Changing Theory

Concepts from the Global South

Dilip M Menon, Dilip M Menon

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000578454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual.

With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.

1 Changing TheoryThinking Concepts from the Global South

DOI: 10.4324/9781003273530-1

Dilip M. Menon

Euro-American theory provides our existing academic interpretations of the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change them. The impulse toward theorizing anew has always arisen within the urgency of historical conjunctures. Historically, decolonization provided an impetus within the Global South to imagine new relations to the past, present, and future; free of the political and intellectual teleologies imposed by the civilizational hierarchies of a colonial epistemology. There arose the necessity to look back, neither with nostalgia, nor anger. Rather, it was imperative to recover from the paradigm imposed by colonial rule that had allowed for an engagement with native pasts only as irrelevant, outmoded, or mired in forms of imagination unsuited to the idea of the modern. Colonialism had inculcated an amnesia toward local forms of intellection with their own long histories. More important, it gave a determinate geographical location to the provenance and genealogy of thought (philosophy as originating in Greece, or in the European Enlightenment). This occluded the history of the circulation of conceptions and culminated in the lethargic as much as learned habit of making distinctions between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ ideas. Finally, in now colonized spaces, it only allowed for the consolation of a distant golden age when there had been the efflorescence of thought; a body of thought that was now deemed irrelevant for the present condition of modernity. Sudipto Kaviraj theorizes the emergence of a Euronormality: an implicit reorienting of the social sciences everywhere toward European conceptualizations that were mere universalizations of its own parochial histories (Kaviraj 2017). The universalization of European particularism, needless to add, was the result of violence: wars, conquest, and the imposition of new structures of pedagogy.

The idea of modernity itself was not only a temporal concept. It was also a political one, based on the self-regard of the former colonizing powers that allowed them to hold themselves up as models for emulation. Addressing amnesia in its various manifestations drove the exigent impulse to theorize; to recover from the loss of self and of an indigenous imagination under alien rule (Devy 1995). One could have used the metaphor of the compass oriented toward the North to characterize intellectual production in the former colonized world. However, this image itself is a normalized one, reflecting amnesia. The Chinese, as we know, created their compasses to point to the true South which was their cardinal direction: geographical as much as ethical (in the sense in which we use the phrase moral compass). The orientation to the ‘South’ was not only about physical direction but about metaphysical balance. The users of early Chinese compasses were as much concerned with orientation as an ethical and metaphysical imperative – in line with the compass’s primary geomantic purpose – as they were about finding physical directions in the physical universe.

This chapter concerns itself programmatically and polemically with the politics of knowledge in the academic space and addresses primarily the question of an insularity that projects itself as universality i.e., the globalization of theoretical production arising from a limited geographical space and its particular trajectories of development. It asks that we broaden our archive of concepts not only through engaging in transdisciplinary conversations, but also through moving away from Euro-American formulations to a conversation across regions, that is also necessarily multilingual. The project of finding new ways of conceptualizing needs to be done not under the sign of a commensurability that establishes a meretricious and falsely transparent translation of ideas across spaces. It is not about rendering visible words and ways of thinking across the Global South through mere translation within a monolingual space, which entrenches the politics of English as a universal language of rendition (Mizumura 2014; Mufti 2018). A true conversation must engage with the nuances and hardness of multilingualism as much as the possible quiddity of concepts. All political locutions arise from a sense of place; existing, constructed, and imagined. This chapter imagines a speaking from the Global South, a space that bears the wound of former colonization, and therefore the loss of ways of thinking, imagining, and living. As de Sousa Santos puts it, this is an ‘epistemological rather than a geographical south’ from which an ‘alternative thinking of alternatives’ can be carried forward (Santos and Meneses 2019).

