably. If the Eurasian
ecumene has been following a single thread for thousands of years, and the capitalist world-system is
nothing new, then what possible argument is there that would indicate that this thread will not continue
forever, or at least for an indefinitely long time? If capitalism did not begin in the sixteenth (or the
eighteenth) century, it is surely not about to end in the twenty-first. Personally, I simply do not believe
this, and I have made the case in several recent writings (Wallerstein, 1995; Hopkins & Wallerstein,
1996). My main point, however, here, is that this line of argument is in no way anti-Eurocentric, since it
accepts the basic set of values that have been put forward by Europe in its period of world dominance,
and thereby in fact denies and/or undermines competing value systems that were, or are, in honor in
other parts of the world.
Colonialism included the colonial expansion of knowledge regardless of whether it not
it was critical of itself – means the alternative links to the K
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter 2002, “The
Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference”, Pg. 79-80, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
It cannot be said of Wallerstein that he, like Vattimo or Habermas, is blind to colonialism. Unlike
continental thought, Wallerstein is not imprisoned in the Greco-Roman–modern European tradition. The
politics of location is [End Page 79] a question valid not just for minority epistemology. On the contrary,
it is the keystone of universalism in European thought. Cornel West's perception and analysis of the
"evasion of American philosophy" speaks to that politics of location that is not a blind voluntarism but a
force of westernization. 66 Although the United States assumed the leadership of Western expansion,
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the historical ground for thinking was not, and could not have been, European. The "evasion of
American philosophy" shows that tension between the will to be like European philosophy and the
impossibility of being so. 67 The logic of the situation analyzed by West is similar to the logic underlined
by Bernasconi vis-á-vis African philosophy. The variance is that the evasion of American philosophy was
performed by Anglo-Creoles displaced from the classical tradition instead of native Africans who felt
the weight of a parallel epistemology.
The social sciences do have a home in the United States as well as in Europe, which is not the case for
philosophy. But the social sciences do not necessarily have a home in the Third World. Therefore,
while opening the social sciences is an important claim to make within the sphere of their gestation
and growth, it is more problematic when the colonial difference comes into the picture. To open the
social sciences is certainly an important reform, but the colonial difference also requires
decolonization . To open the social sciences is certainly an important step but is not yet sufficient, since
opening is not the same as decolonizing, as Fals-Borda claimed in the 1970s. In this sense Quijano's and
Dussel's concepts of coloniality of power and transmodernity are contributing to decolonizing the
social sciences (Quijano) and philosophy (Dussel) by forging an epistemic space from the colonial
difference. Decolonizing the social sciences and philosophy means to produce, transform, and
disseminate knowledge that is not dependent on the epistemology of North Atlantic modernity—the
norms of the disciplines and the problems of the North Atlantic—but that, on the contrary, responds to
the need of the colonial differences. Colonial expansion was also the colonial expansion of forms of
knowledge, even when such knowledges were critical to colonialism from within colonialism itself
(like Bartolome de las Casas) or to modernity from modernity itself (like Nietzsche). A critique of
Christianity by an Islamic philosopher would be a project significantly different from Nietzsche's critique
of Christianity. [End Page 80]
Attempts at decolonizing the academies Eurocentric epistemology fall short leaving
the original colonial power structures in place – it is nothing more than a theory of
dependency
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter 2002, “The
Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference”, Pg. 61 – 63, The South Atlantic Quarterly,
Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
The Liberation of Philosophy and the Decolonization of the Social Sciences
Dependency theory has not yet lost its posture, although it has been severely criticized. It is capable of
holding its own in the middle of a critical tempest because its critics addressed the conceptual structure
of dependency, not its raison d'être. The fact that dependency at large was and is the basic strategy in
the exercise of coloniality of power is not a question that needs lengthy and detailed argumentation.
Even though in the current stage of globalization there is a Third World included in the First, the
interstate system and the coloniality of power organizing it hierarchically have not vanished yet. It is
also not the point here whether the distinction between center and periphery was as valid at the end of
the twentieth century as it was in the nineteenth century. If dependency in the modern/colonial worldsystem is no longer structured under the center/periphery dichotomy, this does not mean that
dependency vanishes because this dichotomy is not as clear today as it was yesterday. On the other
hand, interdependency is a term that served to restructure the coloniality of power around the
emergence of transnational corporations. 19 What Anibal Quijano terms "historico-structural
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dependency" should not be restricted to the center/periphery dichotomy. 20 Rather, it should be
applied to the very structure of the modern/colonial world-system and capitalistic economy.
Dependency theory was more than an analytic and explanatory tool in the social sciences. 21 While
world-system analysis owes its motivating impulse and basic economic, social, and historical structure to
dependency theory, 22 it is not and could not have served as the political dimension of dependency
theory. Dependency theory was parallel to decolonization in Africa and Asia and suggested a course of
action for Latin American countries some 150 years after their decolonization. World-system analysis
operates from inside the system, while dependency theory was a response from the exteriority of the
system—not the exterior but the exteriority. That is to say, the outside is named from the inside in the
exercise of the coloniality of power. Dependency theory offered an explanation and suggested a course
of action for Latin America that could hardly have been done by a world-system analysis. [End Page 62]
World-system analysis in its turn did something that the dependency analysis was not in a position to
accomplish. That is, world-system analysis introduced a historical dimension and a socioeconomic
frame (the modern world-system) into the social sciences, thus displacing the origin of history and
cultures of scholarship from ancient Greece to the modern world-system. The emergence of the social
sciences in the nineteenth century was indeed attached to the epistemic frame opened by the second
modernity (the French Enlightenment, German Romantic philosophy, and the British industrial
revolution). 23 World-system analysis responded to the crisis of that frame in the 1970s, when
decolonization took place in Africa and Asia and the changes introduced by transnational corporations
brought to the foreground the active presence of a world far beyond Western civilization. The
irreducible (colonial) difference between dependency theory and world-system analysis cannot be
located in their conceptual structures but in the politics of their loci of enunciation. Dependency theory
was a political statement for the social transformation of and from Third World countries, while worldsystem analysis was a political statement for academic transformation from First World countries. This
difference, implied in the geopolitics of knowledge described by Carl E. Pletsch, is indeed the irreducible
colonial difference—the difference between center and periphery, between the Eurocentric critique of
Eurocentrism and knowledge production by those who participated in building the modern/colonial
world and those who have been left out of the discussion. 24 Las Casas defended the Indians, but the
Indians did not participate in the discussions about their rights. The emerging capitalists benefiting
from the industrial revolution were eager to end slavery that supported plantation owners and
slaveholders. Black Africans and American Indians were not taken into account when knowledge and
social organization were at stake. They, Africans and American Indians, were considered patient, living
organisms to be told, not to be heard.
The impact of dependency theory on the decolonization of scholarship in Latin America was
immediate and strong. In 1970 Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda published an important book
titled Ciencia Propia y Colonialismo Intelectual [Intellectual colonialism and our own science], which
today echoes a widespread concern in cultures of scholarship in Asia and Africa. The scenario is simple:
Western expansion was not only economic and political but also educational and intellectual. The
Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism was accepted in former colonies as "our own" critique [End Page
63] of Eurocentrism; socialist alternatives to liberalism in Europe were taken, in the colonies, as a path
of liberation without making the distinction between emancipation in Europe and liberation in the
colonial world. Quite simply, the colonial difference was not considered in its epistemic dimension. The
foundation of knowledge that was and still is offered by the history of Western civilization in its
complex and wide range of possibilities, provided the conceptualization (from the right and the left)
and remained within the language frame of modernity and Western civilization. Fals-Borda's book is
still valid because it keeps in mind a current dilemma in cultures of scholarship. In fact, Fals-Borda's early
claims for the decolonization of the social sciences echoes the more recent claims made by Boaventura
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de Sousa Santos from Portugal in his argument "toward a new common sense." 25 Granted, Santos is
not focusing on Colombia or Latin America. However, the marginality of Portugal, as the south of
Europe, allows for a perception of the social sciences different from that which one might have from the
north.
While Wallerstein argues for the opening of the social sciences, assuming the need to maintain them
as a planetary academic enterprise, Fals-Borda's concerns are with the very foundation of the social
sciences and other forms of scholarship. In other words, the planetary expansion of the social sciences
implies that intellectual colonization remains in place, even if such colonization is well intended,
comes from the left, and supports decolonization. Intellectual decolonization, as Fals-Borda intuited,
cannot come from existing philosophies and cultures of scholarship. Dependency is not limited to the
right; it is created also from the left. The postmodern debate in Latin America, for example,
reproduced a discussion whose problems originated not in the colonial histories of the subcontinent
but in the histories of European modernity.
Epistemology isn’t ahistorical – attempts to reduce Eurocentrism down to mere forms
of knowledge production fail – it’s irreducible and ignorant of the colonial difference
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter 2002, “The
Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference”, Pg. 63-66, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
An indirect continuation of Fals-Borda's argument for intellectual decolonization is the project that
Enrique Dussel has been pursuing since the early 1990s. 26 Philosophy of liberation, as conceived by
Dussel since the late 1960s, is another consequence of dependency theory and the intellectual
concerns that prompted its emergence. One of Dussel's main concerns was and still is a philosophical
project contributing to social liberation (I will return to the distinction between emancipation and
liberation). His latest book is the consequence of a long and sustained philosophical, ethical, and
political reflection. 27 Fals-Borda's argument was concerned not just with a [End Page 64] project in the
social sciences for the liberation of the Third World; rather, it concerned also a project of intellectual
liberation from the social sciences. In the case of Dussel, liberation is thought with regard to
philosophy. Here again is the irreducible colonial (epistemic) difference between a leftist social
sciences project from the First World and a liberation of the social sciences (and philosophy) from the
Third World. 28
The logic of this project, from the standpoint of the colonial difference, has been formulated in Dussel's
confrontations between his own philosophy and ethic of liberation and that of Gianni Vattimo. 29 In one
short but substantial chapter ("‘With Vattimo?'; ‘Against Vattimo?'") Dussel relates Vattimo's
philosophy to nihilism and describes nihilism as a "twilight of the West, of Europe, and of modernity."
30 In closing this section (and immediately after the preceding description), Dussel adds,
Has Vattimo asked himself the meaning that his philosophy may have for a Hindu beggar
covered with mud from the floods of the Ganges; or for a member of a Bantu community from subSaharan Africa dying of hunger; or for millions of semi-rural Chinese people; or for hundreds of
thousands of poor marginalized in suburban neighborhoods like Nezahualcoyotl or Tlanepantla in
Mexico, as populated as Torino? Is an aesthetic of "negativity," or a philosophy of "dispersion as final
destiny of being," enough for the impoverished majority of humanity? 31
At first glance, and for someone reading from the wide horizon of continental philosophy, this
paragraph could be interpreted as a cheap shot. It is not, however. Dussel is naming the absent location
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of thinking, obscured by the universalizing of modern epistemology and its parallelism and
companionship with capitalism, either as justification or as internal critique, such as Vattimo's. Indeed,
what is at stake in Dussel's argument is not just being but the coloniality of being, from whence
philosophy of liberation found its energy and conceptualization. It is simply the colonial difference that
is at stake. Dussel's point comes across more clearly in the second section of his article on Vattimo,
when Dussel underlines the discrepancy between the starting point in both projects. As is well known, a
room looks altered if you enter it from a different door. Furthermore, of the many doors through which
one could have entered the room of philosophy, only one was open. The rest were closed. You
understand what it means to have only one door open and the entry heavily regulated. Dussel notes
that the starting point [End Page 65] for a "hermeneutic ontology of the twilight" (Vattimo) and the
"philosophy of liberation" are quite different. Dussel framed this distinction in terms of the geopolitics
of knowledge: the first is from the north; the second, from the south. The south is not, of course, a
simple geographic location but a "metaphor for human suffering under global capitalism." 32 The first
discourse is grounded in the second phase of modernity (industrial revolution, the Enlightenment). The
second discourse, that of philosophy of liberation, is grounded in the first phase of modernity and comes
from the subaltern perspective—not from the colonial/Christian discourse of Spanish colonialism but
from the perspective of its consequences, that is, the repression of American Indians, African slavery,
and the emergence of a Creole consciousness (both white/mestizo mainly in the continent and black in
the Caribbean) in subaltern and dependent positions. From this scenario Dussel points out that while in
the north it could be healthy to celebrate the twilight of Western civilization, from the south it is
healthier to reflect on the fact that 20 percent of the earth's population consumes 80 percent of the
planet's income.