As I have argued elsewhere, I believe that thinking about the Global South (its traditions of intellection and its conceptual categories, as much as their imbrication with the miscegenated genealogies of Western ideas) is a project that we need to embark on (Menon 2018). We have been through the enterprise of thinking from the Global South, which has meant, as in the case of postcolonial theory, the reiteration of a European episteme, but merely from our location. This does not mean a nativist rejection of European theory or an insistence that we work only on our spaces. The ‘space’ that comprises Africa, Asia and Latin America, and the Caribbean cannot be thought without considering international relations of power and capital. We cannot also be unreflective of the interpellation of the Global South in the period of the Cold War and the fact that we live in the time of the continuing ‘decomposition’ of its political and intellectual structures (Prashad 2013; Kwon 2006; Whitfield 1998). As Ann Laura Stoler has recently argued, ‘we live in a temporal and affective space in which colonial inequities endure’ and there is the imperative to think of the (post)colonial skeptically and insist on ‘imperial durabilities in our times’ (Stoler 2016). This means too that we cannot think about the South as a merely theoretical space, leading us to verbal prestidigitation like North of the South, South of the North, and so on – Detroit as South in the United States, Johannesburg as North in Africa.

Theorizing from the South

If we are to frame the temporality of theorizing from the Global South, Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of the moments of departure, maneuver, and arrival within Indian nationalist discourse is a compelling heuristic device to think with (Chatterjee 1986). Chatterjee characterizes the intellection of anticolonialists in India as moving through three moments: departure: the moment of a break from tradition and the consequent desire for Europe (in the works of the nineteenth-century Bengali litterateur Bankim Chandra Chatterjee); maneuver: a reconstitution and reimagining of indigenous thought as against an idea of Europe (Gandhi); and arrival: the confident assertion, with its compromises, of an independent nation (Jawaharlal Nehru). I adopt the triad of concepts but invest a different set of meanings to these moments.

The long conjuncture of decolonization, as countries in Asia and Africa achieved independence from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s, had already created an impulse to decolonize the mind. This moment of departure with its staggered temporality was accompanied by the making of nations, the creation of pedagogical and economic infrastructure, and the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals. The emergent new native elite may have been rooted in nationalism. However, they had been schooled in structures of pedagogy that were governed by knowledge in thrall to a Euro-American idea of the University and a replication of its disciplinary formations. The very idea of national being was governed by a split consciousness. The reality of the postcolonial nation was seen in empirical terms: thick descriptions of social and economic inequalities, as much as visions of science and technology-driven futures that were governed by the sign of self-reliance. However, when it came to theorizing, intellectuals drew upon inherited social science paradigms – what Tagore called histories from elsewhere – rather than on indigenous traditions of intellection about self, community, politics, and ethics.

Ashis Nandy and Ngugi wa Thiong’o were among the first to address the colonial wound of amnesia, as it were, dredging language as much as psychoanalytic frames to think about resources of thought that had not been hijacked by a conception of singular trajectories of development toward a Western state of being (Nandy 1983; wa Thiong’o 1981). Fanon was the penumbral presence in their thought, the idea of the psychic devastation inflicted by colonialism and the need to heal were the dominant themes. Nandy looked at the implicated selves of colonizer and colonized and in a characteristically innovative juxtaposition, studied the early works of Kipling and the oeuvre of the Hindu mystic Vivekananda as contending with the discourses of hypermasculinity generated by colonialism. He was clear that there were other psychic resources within Indic traditions that allowed for a recovery of self, particularly in Gandhi’s invocation of the ‘feminine’, of passive resistance, and of the notion of care and love as central to politics. Ngugi, in a parallel move, asked for a decolonization of the mind against the biggest weapon unleashed against the native mind. He called this the ‘cultural bomb’ that annihilated a people’s belief in their languages, their heritages of struggle, and ‘ultimately in themselves’, which made them see ‘their past as one wasteland of non-achievement’ (wa Thiong’o 1981, 3). Both Nandy and Ngugi departed from the idea of the postindependence moonshot to the modern by addressing the amnesia toward what lay at hand; the intellectual resources and categories that would allow for the restitution of damaged selves.