It is no longer possible, or at least it is not unproblematic, to "think" from the canon of Western
philosophy, even when part of the canon is critical of modernity. To do so means to reproduce the
blind epistemic ethnocentrism that makes difficult, if not impossible, any political philosophy of
inclusion. 33 The limit of Western philosophy is the border where the colonial difference emerges,
making visible the variety of local histories that Western thought, from the right and the left, hid and
suppressed. Thus there are historical experiences of marginalization no longer equivalent to the
situation that engendered Greek philosophy and allowed its revamping in the Europe of nations,
emerging together with the industrial revolution and the consolidation of capitalism. These new
philosophies have been initiated by thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Menchú, Gloria Anzaldúa,
Subramani, Abdelkhebir Khatibi, and Edouard Glissant, among others. Consequently, two points should
be emphasized.
The first is the ratio between places (geohistorically constituted) and thinking, the geopolitics of
knowledge proper. If the notion of being was invented in Western philosophy, coloniality of being
cannot be a continuation of the former. Because of coloniality of power, the concept of being cannot
be dispensed with. And because of the colonial difference, coloniality [End Page 66] of being cannot be
a critical continuation of the former (a sort of postmodern displacement) but must be, rather, a
relocation of the thinking and a critical awareness of the geopolitics of knowledge . Epistemology is
not ahistorical . But not only that , it cannot be reduced to the linear history from Greek to
contemporary North Atlantic knowledge production . It has to be geographical in its historicity by
bringing the colonial difference into the game. 34 The densities of the colonial experience are the
location of emerging epistemologies, such as the contributions of Franz Fanon, that do not overthrow
existing ones but that build on the ground of the silence of history. In this sense Fanon is the equivalent
of Kant, just as Guaman Poma de Ayala in colonial Peru could be considered the equivalent of Aristotle.
35 One of the reasons why Guaman Poma de Ayala and Fanon are not easily perceived as equivalents of
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Aristotle and Kant is time. Since the Renaissance—the early modern period or emergence of the
modern/colonial world—time has functioned as a principle of order that increasingly subordinates
places, relegating them to before or below from the perspective of the "holders (of the doors) of time."
Arrangements of events and people in a time line is also a hierarchical order, distinguishing primary
sources of thought from interesting or curious events, peoples, or ideas. Time is also the point of
reference for the order of knowledge. The discontinuity between being and time and coloniality of being
and place is what nourishes Dussel's need to underline the difference (the colonial difference) between
continental philosophy (Vattimo, Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Michel Foucault) and philosophy of
liberation.
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AT: Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism falls short on both sides of the methodological spectrum
Mowitt, University of Minnesota Cultural studies and Comparative Literature
professor, 1
John, is professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, and English at the University of
Minnesota “In the Wake of Eurocentrism An Introduction”, Cultural Critique 47 (2001) 3-15,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v047/47.1mowitt.html, Muse, Accessed July 6 2013, JB)
However, there is another--perhaps even more challenging--limitation to the Western critique of
Eurocentrism. Intellectuals and cultural producers in the West disturbed by the paradoxical fate of
humanism have, in large part, responded by calling for what is commonly referred to as
"multiculturalism." Initially a strategic political category and now a burgeoning cottage industry,
multiculturalism has lately been deployed by those seeking to displace Eurocentrism within academia
by diversifying the core curriculum of the humanities. It has, perhaps predictably, been assailed from
both the Right (by the likes of Arthur Schlesinger) and from the Left (by, among others, Slavoj Zizek),
thereby confronting its critics with a field that is as volatile as it is congested. However, as a
constitutive element of the wake of Eurocentism, the multicultural initiative would appear to be
critically compromised in two pertinent ways. First, because it reinvests in Man, that is, in a notion of
global human identity that prompts one to mistake immediate, socially specific opportunities to
broaden one's cultural horizons for humanity's alleged universal capacity for choosing which identity
markers it wishes to affirm. And second--as others have observed--because it fails to differentiate
meaningfully between contexts where multiculturalism effectively has been imposed (true, for
example, of virtually all colonial encounters) and contexts where it is fostered as an intellectual
innovation. Even when, in the former colonies of Asia and Africa, an imposed multiculturalism is
vigorously reappropriated, it is done with an eye toward renegotiating a distinctly local version of an
often imported tension between tradition and modernity. Thus, to the extent that multiculturalism is
represented as a necessary corollary to the critique of Eurocentrism (especially in the West), it
threatens to contradict the ends of such a critique by authorizing means for [End Page 11] realizing it
that obscure crucial differences "on the ground." Not to put too fine a point on it: multiculturalism to a
Bolivian tin miner, who wears Tweeds T-shirts (assembled in Bolivia, sold in the United States, blackmarketed everywhere) while listening to Ricky Martin on the camp radio, does not mean what it does to
a Midwestern student in the United States who carries his copy of Cien años de soledad in a book bag
made of leather from Argentina that, in the semiotics of North American youth subcultures, signifies
alternative. Despite the fact that multiculturalism is under siege (especially from the Right), and criticism
of it is now fashionable, if it cannot meaningfully differentiate among cultural contexts and serves, in
effect, to protect the West from actually transforming the conditions of its self-representation, then
not only is it a flawed immanent critique of Eurocentrism, but--for that very reason--it must also be
abandoned as a global strategy. " We" are not the world , and perhaps this is never more obvious than
when we attempt to compensate for that very fact. At least, that's what we were thinking.
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AT: Deconstruction/Decolonization
Decolonization requires an encounter with the colonized – simply deconstructing one
knowledge base doesn’t allow for any new modes of thought
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter 2002, “The
Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference”, Pg. 69-71, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
The irreducible colonial difference that I am trying to chart, starting from Dussel's dialogue with
Vattimo, was also perceived by Robert Bernasconi in his account of the challenge that African
philosophy puts forward to continental philosophy. Simply put, Bernasconi notes that "Western
philosophy traps African philosophy in a double bind. Either African philosophy is so similar to
Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so
different that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt." 45 This double bind is
the colonial [End Page 70] difference that creates the conditions for what I have elsewhere called
"border thinking." 46 I have defined border thinking as an epistemology from a subaltern perspective.
Although Bernasconi describes the phenomenon with different terminology, the problem we are dealing
with here is the same. Furthermore, Bernasconi makes his point with the support of African American
philosopher Lucius Outlaw in an article titled "African ‘Philosophy': Deconstructive and Reconstructive
Challenges." 47 Emphasizing the sense in which Outlaw uses the concept of deconstruction, Bernasconi
at the same time underlines the limits of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive operation and the closure of
Western metaphysics. Derrida, according to Bernasconi, offers no space in which to ask the question
about Chinese, Indian, and especially African philosophy. Latin and Anglo-American philosophy should
be added to this. After a careful discussion of Derrida's philosophy, and pondering possible alternatives
for the extension of deconstruction, Bernasconi concludes by saying, "Even after such revisions, it is
not clear what contribution deconstruction could make to the contemporary dialogue between
Western philosophy and African philosophy." 48 Or, if a contribution could be foreseen, it has to be
from the perspective that Outlaw appropriates and that denaturalizes the deconstruction of the
Western metaphysics from the inside (and maintains the totality, á la Derrida). That is to say, it has to be
a deconstruction from the exteriority of Western metaphysics, from the perspective of the double bind
that Bernasconi detected in the interdependence (and power relations) between Western and African
philosophy. However, if we invert the perspective, we are located in a particular deconstructive strategy
that I would rather name the decolonization of philosophy (or of any other branch of knowledge, natural
sciences, social sciences, and the humanities). Such a displacement of perspective was already
suggested by Moroccan philosopher Abdelkhebir Khatibi, which I have discussed at length elsewhere. 49
However, certainly Bernasconi will concur with Khatibi in naming decolonization as the type of
deconstructive operation proposed by Outlaw, thus maintaining and undoing the colonial difference
from the colonial difference itself. That is to say, maintaining the difference under the assumption that
"we are all human" although undoing the coloniality of power that converted differences into values and
hierarchies. "The existential dimension of African philosophy's challenge to Western philosophy in
general and Continental philosophy in particular is located in the need to decolonize the mind. This task
is at least as important for [End Page 71] the colonizer as it is for the colonized. For Africans,
decolonizing the mind takes place not only in facing the experience of colonialism, but also in
recognizing the precolonial, which established the destructive importance of so-called
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ethnophilosophy." 50 The double bind requires also a double operation from the perspective of African
philosophy, that is, an appropriation of Western philosophy and at the same time a rejection of it
grounded in the colonial difference. Bernasconi recognizes that these, however, are tasks and issues for
African philosophers. What would be similar issues for a continental philosopher? For Europeans,
Bernasconi adds, "decolonizing the colonial mind necessitates an encounter with the colonized, where
finally the European has the experience of being seen as judged by those they have denied. The extent
to which European philosophy championed colonialism, and more particularly helped to justify it
through a philosophy of history that privileged Europe, makes it apparent that such a decolonizing is an
urgent task for European thought." 51
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Can’t Influence Politics
Politicization takes out solvency – specifically criticism of US-Cuba relationships fail to
influence policymaking. Instead, politics is a game of interest groups and high profile
politicians
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 InterAmerican Affairs”, pg. 9-10 date accessed 7/12/13 igm)
The likelihood that scholarly ideas will influence the policy process may be inversely proportional to
the politicization of the issue at play. U.S. policies on illegal drug trade, Cuba, and immigration,
illustrate this paradox (Shifter 2011:2). There is widespread consensus in both academic and policy
circles that U.S. policy is failing in these areas, but policymakers have not been receptive to new ideas
from scholars aimed at addressing these failures. 18
The complex nature of policy-making processes calls for “aligning-stars” in order for expert knowledge
actually to influence policymaking. The outputs of policy-making processes depend on at least three
streams and two factors that are only marginally, if at all, directly influenced by scholarly knowledge.
The three policy streams flow relatively independently from each other and are as follows: (i) “problem
recognition”, or the process through which a given condition (e.g., lack of peace in the Middle East) is
transformed into a national security problem of a given country; (ii) “policy alternatives”, or the
process through which alternative courses of action are generated in academic and nonacademic
circles (e.g., bureaucracy vs. scholars working in think tanks, nongovernmental organizations); and (iii)
“politics”, or “the national mood, interest groups campaigns, and administrative or legislative
turnover” that may or not provide a functional environment for the implementation of available
policy alternatives. Added to these, the two main factors that could bring the streams together and
open the “window of opportunity” for available policy alternatives to influence policy are individual
efforts made by politicians or policy entrepreneurs, or crises such as 9/11. That is, policy-making
processes are like “garbage cans” of decision making in which policy outcomes are the result of
individual actors attaching available policy solutions to existing problems, whereas scholarly inputs
are only one among five processes and factors that may facilitate or impede the influence of scholarly
knowledge on practice (Krasner 2009:261).
Aff cedes the political – the academic community cannot solely focus on obsessing
over the cultural demise – it allows for atrocities to continue
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, pg. 87-88, JZ)
Academic research on Maori became oriented to such debates and obsessed with describing various
modes of cultural decay. The 'fatal impact' of the West on indigenous societies generally has been
theorized as a phased progression from: (1) initial discovery and contact, (2) population decline, (3)
acculturation, (4) assimilation, (5) 'reinvention' as a hybrid, ethnic culture. While the terms may differ
across various theoretical paradigms the historical descent into a state of nothingness and hopelessness
has tended to persist. Indigenous perspectives also show a phased progression, more likely to be
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articulated as: (1) contact and invasion, (2) genocide and destruction, (3) resistance and survival (4)
recovery as indigenous peoples. The sense of hope and optimism is a characteristic of contemporary
indigenous politics which is often criticized, by non-indigenous scholars, because it is viewed as being
overly idealistic.
While Western theories and academics were describing, defining and explaining cultural demise,
however, indigenous peoples were having their lands and resources systematically stripped by the
state; were becoming ever more marginalized; and were subjected to the layers of colonialism
imposed through economic and social policies. This failure of research, and of the academic
community, to address the real social issues of Maori was recalled in later times when indigenous
disquiet became more politicized and sophisticated. Very direct confrontations took place between
Maori and some academic communities. Such confrontations have also occurred in Australia and other
parts of the indigenous world, resulting in much more active resistances by communities to the
presence and activities of researchers.
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No impact internal link
No internal link-Eurocentrism is merely a knowledge archetype
Solomon, a professor in the Institute of Arts and Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong
University, 13
(Jon, a professor in the Institute of Arts and Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong University 2013,
TransEuropeennes, “The Experience of Culture: Eurocentric Limits and Openings in Foucault,”
http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/voir_pdf/108, P.7-8, Accessed: 7/6/13, LPS.)
True to Foucault’s understanding, we should remember that the intellectual is not just the product
or¶ the agent of the division of labor, but also an anthropological figure in the sense this term
acquires in¶ It is in this sense that I understand Robert Young’s appraisal of the status of eurocentrism
in¶ Foucault—“¶ The Order of Things¶ could be seen as an analysis not of eurocentrism as such, but
of its¶ philosophical and conceptual archaeology” (Young 1995, 9). Foucault’s acute orientalism is
not¶ merely the obverse of his investment in the methodological error of culturalism’s “selfcontainment”,¶ it is also, far more crucially, a sign of the intellectual’s inability to avert the disastrous
reversibility and¶ confusion between the opposing poles of knowledge and experience that was
identified by¶ The Order¶ of Things¶ as the crucial feature of modernity. The crux of eurocentrism, as the
quintessential modern¶ geocultural hegemony, lies in the economy that links experience to knowledge
through a plethora of¶ philosophical decisions such as dialectical negation and phenomenological
reduction (the two main¶ straw men in Foucault’s work). Indeed, Chapter Nine of¶ The Order of Things¶ is
devoted to analyzing¶ the transcendental and empirical elements in the constitution of knowledge that
turn “the analysis of¶ actual experience” into a hopelessly equivocal “discourse of mixed nature”
(Foucault 1966/1973,¶ 332/321). Dialectical negativity and phenomenology both constitute, each in
separate ways, flawed¶ yet archaeologically-similar responses to this amphibological mixture that
results in the modern¶ construct of Man as simultaneously both subject and object of knowledge.
Leonard Lawlor has¶ persuasively demonstrated how Foucault’s critique of the amphibological nature of
the modern¶ concept of “lived-experience” (¶ le vécu¶ ) lies at the heart of the critique of modern Man
deployed by¶ The Order of Things¶ . Against this critique of¶ le vécu¶ or lived-experience, Foucault
proposes a notion¶ of¶ le vivant¶ , or the living, whose point of departure is taken from Canguilhem’s
biological notion of¶ error. In explaining Foucault’s objection to the concept of lived-experience, Lawlor
writes: “the¶ critique of the concept of¶ vécu¶ is based on the fact that the relationship in¶ vécu¶ is a
mixture (¶ un¶ mélange¶ ) which closes ‘‘¶ un écart infime¶ ’’. Conversely, Foucault’s conception of the
relationship –¶ here we must use the word ‘‘¶ vivant¶ ’’ – in ‘‘¶ le vivant¶ ’’ is one that dissociates and keeps
‘‘l’écart¶ infime’’ open” (Lawlor 2005, 417). This “¶ écart infime¶ ”, which the English translation of¶ Les
mots et¶ les choses¶ renders as a “miniscule hiatus” (Foucault 1966/1973, 351/340), must be
understood,¶ argues Lawlor, in both senses of the French word “¶ infime¶ ”: both “miniscule” and
“infinitesimal” or¶ “infinitely divisible” (Lawlor 2005, 422). I suppose that what Lawlor has in mind when
basing his¶ argument on the dual meaning of the French word¶ infime¶ is a form of what Sakai calls
“continuity in¶ discontinuity” (Sakai 2009, 85). In this case, the meaning of¶ infime¶ as the “infinitely
divisible” would¶ refer us to what mathematics calls “continuity”, while that of the “miniscule” would
take us back to a¶ difference so small it cannot be measured, thus constituting the incommensurability
of¶ “discontinuity”.
¶
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AT: Root Cause
Their root cause claims are false
Wallerstein, is an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems
analyst, 97
(Immanuel, an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. His bimonthly
commentaries on world affairs are syndicated, 1997, Binghamton.edu "Eurocentrism and its Avatars:
The Dilemmas of Social Science," http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iweuroc.htm, Accessed:
7/6/13, LPS.)
But even if we agree on the definition and the timing, and therefore so to speak on the reality of the
phenomenon, we have actually explained very little. For we must then explain why it is that Europeans,
and not others, launched the specified phenomenon, and why they did so at a certain moment of
history. In seeking such explanations, the instinct of most scholars has been to push us back in history
to presumed antecedents. If Europeans in the eighteenth or sixteenth century did x, it is said to be
probably because their ancestors (or attributed ancestors, for the ancestry may be less biological than
cultural, or assertedly cultural) did, or were, y in the eleventh century, or in the fifth century B.C. or
even further back. We can all think of the multiple explanations that, once having established or at
least asserted some phenomenon that has occurred in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, proceed
to push us back to various earlier points in European ancestry for the truly determinant variable.
There is a premise here that is not really hidden, but was for a long time undebated. The premise is that
whatever is the novelty for which Europe is held responsible in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries,
this novelty is a good thing, one of which Europe should be proud, one of which the rest of the world
should be envious, or at least appreciative. This novelty is perceived as an achievement, and numerous
book titles bear testimony to this kind of evaluation.
There seems to me little question that the actual historiography of world social science has expressed
such a perception of reality to a very large degree. This perception of course can be challenged on
various grounds, and this has been increasingly the case in recent decades. One can challenge the
accuracy of the picture of what happened, within Europe and in the world as a whole in the sixteenth to
nineteenth centuries. One can certainly challenge the plausibility of the presumed cultural antecedents
of what happened in this period. One can implant the story of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in a
longer duration, from several centuries longer to tens of thousands of years. If one does that, one is
usually arguing that the European "achievements" of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries thereby
seem less remarkable, or more like a cyclical variant, or less like achievements that can be credited
primarily to Europe. Finally one can accept that the novelties were real, but argue that they were less a
positive than a negative accomplishment.
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AT: Quijano
Quijano’s theory relies on coloniality being constitutive of modernity – history proves
the two existed independent of each other
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter 2002, “The
Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference”, Pg. 81-82, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
Coloniality of Power, Dependency, and Eurocentrism
Wallerstein, Quijano, and Dussel have in common their debt to dependency theory. They are apart
(although not enemies) because of the epistemic colonial difference. Quijano's concepts of coloniality
of power and historic-structural dependency emphasize this complicity, similar to Dussel's arguments
with and against Vattimo. 68
To understand Quijano's coloniality of power, it is first necessary to accept coloniality as constitutive
of modernity and not just as a derivative of modernity—that is, first comes modernity and then
coloniality. The emergence of the commercial Atlantic circuit in the sixteenth century was the crucial
moment in which modernity, coloniality, and capitalism, as we know them today, came together.
However, the Atlantic commercial circuit did not immediately become the location of Western
hegemonic power. It was just one more commercial circuit among those existing in Asia, Africa, and
Anahuac and Tawantinsuyu in what would later become America. 69 Modernity/coloniality is the
moment of Western history linked to the Atlantic commercial circuit and the transformation of
capitalism (if we accept from Wallerstein and Arrighi that the seed of capitalism can be located in
fifteenth-century Italy) 70 and the foundation of the modern/colonial world-system.
In the preceding paragraph I purposely mixed two macronarratives. One I will call the Western
civilization macronarrative and the other the modern/colonial world-system narrative. The first emerged
in the Renaissance and was consolidated during the Enlightenment and by German philosophy in the
early nineteenth century. As such, this macronarrative is tied to historiography (the Renaissance) and
philosophy (the Enlightenment). The second macronarrative emerged during the Cold War as it is linked
to the consolidation of the social sciences. The first macronarrative has its origin in Greece; the second
in the origin of the Atlantic commercial circuit. Both macronarratives are founded in the same principles
of Western epistemology, and both have their own double personality complex (double side). For
instance, the narrative of Western civilization is at the same time celebratory of its virtues and critical
of its failings. In the same vein modernity is often celebrated as hiding coloniality and yet is critiqued
because of coloniality, its other side. Both macronarratives can also be criticized from the inside
(Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Wallerstein, Gunder Frank, etc.) and [End Page 81] from the exteriority
of the colonial difference. 71 Both coloniality of power and historico-structural dependency are key
concepts in Quijano's critique of the above macronarratives from the exteriority of the colonial
difference.
Colonialism exists on a multiplicity of levels – Quijano missed the critique of the
western civilization and the modern world
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter 2002, “The
Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference”, Pg. 84-85, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume
101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10 2013, JB)
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Coloniality of power worked at all levels of the two macronarratives, Western civilization and modern
world-system, that I mentioned earlier. The colonized areas of the world were targets of Christianization
and the civilizing mission as the project of the narrative of Western civilization, and they became the
target of development, modernization, and the new marketplace as the project of the modern worldsystem. The internal critique of both macronarratives tended to present itself as valid for the totality,
in the sense that it is configured by the program of Western civilization and the modern world-system.