The theorizing of the next generation represented the moment of maneuver. It reflected the presence within Euro-American academe of a postcolonial elite that bristled against the condescending characterization of the spaces that they came from as being not-yet-modern (Dirlik 1997). Dipesh Chakrabarty in his broadside against existing descriptions of decolonized societies, spoke of a reckoning of lack, a dispiriting accounting of absences – of capitalism, modernity, or of real democracy (Chakrabarty 2000). However, he was also conscious of the ‘conceptual gifts’, as he called them, of historicism and of politics, from nineteenth century Europe which allowed for reflection on the way forward. Postcolonial theorists like Chakrabarty, Spivak, and Bhabha challenged the imposition of singular trajectories of the future, deploying European epistemology with verve and skill, and denying derivativeness through adroit categories like hybridity, interstitiality, strategic essentialism, and provincialization (Gandhi 1998; Loomba 1998). These categories are revealing of the strategy of maneuver; one had to position oneself within an already determined field. If one were being uncharitable, mimicry as theorized by Bhabha, was seen as the way forward; like-yet-not-like, the unreadability of imitation as repetition or difference. However, postcolonial theory was characterized by a distinct forgetfulness toward indigenous systems of intellection; the theorists have been schooled in a paradigm framed by Euromerican social theory and its internal dissensions and critiques.

We stand now at the threshold of a moment of arrival, with theorizations that start with the idea of intellection from the Global South as their premise. In one sense, it is a taking up of the standard again, a theorizing from where we are, continuing a resistance to what Ngugi had called the method of ‘Europhone Theory’ and ‘African fact’. A slew of recent work that engages with forms of thinking in Africa, Asia, South America, and the Arab world has allowed us to question the Eurocentricity of postcolonial theory and to engage with indigenous landscapes, epistemologies, and temporalities (Chen 2010; Cusicanqui 2020; Eze 1998; Escobar 2018; Elshakry, M 2014; Elshakry, O 2020; Santos 2018). There are many distinct intellectual trajectories here pointing to different futures of interpretation. What is very clear in these works is an engagement with long histories of intellection and debate in the Global South. Euro-American epistemologies were transformed by their commensuration with already existing fields of interpretation. The act of reading Darwin or Freud in Egypt, for example, is not one of startled discovery but a negotiated and careful process of translation, situating within existing paradigms, and a questioning of the universalist assumptions of historical and psychological evolution. The South American thinkers rethink the temporality of the modern by displacing the Enlightenment as the fons et origo. They put the violent Spanish conquest and the genocide of native peoples by Europeans at the beginning of European engagement with the world at large. Modernity is inaugurated less by the cogitations of the philosophes than by the genocide perpetrated by the conquistadores.

Modernity and coloniality therefore are the dyad with which the world must be thought, which results in the idea of the pluriverse and of pluriversality rather than the emergence of any singular set of ideas that then are disseminated by Euro-America as the markers of civilization (Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Escobar 2020). These works engage at one level with the frictions encountered by intellectual paradigms and concepts from Europe as intellectuals in the Global South grapple with them or deploy them strategically. At another, they work with indigenous ideas that do not merely mirror European categories but have a purchase in local imaginations and ways of being which are distinctive and rooted. Most important, they restore, each in different ways, Euro-American violence – physical and epistemic – to its central place in the making of the world that we inhabit.

Word Making and World Making

In this moment of arrival, we need to think with questions of inheritance as much as a rejection of a colonial patrimony. The concepts we think with – from modernity to secularism and democracy – have embedded in them both an implicit ideal trajectory as much as a hierarchical politics of spaces (Kaviraj 2005). Words must arise from their worlds. For too long we have thought with the trajectories of a European history and its self-regarding nativist epistemology that was rendered universal largely through the violence of conquest and empire. As the aphorism goes, a language is a dialect backed by an army. Benedict Anderson has argued that colonialism generated a double consciousness of the world: the connection between colony and metropole – London and Delhi; Jakarta and Amsterdam; Hanoi and Paris (Anderson 1998). This seems to suggest that the geography generated by empire exhausted the possibility of other worlds and connections. However, existing networks before the onset of colonialism were never severed entirely as Engseng Ho shows in his magnificent study of the uninterrupted flow of people, ideas, and commerce over half a millennium from the Hadramawt to South East Asia (Ho 2006).

Moreover, empire created what I have called new ‘geographies of affinity’ which exceeded the incarcerative and schematic maps that reflected merely the imperial hubris of control (Menon 2012). Rebecca Karl, in her work on late nineteenth-century Chinese nationalists shows how they drew on the historical experiences of the resistance in the Philippines to American imperialism; the Boer ...