The insertion of the word colonial, as in modern/colonial world-system, makes visible what both
macronarratives previously obscured: that the production of knowledge and the critique of
modernity/coloniality from the colonial difference is a necessary move of decolonization. Otherwise,
opening the social sciences could be seen as a well-intentioned reproduction of colonialism from the
left. Similarly, a critique of Western metaphysics and logocentrism from the Arabic world may not take
into account the critical epistemic legacy and the memory of epistemic violence inscribed in Arabic
language and knowledge. Historico-structural dependency, in the narrative of the modern/colonial
world-system, presupposes the colonial difference. It is, indeed, the dependency defined and enacted by
the coloniality of power. Barbarians, primitives, underdeveloped people, and people of color are all
categories that established epistemic dependencies under different [End Page 84] global designs
(Christianization, civilizing mission, modernization and development, consumerism). Such epistemic
dependency is for Quijano the very essence of coloniality of power. 75
Both Quijano and Dussel have been proposing and claiming that the starting point of knowledge and
thinking must be the colonial difference, not the narrative of Western civilization or the narrative of
the modern world-system. Thus transmodernity and coloniality of power highlight the epistemic
colonial difference, essentially the fact that it is urgently necessary to think and produce knowledge
from the colonial difference. Paradoxically, the erasure of the colonial difference implies that one
recognize it and think from such an epistemic location—to think, that is, from the borders of the two
macronarratives, philosophy (Western civilization) and the social sciences (modern world-system). The
epistemic colonial difference cannot be erased by its recognition from the perspective of modern
epistemology. On the contrary, it requires, as Bernasconi clearly saw in the case of African philosophy,
that epistemic horizons open beyond Bacon's authoritarian assertion that "there can be no others." The
consequences of this are gigantic not only for epistemology but also for ethics and politics. I would like
to conclude by highlighting some of them in view of future discussions.
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Eurocentrism Inevitable
Can’t solve the impact-Eurocentrism is the underlying basis of all education- it
expands beyond the west systemically means they can’t solve
Solomon, a professor in the Institute of Arts and Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong
University, 13
(Jon, a professor in the Institute of Arts and Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong University 2013,
TransEuropeennes, “The Experience of Culture: Eurocentric Limits and Openings in Foucault,”
http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/voir_pdf/108, P.7-8, Accessed: 7/6/13, LPS.)
Against the modern concept of man that is based on an equivocal relation between¶ experience and
knowledge, Foucault’s critique calls not for a “mixing” of the two but for a way of¶ making the
immeasurably small differences between them discontinuous and non-relational. The way¶ this is to
be done is to be found in a strategy of “double negation” that “affirms” both terms rather¶ than
combines them (Lawlor 2005, 424).¶ The problem with the modern Western¶ episteme¶ , according
to¶ The Order of Things¶ , is that a¶ fundamental equivocity and reversibility has been installed
between experience and knowledge. The¶ resolution of this amphiboly is not what concerns me here so
much as what I take to be a warning,¶ issued by archaeology to biopolitics. Biopolitics, particularly in the
part of it that lends itself to studies¶ of governmentality, always runs the risk of becoming the study of
the ‘actual experience’ of the¶ politics of life. If the problem of eurocentrism ultimately concerns a
hegemony that is mobile and¶ self-transformative, i.e., if the problem of “the West” is not limited to
the West, this is because at its¶ core lies a fundamental equivocity or amphibological confusion
between knowledge and experience.¶ Similarly, the problem of the state amounts to a way of
appropriating the amphiboly, or of capturing it,¶ under the guise of “lived experience”. Hence, to
oppose experience—actual experience, local¶ ¶ experience—against the hegemony of the West (and its
avatar, “Western theory”) ends up being a¶ strategy complicit at a broad level with the hegemonic
logic—consolidated in the state—according to¶ which the West first gathered itself as a subject in
history.
Eurocentric Framing is inevitable
Zahrai, Ethics Journalist, 8
(Koorosh Zahrai, March 18, 2008, Control Structures Review, “Eurocentrism: The basis of our society,
culture, and source of our problem coexisting with nature,”
http://controlstructures.spheerix.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19:eurocentris
m-the-basis-of-our-society-culture-and-source-of-our-problem-coexisting-with-nature&catid=5:digitalculture&Itemid=6, accessed July 6, 2013, EK)
The Eurocentric worldview permeates every aspect of our lives, as we are all products of the system
of the United States. Whether at home or abroad, in our relationships with each other and nature,
each of us participates in and replicates these notions of Western society and culture, as we are all
indoctrinated through the education system and communal socialization. Creating new living
experiences and narratives free of these constraining and altered states of being begins with liberation
of our selves, minds, and actions and becoming harmonious in our relations with nature and each other.
More positive present and future experiences will shape our paths so that we can all join together to
work on attaining a more meaningful relationship with our surroundings.
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Unthinking Eurocentrism focusses on Eurocentrism and multiculturalism in popular culture. It is written
in the passionate belief that an awareness of the intellectually debilitating effects of the Eurocentric
legacy is indispensable for comprehending not only contemporary media representations but even
contemporary subjectivities. Endemic in present-day thought and education, Eurocentrism is
naturalized as "common sense." Philosophy and literature are assumed to be European philosophy and
literature. The "best that is thought and written" is assumed to have been thought and written by
Europeans. (By Europeans, we refer not only to Europe per se but also to the "neo-Europeans" of the
Americas, Australia, and elsewhere.) History is assumed to be European history, everything else being
reduced to what historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (in 1965!) patronizingly called the "unrewarding gyrations
of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe."1 Standard core courses in
universities stress the history of "Western" civilization, with the more liberal universities insisting on
token study of "other" civilizations. And even "Western" civilization is usually taught without reference
to the central role of European colonialism within capitalist modernity. So embedded is Eurocentrism in
everyday life, so pervasive, that it often goes unnoticed. The residual traces of centuries of axiomatic
European domination inform the general culture, the everyday language, and the media, engendering
a fictitious sense of the innate superiority of European-derived cultures and peoples.
Eurocentrism is inevitable – its multifaceted nature makes criticism impossible
Matin, committee member of Centre for Advanced International Theory, 12 (Kamran,
European Journal of International Relations 2013 19: 353
“Redeeming the universal: Postcolonialism and the inner life of Eurocentrism”,
http://ejt.sagepub.com/content/19/2/353 pg. 359, date accessed 7/7/13 IGM)
In spite of this veritable history of anti-Eurocentric thought and practice, mounting critique, obvious
counter-facts, and logical tensions, Eurocentrism continues to exert influence in the academy, in
national and international policy making centers, and among the elites and the intelligentsia of nonWestern ‘developing’ countries (Friedman, 2006; Ganji, 2008; Jones, 2003: ix–xl; Landes, 2003; Sen,
1999). This influence is certainly closely related to the ideological dimension of Eurocentrism, the fact
that it sustains and is sustained by the global dominance of the Western-centered configurations of
eco nomic, technological, and military power. This explains why non-Western challenges to those
configurations, for example, the strategic shift in the loci of the global concentrations of economic
power to non-Western countries such as China, India, or Brazil, can destabilize Eurocentrism too.
However, the longevity of Eurocentrism, as an intellectual mode, has also to be understood in terms of
the limitations of the critiques it has been subjected to. One key limitation of anti-Eurocentric critiques
has been an indecisive challenge to Eurocentrism’s stadial conception of development. This is
particularly important because the assumption of stadial development is the culmination of
Eurocentrism’s historical, prognostic, and normative assumptions. It contains an ideal typical concept of
modernity (Europe), a theory of history (stagist development) sustain ing the concept, and a socialscientific methodology — comparative analysis — for investigating it (Bhambra, 2007; Washbrook, 1997:
410; cf. Amin, 1989: x).
Eurocentrism inevitable
Dirlik, Former Duke University History Professor, 99
(Arif Dirlik, Spring 1999, “Is There History after Eurocentrism?: Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the
Disavowal of History,” pg. 3-4, JSTOR, accessed July 7, 2013, EK)
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I suggest by way of conclusion that a radical critique of Euro- centrism must rest on a radical critique of
the whole project of modernity understood in terms of the life-world that is cultural and material at
once. Modernity in our day is not just EuroAmerican, but is dispersed globally, if not equally or
uniformly, in transnational structures of various kinds, in ideologies of development, and the practices
of everyday life. It does not just emanate from EuroAmerica understood geographically, nor are its
agencies necessarily Euro- American in origin. A radical critique of Eurocentrism, in other words, must
confront contemporary questions of globalism and postcolonial- ism, and return analysis to the locations
of contemporary struggles over the life-world. I should note here that the critique of Eurocentrism is a
diffuse characteristic of all kinds of critiques of power in our day: from feminist to racial critiques. On
occasion, it seems as if the problems of the world would be solved if somehow we got rid of
Eurocentrism. This, of course, is silly. It not only misses much about Eurocentrism; it ignores even
more about the rest of the world. Not the least of what it ignores is that although the agencies that are
located in EuroAmerica may be the promoters of Eurocentrism, they are by now not the only ones, and
possibly not the most important ones. Eurocentrism may not be global destiny, but it is a problem that
needs to be confronted by any serious thinking about global des- tinies. These problems are too serious
to be left in the hands of elites to whom Eurocentrism is an issue of identity in intra-elite struggles for
power.
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Framework
Eurocentric epistemological reproduction is inevitable
O’Brien, Professor of Economic History, London School of Economics, 10
(Patrick Karl, , “How Do You Study Global History? Comparisons, Connections, Entanglement’s and
Eurocentrism,” http://globalhistoryatlse.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/how-do-you-study-global-historycomparisons-connections-entanglements-and-eurocentrism/, Accessed: 7/6/13, LPS.)
How do we learn the past? We learn the past by being taught it by someone else, whether orally or by
reading.¶ History is also invented by peoples, tribes, religions who need a common past as a means to
define and establish themselves. They need a common (sometimes mythical) common origin to give
the group a common destiny. This is done through a process of othering. We can only know something
we don’t know through comparison with something we do know.¶ The other is alien, it is foreign.
Everyone is ethnocentric so some extent, it is unavoidable in the way we have been brough up to
define others in terms of their differences to you. Identity is a narrative of yourself established in
relation to the other. French versus English. Argentinian versus Brazil. Protestant versus Catholic. Hindu
versus Muslim. West versus Rest. This is both a historical and Epistemology process.
Knowledge production is inevitably Eurocentric
Wallerstein, is an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems
analyst, 97
(Immanuel, an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. His bimonthly
commentaries on world affairs are syndicated, 1997, Binghamton.edu "Eurocentrism and its Avatars:
The Dilemmas of Social Science," http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iweuroc.htm, Accessed:
7/6/13, LPS.)
Social science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional history, which means since there have
been departments teaching social science within university systems. This is not in the least surprising.
Social science is a product of the modern world-system, and Eurocentrism is constitutive of the
geoculture of the modern world. Furthermore, as an institutional structure, social science originated
largely in Europe. We shall be using Europe here more as a cultural than as a cartographical
expression; in this sense, in the discussion about the last two centuries, we are referring primarily and
jointly to western Europe and North America. The social science disciplines were in fact overwhelmingly
located, at least up to 1945, in just five countries - France, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and the United
States. Even today, despite the global spread of social science as an activity, the large ma- jority of
social scientists worldwide remain Europeans. Social science emerged in response to European
problems, at a point in history when Europe dominated the whole world-system. It was virtually
¶
inevitable that its choice of subject matter, its theorizing, its methodology, and its epistemology all
re- flected the constraints of the crucible within which it was born. ¶ However, in the period since
1945, the decolonization of Asia and Africa, plus the sharply accentuated political consciousness of the
non-European world everywhere, has affected the world of knowledge just as much as it has affected
the politics of the world-system. One major such difference, today and indeed for some thirty years now
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at least, is that the "Eurocentrism" of social science has been under attack, severe attack. The attack is
of course fundamentally justified, and there is no question that, if social science is to make any progress
in the twenty-first century, it must overcome the Eurocentric heritage which has distorted its analyses
and its capacity to deal with the problems of the contemporary world. If, however, we are to do this, we
must take a careful look at what constitutes Eurocentrism, for, as we shall see, it is a hydra-headed
monster and has many avatars. It will not be easy to slaughter the dragon swiftly. Indeed, if we are not
careful, in the guise of trying to fight it, we may in fact criticize Eurocentrism using Eurocentric premises
and thereby reinforce its hold on the community of scholars.
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Hegemony Good DA
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Hegemony Good DA Link
Critiquing American imperialism decreases hegemony
Kagan, adjunct history professor at Georgetown, 98
(Robert, PhD, graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, senior associate at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, Foreign Policy, “The benevolent empire”,
http://people.cas.sc.edu/rosati/a.kaplan.benevolentempire.fp.sum98.pdf)
Those contributing to the growing chorus of antihegemony and multipolarity may know they are
playing a dangerous game, one that needs to be conducted with the utmost care, as French leaders did
during the Cold War, lest the entire international system come crashing down around them. What
they may not have adequately calculated, however, is the possibility that Americans will not respond
as wisely as they generally did during the Cold War. Americans and their leaders should not take all this
sophisticated whining about U.S. hegemony too seriously. They certainly should not take it more
seriously than the whiners themselves do. But, of course, Americans are taking it seriously. In the
United States these days, the lugubrious guilt trip of post-Vietnam liberalism is echoed even by
conservatives, with William Buckley, Samuel Huntington, and James Schlesinger all decrying American
"hubris," "arrogance," and "imperialism." Clinton administration officials, in between speeches exalting
America as the "indispensable" nation, increasingly behave as if what is truly indispensable is the prior
approval of China, France, and Russia for every military action. Moreover, at another level, there is a
stirring of neo-isolationism in America today, a mood that nicely complements the view among many
Europeans that America is meddling too much in everyone else's business and taking too little time to
mind its own. The existence of the Soviet Union disciplined Americans and made them see that their
enlightened self-interest lay in a relatively generous foreign policy. Today, that discipline is no longer
present. In other words, foreign grumbling about American hegemony would be merely amusing, were
it not for the very real possibility that too many Americans will forget — even if most of the rest of the
world does not — just how important continued American dominance is to the preservation of a
reasonable level of international security and prosperity. World leaders may want to keep this in mind
when they pop the champagne corks in celebration of the next American humbling.
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Tyranny of Guilt K
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1NC
The aff’s stigmatization of Europe as the sole evil oversimplifies the world situation –
conversely it raises Europe’s arrogance as the martyr that drives the world while
ignoring other non-European problems
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 34-36, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
Thus we Euro-Americans are supposed to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we
have inflicted on other parts of humanity. How can we fail to see that this leads us to live off selfdenunciation while taking a strange pride in being the worst? Self-denigration is all too clearly a form
of indirect self-glorification. Evil can come only from us; other people are motivated by sympathy, good
will, candor. This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is
still a way of staying on the crest of history. Since Freud we know that masochism is only a reversed
sadism, a passion for domination turned against oneself. Europe is still messianic in a minor key,
campaigning for its own weakness, exporting humility and wisdom.6 Its obvious scorn for itself does not
conceal a very great infatuation. Barbarity is Europe’s great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself;
it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (which is a way of
denying them all responsibility).
Thus it wants to be the sole seat of inhumanity in action and wears this evil disposition as its insignia
as others wear their decorations. Even natural catastrophes do not escape our delusions of grandeur:
there are always many analysts who see in the slightest hurricane, flood, or earthquake the perfidious
hand of Euro-America. Regarding the tsunami in December 2004, some even saw the goddess Gaia rising
from the ocean floor to punish our industrial civilization. Like prayer, self-accusation is a way of acting
symbolically at a distance when one can do nothing. Megalomania without borders: by attributing all
the misfortunes of the world to man, a certain kind of ecology shows an unbridled anthropocentrism
that confirms our status as the “master and destroyer” of the planet. To think, for example, that
tomorrow we will be able to determine whether we have rain or sunshine, that we will eclipse nature, is
to relapse into the Promethean fantasy nourished by the most fanatical adepts of progress. We can,
then, contest everything except our own depravity. A blatant case of imperialism in reverse.
Decolonization has deprived us of our power, our economic influence is constantly decreasing, but in
a colossal overestimation we continue to see ourselves as the evil center of gravity on which the
universe depends.
We need our clichés about the wretchedness of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to confirm the cliché
about the predatory, murderous West. Our loud stigmatizations serve only to mask this wound to our
self-esteem: we no longer make the laws. Other cultures know it but nonetheless continue to blame us
in order to escape our judgment and call us, at the slightest tremor, “people in pith helmets telling other
people what to do” (Vladimir Putin). If colonial independence’s record of achievement is at present
problematic, there is no doubt that someday Africa will take off, and the Arab world as well, that they
will cease to be objects of our compassion and become direct competitors, partners on equal terms.
Then we will no longer be the “masters of the world” but only formerly well-off people with pale faces.
The whole paradox of a sobered-up Europe is that it is no less arrogant than imperial Europe because
it continues to project its categories on the rest of the world and childishly boasts that it is the origin
of all the ills that beset mankind. Our superiority complex has taken refuge in the perpetual avowal of
our sins, a strange way of inflating our puny selves to global dimensions.
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Reject the affirmative to recognize the potential positive effects of the status quo
order – penitence is a political act – the result is the crime of indifference in the face of
atrocities – we have the obligation to promote freedom instead
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 106-107, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
History offers us a twofold lesson: that a people can die, and that a people can be reborn, that human
communities sometimes emerge from the worst aberrations greater than ever before, providing us
with examples of admirable resurrection. Two philosophies thus conflict in us: one is a source of fear
and despair, the other a source of courage and endurance. The former overwhelms us with the
irremediable, the latter frees us from it and calls upon us to reject fatalism. Confidence is like taking
chances and prophesying, it is a will to take responsibility for our own future, an aptitude for leaping
beyond doubt and fear, for gathering strengths we didn’t know we had. In Spinoza’s terms, it is an
increase in power, the certainty that the world is a secure place where I can develop myself fully. To
recover confidence is to rediscover capacities for action that multiply by themselves, whereas excessive
cautiousness gives rise to fear and a shriveling of ambitions. The only debt we owe to people we have
persecuted, apart from the recognition of these persecutions, is to promote the extension of
democratic regimes or at least to accelerate the erosion of despotism. Our obligation is not to remain
silent, out of embarrassment, when these same peoples fall in their turn into arbitrary rule or
oppression, but to prevent everywhere the return of humiliations and butchery. Let us recall Raymond
Aron’s observation, which the whole work of the great Indian economist Amartya Sen seems to
illustrate: the main obstacle to development is not the economic system, no matter how harsh it
might be, but rather the lack of freedom, of a sense of the public interest and concern for public
welfare. Europe has to have done with fanaticism and modesty: if it cannot swallow up the world with
a big spoon, it has to take its share and remain the singular voice that speaks for justice and law, and
acquires the military and political means to make that voice heard. This responsibility increases in the
degree that we also assume that democracy draws sustenance from the belief in democracy when it
bears and incarnates its values with determination. If it limits itself to moderation alone, it is in danger
of exhausting itself. Penitence is ultimately a political choice: that of an abdication that in no way
immunizes us against wrong. The fear of returning to our former errors makes us too indulgent with
regard to contemporary infamies. The crime of interfering is replaced by the crime of indifference.
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2NC - Overview
Vote negative to repent and forget about the harms of the past – only then can we
encourage the mingling of cultures – solves the entirety of the aff
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 162-163, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
But history consists as much of collective forgetting as it does of memory; it abolishes the blood debts
societies contract among themselves. If we had to continue the quarrels of our predecessors, if all
peoples had to ruminate their respective grievances, the world would be given over to fire and blood.
That is why there is something very profound in Ernest Renan’s remark that “Someone who has to
make history has to forget history.” We have to abandon the idea of reparations for each and every
past injury: the tortured, the defeated, the belittled will not be avenged, no financial compensation
will bring them back to life.14 What is owed them is the historical truth, not an insatiable desire for
punishment on the part of their descendants. We cannot go on forever using suffering to make
demands on the future; the time of prosecution has to come to an end after a few generations, once
the biological duration has been respected, and to make room for the work of the researcher. There
comes a time when we have to let the dead bury the dead, taking with them their dissensions and
their woes. Focusing on what separates us rather than on what unites us is always dangerous.
Oblivion is what makes room for the living, for newcomers who want to wipe away the obligations of
the past and not bear the burden of ancient resentments. It is a power of beginning again for future
generations.
The best victory over the exterminators, torturers, and slave traders of yesterday is the coexistence
that is now possible among peoples and ethnic groups that prejudices and mentalities previously
declared to be incompatible, it is that formerly dominated people are now treated as equals and
engaged in a collective adventure. In each of our nations, millions of people have to learn to live
together with differing histories. Their ancestors killed each other for reasons that today seem obscure
or repugnant. They can continue to mistrust each other, live alongside each other and compete in sad
passions; or they can abandon vindictiveness in favor of a will to get along, as we see in certain
exceptional moments. “What is good about soccer in France is that people celebrate French players
without asking whether they are black or not. Just because they are French” (Lilian Thuram). The ideal
would be to arrive at an indifference to color, ethnic group, and identity, seeing only talents, proper
names, individual strengths, exceptional persons rather than individuals crammed into fixed
categories. We are not there yet, not in Brazil and not in the United States, but these two great
multiracial countries are showing the way. We should be working on enlarging the human family, not on
sanctifying past sufferings, which is always degrading for those who complain about them. To
accomplish this task, good will is not enough. We need a whole politics of friendship, of benevolent
sympathy: we need a miracle.
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Turns Case
When regions like Latin America are absolved from all responsibility and blame, they
are returned to the condition of infantilism under colonialism – a lack of responsibility
correlates to a lack of freedom – this makes their impacts inevitable
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 42-45, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
The wave of repentance that is washing over Europe and especially our main churches is salutary only if
it is mutual, and other beliefs, other systems recognize their aberrations as well. Contrition cannot be
reserved for the few and purity attributed, like a kind of moral income, to those who say they have been
humiliated. For too many countries in Africa, the Near East, and Latin America, self-criticism is
confused with the search for a convenient scapegoat that explains all their misfortunes: it is never
their fault; the fault always lies elsewhere (in the West, globalization, capitalism). But this division is
not exempt from racism: when tropical or overseas peoples are relieved of all responsibility for their
situation, they are at the same time deprived of all freedom and plunged back into the condition of
infantilism that obtained under colonialism. Every war, every crime against humanity among the
damned of the Earth is supposed to be somewhat our fault and ought to lead us to confess our guilt, to
pay endlessly for being a member of the bloc of wealthy nations. This culture of apologies is above all a
culture of condescendence. Nothing authorizes us to divide humanity into the guilty and the innocent,
for innocence is the lot of children, but also that of idiots and slaves. A people that is never held
accountable for its acts has lost all the qualities that make it possible to treat it as an equal. Thus we
must enlarge the circle of repentance, open it to all continents, and not confine it to Northern
Hemisphere countries alone.10
Criticism of Eurocentrism only place more blame on those who have repented – it
ignores the wrongs committed by other groups – makes their impacts inevitable
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 155-156, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
Isn’t it astonishing that the first nations that abolished slavery, after having greatly profited by it, were
also the only ones that are now the object of accusations and demands for reparations? In other
words, the crime is attributed only to those who have repented of it—Europe and the United States—
which lost, by the way, a million of its sons for this cause in the Civil War—and who have condemned
this commerce in human beings as a barbarity. In France, the Taubira law of May 21, 2002, which seeks
to define as a crime against humanity only the Western slave trade, participates in this partial
interpretation of the phenomenon. Why is the West and the West alone blamed, whereas the Asian
and African worlds, which have never publicly apologized for it, are exonerated of all responsibility?
Because the former is rich and sensitive to moral arguments: it was in the name of these arguments
that, first in Britain in 1807, and then in Denmark and France, the West yielded to the abolitionists who
denounced as infamous the reduction of a category of human beings to the status of “animated tools”
(Aristotle), of chattels. (For the record, the first Arab Muslim state to abolish slavery was Tunisia in 1846,
but the measure was not enforced until the French arrived in 1881. The Ottoman Empire abolished
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slavery in the early twentieth century. The slave trade was declared illegal in Yemen and Saudi Arabia
only in 1962, and in Mauritania in 1980.) There is still a taboo on mentioning that there were three
slave trades, the Eastern one, which began in the seventh century (an estimated seventeen million
captives); the African, which provided slaves for use both in Africa and abroad (fourteen million
persons); and the Atlantic, which, in a shorter period of time, led to the deportation of almost eleven
million men, women, and children. Any historian who dares to discuss this is running the risk of being
accused of revisionism. It was the West and the West alone that developed the abolitionist idea
before it was disseminated in black Africa and in East Asia.
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Link
We need to forget the repented-for harms of the past – continuing to focus only
reinforces the binaries that exist
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 140-146, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
What counts is knowing what mobilizes these collectivities: scorn for their equal rights, or an outrage so
deep that it puts them in a state of unlimited indebtedness? Claiming a place in the public sphere by
reappropriating the past, knowing and communicating, for example, the history of the Algerians,
Moroccans, and Senegalese who died for France and were used as cannon fodder in our European
wars (see Rachid Bouchared’s film Indigènes), is part of a legitimate process of self-revaluation for
their children and grandchildren. Symbolic recognition by the highest state authorities can complete
this process, and France would be wrong to conceal the Arab-African side of its identity.1 But there is
also the danger of transforming these groups’ suffering into a kind of sanctuary, if necessary by
embodying it in a law, of making it an impenetrable bastion . Heirs: traditionally that term referred to
the children from good families who enjoyed a large fortune and a good education. Now the word
refers to the transmission of a new patrician value: suffering, which raises us to an unprecedented
aristocratic order. We are all heirs on both sides of the same barrier, perpetuating a distinction or a
defect that marks us forever. We no longer create our own lives, we repeat the injuries of former
times. What victimist thought resuscitates is the old religious category of the curse. How then can we
avoid transforming ourselves into lobbies of professional sufferers, competing with others for market
share and the martyr’s crown? Just as there are imaginary Jews, there are imaginary slaves and
colonized peoples who want to drape themselves in an accursed legend and thereby win additional
esteem. Thus would be reconstituted the great fraternity of the shipwrecked and defeated, confronted
only by oppressors and torturers. Victimization would be a kind of savage positive discrimination, a
way of giving oneself a free pass when all legal and political recourse have been exhausted . To call
oneself a victim is to make oneself a candidate for exception; perhaps that is an indispensable stage
that has to be passed through by a minority that is reconstructing itself and reconquering its dignity.
But it is a two-edged blade. A feeling of belonging cannot be founded on a theatricalized misfortune, it
has to be founded on a shared collective experience, a growing responsibility in public life, in the
media, and in professions. Victimization does not produce a sectarian emphasis on difference, as
supporters of the Republican model fear, it constructs conglomerates of plaintiffs, it forges ex nihilo an
absent community. This allocation of prestige to the “defeated” or those who feel themselves to be
defeated is ambiguous. It is a mistake to believe that making schoolchildren feel guilty in accord with
the principle “your ancestors enslaved mine” will make them like the idea of human diversity any
better or will seem to them anything more than a theatrical artifice.2 Just imagine little blond,
brunette, or curly-headed kids coming up to each other on the playground and introducing themselves
as descendants of slaves, of colonized peoples, of slavetraders, of bandits, of peasants, of beggars! Why
ask boys and girls to make themselves the contemporaries of crimes that may have been committed
three centuries ago by unknown people in Nantes, Bordeaux, or La Rochelle, when they themselves are
allergic to any idea of slavery? In short, whereas Europe has buried its age-old quarrels and reconciled
its hereditary enemies, only the slave trade and imperialism are supposed to escape history, that is,
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distancing, and we are supposed constantly to inject rage and anger into them, repeating like a refrain
Faulkner’s famous phrase: “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”
As a result, a veritable civil war between incompatible memories is beginning, making it impossible to
establish a common narrative because there will always be groups that, because of their beliefs or
sufferings, will not recognize themselves in it.3 Unless there is a federating national or supranational
narrative that brings all the diverse components of a country together and gives them a common
impulse, the country becomes an agglomeration of black, North African, Gypsy, Antillese, Corsican, gay,
etc. tribes unified by their mutual dissensions and relying on the state only as a simple mediating
authority. Then identity ceases to coincide with citizenship; it is in fact what makes citizenship
impossible. The French or British model may be in difficulty, but everywhere in Europe there is, as we
have seen, a disqualification of the idea of the nation that renders absurd even the concept of
integration. The latter is reduced to two complementary models. The freemarket model makes
settlement in a country equivalent to a labor contract that can be renewed or canceled in accord with
the law of supply and demand. The Third World or Christian model of hospitality requires us to welcome
anyone who comes to our country, without demanding anything of him or her, in an act of pure
oblation. If there are no longer any patriots or natives, there are no longer any foreigners, either, only
well-off people who have a duty to help their less well-off neighbors. Only the welfare state, through the
allocations it provides us, reminds us that we are still in a certain place, with a certain government.
What is lacking is a symbolic adherence to a spiritual principle, the result of a singular history, and a
freely accepted, voluntary association with a specific national community, with all that presupposes in
the way of learning the language and being introduced to that community’s peculiar culture. It is not
enough to regularize the status of thousands of immigrants, to provide them with a life and suitable
work. In addition, if they want to stay in Europe, we must make them true Europeans—Spaniards,
French, Italians—and this presupposes a political society sure of itself and of its values that can arrange,
for example, a formal welcoming ceremony for newcomers. We blame great nations, often rightly, for
their failures to absorb immigrants. But we forget that there is also a despotism on the part of the
minorities, who resist assimilation if it is not accompanied by extraterritorial status.4
Still more serious is the fact that under cover of respecting cultural or religious differences (the basic
credo of multiculturalism), individuals are locked into an ethnic or racial definition, cast back into the
trap from which we were trying to free them. Their good progressive friends set blacks and Arabs,
forever prisoners of their history, back into the context of their former domination and subject them to
ethnic chauvinism. As during the colonial era, they are put under house arrest in their skins, in their
origins. By a perverse dialectic, the prejudices that were to be eradicated are reinforced: we can no
longer see others as equals but must see them as inferiors, victims of perpetual oppression whose
past ordeals interest us more than their present merits. (The whole problem with “prides”—gay, bi,
trans, Breton, black, etc.—which generally proceed from stigmatized categories, is that they imply the
contrary of what they say: that one might be ashamed of what one is. It is revelatory that this
expression, which comes from the politics of identity, has become a slogan for everyone. One should be
proud, not of what one is and that is not up to us, but of what one does.) To Europeans, African
Americans seem first of all to be American citizens, with all that implies on the cultural, linguistic, and
economic levels.5 In everyday life I do not encounter “Jews,” “blacks,” or “Arabs,” which are just
abstract categories; I encounter distinct persons, whom I like or don’t like, and to whom I am bound by
precise affinities, but whose roots, whose pale or colored skins, and whose religious convictions play
only a secondary role in my judgment of them. Individuals exist as such only when their singularity is
more important than their nationality, the color of their skin, or their membership in a group.
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Focusing solely on repentance for past wrongs is only a justification for present
inaction in the face of new harms while ignoring the problems that exist because of
the countries’ own misgoverning
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 96-100, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
The true crime of old Europe is not only what it did in the past, but what it is not doing today—its
inaction in the course of the 1990s in the Balkans, its scandalous wait and-see attitude in Rwanda, its
silence on Chechnya, its indifference to Darfur and western Sudan, and in general its indulgence, its
kowtowing, its servility.2 What is remarkable in this regard is the way Europe avoids getting involved
in current tensions, including those on its own soil, leaving it to the Yankee big brother to do the dirty
work, while criticizing him harshly later on. Whatever America does, whether it intervenes or stands
aside, it is always wrong, in accord with the customary roles. In the Near East or elsewhere, Europe, like
Hegel’s “beautiful soul” who does not want to soil the splendor of his interiority, refuses to dirty his
hands except to hold them out with passionate effusiveness to all men of good will. When the latter
reject our friendship, we leave it to others to do what has to be done. We have seen this in Bosnia in
1995, in Kosovo in 1999, and in a caricatured form in 2002, when the European Union requested the
mediation of Washington and Colin Powell to settle the microscopic dispute between Spain and
Morocco over the tiny island of Perejil near Tangiers. It was noted with alarm in the winter of 2006,
during the affair of the caricatures of Muhammad, when the European Union, booed by the crowds in
Damascus, Gaza, Jakarta, Teheran, and Beirut, shamefully failed to support Denmark and Norway,
condemned the blasphematory drawings, and sent Javier Solanas to the Near East as a traveling
salesman for expiation. If tomorrow Vladimir Putin set his big paw on the Baltic countries, invaded
Georgia, or set up a puppet regime in Moldavia, Western Europe would cry in unison: “Take what you
want!” Only the United States, possibly, would react. We can deplore this fact; but everywhere a
people is oppressed and groans in its fetters, everywhere it endures the burden of tyranny, it still
turns toward America for relief, not toward Europe. Even the Palestinians, despite their hostility to
Washington’s policies, know that they have a better chance of someday having their own state with
Washington than with Paris, Berlin, or Madrid.
On the whole, the Old World prefers guilt to responsibility : the former is easier to bear; we get on
well with our guilty conscience. Our lazy despair does not incite us to fight injustice but rather to
coexist with it. Despite our intransigent superego, we delight in our tranquil impotence, we take up
permanent residence in a peaceful hell. This verbal despondency is an act that allows us not to feel
obliged to justify ourselves to anyone. Remorse is a mixture of good will and bad faith: a sincere desire
to close up old wounds and a secret desire to retreat to the sidelines. There comes a time when moral
and metaphysical culpability is used to elude any real political responsibility. The debt to the dead
wins out over the duty to the living. Repentance creates people who apologize for ancient crimes in
order to exonerate themselves for present crimes. A cautious withdrawal to the fortresses of the
North, a renunciation of the duty to spread the democratic idea and to contain barbarity. Culpability
closes Europe to everything that differs from it, makes it an actor in an intimate tragedy from which it
cannot escape. “Leave us alone!” said some banners held by protestors against the war in Iraq in 2003.
What an admission: they want to cut all ties with the world if these ties are going to be a source of
tension! It is in reality the fear of contagion that animates these pacifists, and not concern for the Iraqi
people.
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Nothing is more insidious than the idea of a collective sin that is supposed to be handed down from
generation to generation and to permanently stain a people or a community. Contrition is not a policy.
There is no more a hereditary transmission of the status of victim than there is a transmission of the
status of tormentor: unless we create a crime of filiation, the “duty to remember” does not imply the
automatic purity or corruption of the great-grandchildren. History is not divided into sinful nations and
angelic continents or cursed races and inviolable peoples, but rather into democracies that recognize
their despicable acts and dictatorships that conceal them by draping themselves in the faded garments
of martyrdom. It hardly needs to be said that Africans, like Asians or the French, are solely responsible
for their development and can blame only themselves if they lag behind, no matter how harsh the
international system may be (even if in certain cases the pillaging of wealth by foreign companies occurs
with the complicity of local authorities, and even if one has to militate for debt cancellation). Through
their struggle, formerly colonized peoples have become actors in their destiny; they are therefore
accountable for their acts and cannot forever blame their problems on the former colonial powers or
attribute their errors to a “colonialism without colonists” (Marc Ferro), a notion that irresistibly evokes
the famous knife without a blade that lacks a handle (Lichtenberg). There are no innocent states: that is
what we have learned in the course of the past halfcentury. There is no state that is not founded on
crime and coercion, including those that have just appeared on the stage of history. But there are
states capable of recognizing their barbarity and seeing it for what it is, but who are instead seeking in
their former oppression excuses for their present malfeasance.
The affirmative’s attempts to rectify inequality and lift up the minority by placing
blame on one sole entity creates inevitable binaries as we exalt one group over the
other
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 149-152, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
Minorities, in proportion to the wrongs that have been inflicted on them, have acquired a prerogative
that used to be peculiar to the bourgeoisie: unmitigated egoism and the pleasure of self-satisfaction.
They noisily proclaim their personalities, take pride in being what they are, practice self-celebration,
recognize no defect in themselves, authorize no challenge, and are even sometimes exempted from
the common laws (in the United States, gay men and women cannot, except in rare cases, be accused of
sexual harassment: the free expression of their libido is always innocent). We have transferred to
minorities the privileges forbidden to the dominant classes and to nations. Moreover, a minority,
whether ethnic, religious, sexual, or regional, is nothing more than that: a small nation restored to its
angelism, cleansed of original sin, in which the most excessive chauvinism is only the expression of a
legitimate self-esteem. On the pretext of celebrating the idea of diversity, we are at the same time
separating people and making them unequal because some people, by the very fact that they exist,
enjoy advantages that are forbidden to others. As a result, marginalities have a discipline that is no
less severe than the other one, and a micro- nationalism that is just as jingoistic. Pressure to join in
ethnic, racial, or religious solidarity and the denunciation of traitors, called “bougnoules” or “macaques”
in the service of the dominant group,6 serve to keep potentially recalcitrant members in line and
restrain their aspirations to freedom. Every time a Western country has tried to create a special legal
code for minorities, it has been members of those minorities, usually women, who have protested.
For example, Canada’s generous provisions intended to allow Muslims to be judged in accord with
Muslim law were seen as a regression, a new confinement.7 How can we not be extremely distrustful of
this mystique of alterity that is now developing alongside the mystique of respect (whose etymological
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meaning is “look at from a distance”)? This stranger who is close to me is not another version of myself;
he shines in his distant and inalterable splendor because he has not been soiled by modernity.
Multiculturalism may ultimately be nothing more than that: a legal apartheid in which we find the
wealthy once again explaining tenderly to the poor that money won’t make them happy: let us
shoulder the burden of freedom, of inventing ourselves, of the equality of men and women; you have
the joys of custom, forced marriages, the veil, polygamy, and clitoridectomy. The members of these
little congregations then become museum pieces, the inhabitants of a reservation whom we want to
preserve from the “calamities” of progress and civilization. Some communities in Italy are considering
reserving beaches for Muslim women so that they can swim without being seen by men. You’d think
we’d returned to the time of segregation in the southern United States. In other words, we have to
wage a double battle: protecting minorities from discrimination (favoring, for example, teaching
regional languages and cultures, adapting the school calendar to religious holidays), and protecting
private individuals from the intimidation that their birth communities may practice on them.
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Alt
True evil isn’t in the colonization of the past but of the economic abandonment of the
present
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 129-136, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
In truth, the trial of colonialism has been reopened not because it was ignored or repressed in the
schools,23 but because it provides clarity for all those who are nostalgic for the old divisions. Just as
there are people who miss the Cold War, there are intellectuals who have never mentally accepted the
independence of territories that used to be under French administration. Anticolonialism serves as a
substitute for Marxism for a whole segment of the Left that no longer knows how to understand the
world. Since the idea of the nation includes all the defects of Western domination— expansionist, it falls
into the sin of imperialism; confined to its own borders, it falls into the sin of chauvinism and racism—
this Left has to produce, relying heavily on artifices, the image of a France that is xenophobic because it
is France, that is, branded with a criminal past. The wretched situation of Maghrebins and blacks is
supposed to be explained by “the persistence and application of colonial schemas to certain categories
of the population (categories that are real or constructed), mainly those who have come from the
former French empire.”24 “Our parents and grandparents have been enslaved,” states the Appel des
Indigènes, published by several collectives during the winter of 2005 and supported by various left-wing
figures close to Islamist milieus: “As daughters and sons of immigrants, we are . . . engaged in the
struggle against the oppression and discrimination produced by the postcolonial Republic. . . . We have
to put an end to institutions that reduce to subhuman status people who have come out of
colonization.” According to these new vulgates, social problems are first of all ethnic problems (note the
rhetorical similarity to the discourse of the Front National), and the low-cost housing projects in the
suburbs where many immigrants live are nothing other than our new dominions, in which the
inhabitants are silenced and kept in a system of institutional racism.25 Paris is supposed to steal from
the projects, exploit their wealth, and conduct a violent policy of despoiling them! Let us recall that
others have tried to make these areas the equivalent of the occupied territories in Palestine, a Gaza
Strip or a West Bank of their own around Lyons, Toulouse, or Paris. So now the French have become
colonists at home, and the hexagon will have to be taken from them! Instead of admitting that the
French system discourages initiative and effort, that an unemployment rate of 40 percent among young
people in the projects, the absence of qualifications and interfamilial solidarity, and the omnipresence of
gangs that rule the projects and regularly shake down the inhabitants of the apartment blocks there
make their situation catastrophic, a fantastic genealogy is invented, and areas like Les Minguettes and La
Courneuve are seen as if they were the Aurès mountains of Algeria or the high plateaus of Tonkin. Here
we are in a kind of spatio-temporal telescoping, a superposition of continents and eras in which
everything is mixed up, Seine-Saint-Denis with South African townships, Clichy with Gaza, Bobigny with
the slave trade. According to his inclinations, everyone can live in the virtual country of slavery or
colonialism, which have become vague concepts, temporary habitats, that one enters in order to
express one’s anger, one’s disgust.26 The situation in the projects has to do with rejection, with
territorial separation, not with the subordination to commercial ends that was the peculiar feature of
empires. The colonists held a country and did not abandon it; they did not make of it a “lost territory of
the Republic.” When a government abandons part of its citizens—the unemployed, those whose right
to support has run out, poor people, subproletarians, people living on welfare— we don’t say that it
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colonizes them, we say that it neglects them.27 Just as for half a century we have been bombarded by
supporters of resistance—that is, individuals born after 1945 who dream of cleansing themselves of the
affront of collaborationism by fighting “fascism,” we see coming back a generation of Third Worldists
who are resuming the battles for liberation half a century after the countries of the South won their
independence and are feverishly rehearsing their anticolonialist catechism and announcing that they are
going to liberate “9-3.”28 They make one think of those Japanese soldiers scattered around the Pacific
islands who at the end of the twentieth century still didn’t know that the Second World War was over. It
is a vocation to be a hero once the fighting is over; it gives you the luster of being a sniper without
exposing you to the slightest danger. But a historian cannot allow ideology—even the most generous—
to dictate his craft without reducing his discipline to the rank of simple propaganda.
However, it is regrettable that it is necessary to recall such a simple matter. Decolonization happened.
Very imperfectly, no doubt, but France finally put an end to colonization. If it wants to forget this
period or is reluctant to remember it, that is because in this area amnesia is the counterpart of
detachment. Will someone bring up in this connection “Françafrique,” its scandals and its networks of
secret agents, its dirty tricks borne by de Gaulle, Giscard, Mitterand, and Chirac? It was primarily a
relationship of “mutual corruption” (Achille Mbembe) in which Paris and a few African heads of state
held each other by their goatees; today, it is about to end, as is shown by the sad quagmire in Côte
d’Ivoire. How can one fail to see that the real danger today is not expansion but abandonment, pure
and simple? According to the economist Paul Bairoch’s brusque formulation, “The West doesn’t need
the Third World, which is bad news for the Third World.”29 In short, to the misfortune of being
exploited corresponds the still greater misfortune of no longer being exploitable, of being abandoned.
What threatens many deprived countries in the South is not the invasion of the capitalist octopus, but
the inverse: no longer interesting either investors or large economic groups, being excluded from
global circuits. Nothing would be worse than a unilateral withdrawal, a rupture of ties forged over the
centuries. It is to Europe that France must bequeath its African preserve, since Europe alone is able to
deal with this continent, so as to weave coherent relationships and not to burn bridges.
Colonialism has thus become a portmanteau word that no longer designates a specific historical
process but everything that is rejected—the Republican ideal, the French model, secularism, the
influence of the multinationals, and who knows what else? It is true that a small fraction of those
repatriated from Algeria long for French Algeria; but a large fraction of the intellectual Left longs for it
no less, mourning for the revolutionary romanticism and the political energy of that period. For the Left
that sees the confrontation between rich and poor in terms of debits and credits, which is
simultaneously whining and compassionate, immigration, instead of being an opportunity for those who
left and for the country they went to, is supposed to be a simple restitution: France (or Holland, Britain,
or Spain) is said to be paying its debts to Africa by receiving its children. Europe owes the latter
everything: housing, healthcare, education, decent salaries, immediate consideration, and especially
respect for their identity. Before they have even set foot on our soil they have legal claims and have
come to be reimbursed. “Anyway, the real victory will come when France accepts you even if you don’t
play soccer,” says a strange ad produced by the Catholic Committee against Hunger and for
Development, showing the photo of a boy playing with a ball in an African village at the time of the
soccer World Cup in 2006.30 We might wonder if this Christian and somewhat paternalistic view of the
immigrant is not itself imbued with a colonial perspective in reverse, which consists in seeing the home
country as eternally in debt to its former possessions.31 (If immigration is not selective, it must
therefore be passively undergone, accepted as an ineluctable phenomenon, a command issued by
Providence; it is curious to hear Socialist leaders praise a hands-off policy, erecting fatalism into a
progressive slogan.) To cut the umbilical cord is to cease to argue in terms of debt and dependency; it is
to privilege partnership over an affective or resentful relationship, which excludes neither solidarity nor
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responsibilities. There may be a second, mental revolution to be carried out on both sides, between
Paris and the various African capitals, which will be no less arduous than the first one. As for the
adjectives “decolonized” or “postcolonial,” they have the defect of still indicating a relationship of
subordination with the former system, confusing rupture with consequence, secession with
continuity. One has to feel very sure of oneself to say, as did the president of the People’s Republic of
China on welcoming Mrs. Thatcher in 1985: “The British occupation awakened China from its
immemorial slumber,” or to emphasize, as did the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh on receiving
an honorary doctorate from Oxford on July 8, 2005, the positive aspects of the British Empire. Although
India was later to combat the Empire, Singh said, it also had to recognize its “beneficial
consequences.” The past is not forgotten, it is quietly put in its place, digested.32 These great
nations—favored, it is true by their population, their power, and the very high level of their elites—
have simply become the masters of their own destiny.
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AT: Perm
Permutation fails –you cannot continue to repent for the wrongs of colonialism while
forgetting about the past at the same time
Prefer the specificity of the link – the repenting mindset of the affirmative ensures
inaction in the face of wrongs
<<<Adding the section of ensuring no future atrocities is intrinsic – makes it impossible
to win an alt because the aff can shift out of its advocacy>>>
Complete rejection is key.
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)
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.
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 midtwentieth 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.
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AT: Eurocentrism = colonization/bad things
European domination cannot be completely rejected – it has had its faults, but has
also opened the knowledge necessary to redeem those faults.
Bruckner, French writer, 2010
(Pascal, 2010, A Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, pg. 28-33, translated by Steven
Rendall, JZ)
There is no doubt that Europe has given birth to monsters, but at the same time it has given birth to
theories that make it possible to understand and destroy these monsters. Because it has raised the
alliance between progress and cruelty, between technological power and aggressiveness, to its
highest point since the Conquistadors, because it has engaged for centuries in bloody saturnalia, it has
also developed an acute sensibility to the follies of the human species. Taking over from Arabs and
Africans, it instituted the transatlantic slave trade, but it also engendered abolitionism and put an end
to slavery before other nations did. It has committed the worst crimes and has given itself the means
of eradicating them. The peculiarity of Europe is a paradox pushed to the extreme: out of the medieval
order came the Renaissance; out of feudalism, the aspiration to democracy; and out of the church’s
repression, the rise of the Enlightenment. The religious wars promoted secularism, national
antagonisms promoted the hope of a supranational community, and the revolutions of the twentieth
century promoted the antitotalitarian movement. Europe, like a jailer who throws you into prison and
slips you the keys to your cell, brought into the world both despotism and liberty. It sent soldiers,
merchants, and missionaries to subjugate and exploit distant lands,2 but it also invented an
anthropology that provides a way of seeing oneself from the other’s point of view, of seeing the other
in oneself, and oneself in the other—in short, of separating oneself from what is near in order to come
closer to that from which one is separated.
For instance, the French Republic has committed abominations. It was also thanks to the Republic that
we finally emerged from them when, after terrible convulsions, it finally brought its actions into
accord with its principles. The colonial venture died from a double contradiction: it inflicted our
particular customs on distant peoples on the pretext that they were universal. Forcing pastis and
baguettes on Africans or pudding on Hindus was using tribalism to practice imperialism. Finally, by
subjecting entire continents to the laws of an imperial master and at the same time inculcating in
them the idea of nationalism and the right to self-determination, the British, French, and Dutch gave
those whom they dominated the instruments of their emancipation. In demanding their
independence, colonized peoples simply turned against their masters the rules the latter had taught
them, providing them in spite of themselves with the weapons they needed to drive the colonizers out.
For example, it was in the name of the rights of man and the citizen that the slaves in Haiti and Santo
Domingo revolted in the late eighteenth century, discussing “the foundations of a new social contract on
the basis of the abolition of slavery, the equality of color, and the destruction of colonial society.”3 And
in 1954 the nine historical leaders of the Algerian Front de libération nationale had all been educated in
French schools, where they were taught the revolutionary ideals that were to incite them to rise up
against Paris.
Here we have to distinguish colonialism, which is for us, as moderns, fundamentally reprehensible,
like fascism and communism, from colonization, which was diverse and complex, simultaneously
harmful and beneficial, and whose chronicling requires the scrupulous work of historians who respect
facts and nuances. Colonization has not in every case prevented the weaving of ties or the
maintenance of friendly and respectful relations half a century after its liquidation. As French living
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two thousand years later, we can state that the Roman invasion of Gaul was ultimately a good thing, and
that without Caesar’s defeat of Vercingetorix at Alesia, without the infusion of Greco- Roman culture
into our territory, we would have long remained a myriad of tribes with uncouth customs and obscure
forms of worship. Similarly, the Arab tutelage of Spain up to the fifteenth century allowed the
blossoming of an extraordinary civilization, and the Ottoman Empire itself would not have lasted such a
long time had it not represented, in certain respects, an authentic progress. Nonetheless, in all these
cases, nations rose up against this foreign domination and destroyed it.4 Under colonialism, the
occupied peoples are infantilized, belittled, and humiliated, while the occupying powers lose their souls,
trample on their own principles, and undergo a corruption of their substance. Today we are stupefied by
colonial writings justifying the elevation of “inferior races by superior races” (Jules Ferry), and we find
crazy the obstinacy of a certain part of the Left under the Fourth Republic (Guy Mollet, François
Mitterand, Robert Lacoste) that wanted to keep Algeria under French control. It’s not just that we
disapprove, we are now elsewhere. That is why the attempt made by a certain revanchist Islam, that of
the Saudi Wahhabites or the Muslim Brotherhood, to take over European societies is related to a
colonial enterprise that must be opposed. In Europe, either Islam will become one religion among others
or it will collide with strong resistance on part of free people for whom the yoke of fanaticism, two
centuries after the French Revolution, is intolerable.
A civilization like that of Europe, which has been guilty of the worst atrocities and made the most
sublime achievements, thus cannot be seen solely as a curse. If Europe is motivated by a veritable
“genocidal passion,”5 it has also made it possible to conceptualize crimes such as genocides, and after
1945 it distanced itself from its own barbarity in order to give this word a precise meaning, at the risk
of seeing the accusation turned against it. It is a machine both for producing evil and for containing it.
The peculiar genius of Europe is that it is aware of its dark areas; it knows only too well what ails it
and how fragile are the barriers that separate it from its own ignominy. This extreme lucidity prevents
it from calling for a crusade against Evil on behalf of the Good and encourages instead a struggle for
the preferable as opposed to the detestable, to use Raymond Aron’s formula. No European leader
could say, as President George Bush did after the attacks on September 11, 2001, “I’m amazed that
there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about. . . . I just can’t believe it because I know
how good we are.” As children of the Old World, we know at least one thing: we are not good (but
perfectible). Europe is critical thought in action: since the Renaissance, it has constituted itself within a
doubt that denies it and casts on it the eye of an intransigent judge. Western reason is a unique
adventure in self-reflection that leaves no idol standing, that gives traditions and authority a pounding.
Europe had hardly been born before it rose up against itself and placed the enemy within its heart,
subjecting itself to a constant re-examination. If incrimination of the system is to such an extent part of
the system itself—if, for example, the whole history of colonialism has from the outset been contested
by various schools of anticolonialism—that is because in Europe there is not only a principle of
expansion, but also a space of pluralism, of the relativity of beliefs and faiths. To the antagonisms
peculiar to nations in a specific geographical area has been added the fundamental element of the
internal division within each of them. I do not mean to say that Europe is superior only insofar as it
doubts its own superiority. In this respect, however, it differs from other cultures that have not, at
least until recently, practiced this systematic challenging of their own convictions. Following the
example of the Old World, no people can escape the duty to think against itself.
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Capitalism
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AT: Marxism is Eurocentric
This ignores uniquely Latin American forms of Marxism that move beyond Eurocentric
origins
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-latin-america accessed 74-13 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 and Georgi 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
Néstor Kohan 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's time, 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 anti-imperialism in recent Latin American
struggles would seem to confirm the early Communist International's analysis.
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
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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 Linera
attributes 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 of
Mariátegui 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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Feminism K
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Link
A critical focus on Eurocentrism essentializes the reasons that some groups are
subordinated and fails to address issues of intersectionality.
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's Studies at Binghamton
University in New York, Spring 2008, “The Coloniality of Gender”,
http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wp-content/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf,
Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
We are now in a position to approach the question of the intersectionality of race and gender in
Quijano’s terms . I think the logic of “structural axes” does more and less than intersectionality.
Intersectionality reveals what is not seen when categories such as gender and race are conceptualized
as separate from each other. The move to intersect the categories has been motivated by the difficulties
in making visible those who are dominated and victimized in terms of both categories. Though everyone
in capitalist Eurocentered modernity is both raced and gendered, not everyone is dominated or
victimized in terms of them. Crenshaw and other women of color feminists have argued that the
categories have been understood as homogenous and as picking out the dominant in the group as the
norm, thus “women” picks out white bourgeois women, “men” picks out white bourgeois men,
“black” picks out black heterosexual men, and so on. It becomes logically clear then that the logic of
categorial separation distorts what exists at the intersection, such as violence against women of color.
Given the construction of the categories, the intersection misconstrues women of color. So, once
intersectionality shows us what is missing, we have ahead of us the task of reconceptualizing the logic of
the “intersection” so as to avoid separability. It is only when we perceive gender and race as
intermeshed or fused that we actually see women of color.
The logic of structural axes shows gender as constituted by and constituting the coloniality of power. In
that sense, there is no gender/race separability in Quijano’s model. I think he has the logic of it right.
But the axis of coloniality is not sufficient to pick out all aspects of gender. What aspects of gender are
shown depends on how gender is actually conceptualized in the model. In Quijano’s model (pattern,)
gender seems to be contained within the organization of that “basic area of existence” that Quijano calls
“sex, its resources, and products.“ That is, there is an account of gender within the framework that is
not itself placed under scrutiny and that is too narrow and overly biologized as it presupposes sexual
dimorphism, heterosexuality, patriarchal distribution of power, and so on.
Criticisms of coloniality and Eurocentrism rely on hegemonic and biological
understandings of gender
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of Philosophy and of Women's Studies at Binghamton
University in New York, Spring 2008, “The Coloniality of Gender”,
http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wp-content/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf,
Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
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This is too narrow an understanding of the oppressive modern/colonial constructions of the scope of
gender. Quijano’s lenses also assume patriarchal and heterosexual understandings of the disputes
over control of sex, its resources, and products. Quijano accepts the global, Eurocentered, capitalist
understanding of what gender is about. These features of the framework serve to veil the ways in
which non-“white” colonized women were subjected and disempowered. The heterosexual and
patriarchal character of the arrangements can themselves be appreciated as oppressive by unveiling
the presuppositions of the framework. Gender does not need to organize social arrangements,
including social sexual arrangements. But gender arrangements need not be either heterosexual or
patriarchal. They need not be, that is, as a matter of history. Understanding these features of the
organization of gender in the modern/colonial gender system--the biological dimorphism, the
patriarchal and heterosexual organizations of relations--is crucial to an understanding of the
differential gender arrangements along “racial” lines. Biological dimorphism, heterosexual patriarchy
are all characteristic of what I call the “light” side of the colonial/modern organization of gender.
Hegemonically these are written large over the meaning of gender. Quijano seems not to be aware of
his accepting this hegemonic meaning of gender. In making these claims I aim to expand and
complicate Quijano’s approach, preserving his understanding of the coloniality of power, which is at the
center of what I am calling the “modern/colonial gender system.”