Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

Debates on History and Power in Europe and the Americas

Marta Araújo, Silvia R. Maeso

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349450985, 9781137292889
• eBook ISBN: 9781137292896
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This collection addresses key issues in the critique of Eurocentrism and racism regarding debates on the production of knowledge, historical narratives and memories in Europe and the Americas. Contributors explore the history of liberation politics as well as academic and political reaction through formulas of accommodation that re-centre the West.

1

Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and the Entrenched Will-to-Ignorance: An Introduction

Silvia Rodríguez Maeso and Marta Araújo

This edited collection is an interdisciplinary production, bringing the work of international scholars and political activists within a wide range of approaches and disciplines, including History, Anthropology, Political Sociology, Philosophy, International Relations, Political Economy and the Sociology of Education. It addresses key contemporary issues in the critique of Eurocentrism and racism, in relation to debates on the production, sedimentation and circulation of (scientific) knowledge, historical narratives and memories in Europe and the Americas. It takes as its crucial starting point the concept of Eurocentrism as grounded in the project of Modernity and, in particular, its specific configuration of colonialism, history and Being which has led to the emergence of race as a key organizing principle in the modern world order from the geopolitical perspective of the creation of Europe/Europeanness, the expression of its hegemony and its contestation.

We consider Eurocentrism as a paradigm for interpreting a (past, present and future) reality that uncritically establishes the idea of European and Western historical progress/achievement and its political and ethical superiority, based on scientific rationality and the construction of the rule of law. Accordingly, we propose that it is essential to debate Eurocentrism within the formation of Western knowledge and its claims for universal validity, since this provides a certain historical mapping of the world that unambiguously establishes which events and processes are scientifically relevant and how they are interpreted – simultaneously discovering and covering them.

In order to understand the consequences of Eurocentrism in terms of the way in which certain patterns of interpretation are produced and contested, it is vital to question the fundamental basis of the centuries-old project of Modernity: coloniality/racism. More specifically, following authors such as Enrique Dussel (2000, 2008), Sylvia Wynter (1995, 2003) and Aníbal Quijano (2000, 2007), we consider that Eurocentrism is rooted in the Eurocentred colonization of America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in two interrelated processes: the production of onto-colonial taxonomies based on the ‘Western Idea of Man’ (Wynter, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2004) in the distribution of (ir-)rationality/(sub-)humanity (that is, race), and the gradual establishment of capitalist accumulation as a global standard for labour and market control. Hence, Eurocentrism is not mere ethnocentrism, that is, the perspective from which each people tells their history, nor is racism simply the product of ‘exacerbated ethnocentrism’ (Cox, 1970 [1948]), pp. 477–9).

This conceptual framework calls for a critical analysis of modern and contemporary configurations of race and racism. In other words, ‘modernity is racial’ (Hesse, 2007, p. 643), and the specific relationships between power and knowledge that forge the contemporary contours of Eurocentrism can tell us about the histories of race and racism and their enduring legacies. This is paramount to unsettling a key epistemological and political effect of the ways in which we interpret Modernity and the idea of a European specificity (implicitly read as superiority), that is, the drawing of an ‘abyssal line’ (Santos, 2007) in the production of history. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has characterized modern thinking as ‘abyssal thinking’, consisting of ‘a system of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones’ (ibid., p. 45). He thus argues that whereas ‘Western modernity’ can be defined ‘as a socio-political paradigm founded on the tension between social regulation and social emancipation’, the visible distinction is simultaneously founded on an invisible one that establishes a division between metropolitan societies and colonial territories. While the ‘regulation/emancipation’ dichotomy is applied to the metropolitan side of the line, the colonial territories are ruled by the ‘appropriation/ violence’ dichotomy. Following this analysis, Santos considers ‘modern scientific knowledge and modern law’ as ‘the most accomplished and clear manifestation of abyssal thinking’ (ibid., p. 46). Accordingly, the spheres of science and law produce, and are sustained by, a ‘radical denial’ that ‘eliminates whatever realities are on the other side of the line’; although the colonial side of the line is the condition of possibility for the emergence of modern law and science, this is rendered invisible (ibid., p. 48). Erasing this history – what Maldonado-Torres (2004, p. 30) has described as the ‘forgetfulness of coloniality in both Western Philosophy and contemporary social theory’ – is, therefore, a key characteristic of Eurocentrism. This allows for an interpretation of Modernity – of liberal democracy, citizenship, the nation-state and human rights, among other ‘universal’ categories – as if race, racism and colonialism did not lie at the core of this historical process, inside and outside the geographical borders of ‘Europe’, Europeanized nation-states and/or the West. Most importantly, race has been tenaciously produced and inscribed in the world through ‘the idea of a neutral epistemic subject whose reflections only respond to the structures of the spaceless realm of the universal’ (ibid., p. 29), an aspect crucial to the debates analyzed in this collection.

In conceiving of Eurocentrism as a paradigm for an interpretation of reality, we insist on the need to bring the relationship between knowledge and power to the centre of disputes on national identity, cultural diversity and the validation of ‘other’ narratives. More specifically, we insist on the need to interrogate and explain what Sylvia Wynter (1992, 1995, 2003) refers to as the ‘organization/order of knowledge’ and its ‘descriptive/prescriptive statements’. We argue that what is at stake is not that the history of Europe and the Americas is being written without considering colonialism and racial enslavement, but rather that the dominant approach often interprets these processes as a dark chapter (UNESCO, 2002, p. 17) in the triumphant development of Modernity (Wolf, 1997 [1982]), that is, an appendix to this history that is offset by the eventual progress in rights, equality and democracy. Accordingly, while colonialism and racism may be acknowledged in the debates on history and memory, they are often approached, to paraphrase Aimé Césaire (2000 [1955], p. 53), as that ‘annoying fly’ that interrupts the state’s ‘forgetting machine’ (ibid., p. 52), driven by what needs to be remembered, celebrated or commemorated (e.g. the multicultural empire, mestizaje, intercultural encounters, liberal revolutions). Moreover, the legacies of colonialism are to be conventionally understood within the liberal framework of human rights. Following the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, p. 96) on the formulas of silence pervading the production of history on the Haitian Revolution, we argue that this framework erases and banalizes the histories of collective struggles and questions of political responsibility (for instance, the enduring anti-enslavement and anti-colonial/liberation struggles versus the narratives of White humanist abolitionism and independences granted in due time – drawing on the idea of the immaturity¹ of the colonized for immediate emancipation/liberation). For instance, as Angela Davis (1981, p. 59) showed in the case of White anti-slavery/ abolitionist and women’s rights movements in the United States, these initiatives towards emancipation both perpetuated racism and failed to promote a wider anti-racist consciousness – an example of the enduring rule of White supremacy/privilege.

We thus consider it crucial to approach the history of the formation of modern nation-states as inextricably bound to that of colonialism and racial enslavement (Goldberg, 2002; Santos, 2007; Nimako and Willemsen, 2011). This conceptual approach enables the discussion to move beyond traditional analyses that view debates on history and memory as merely a matter of the identity politics of groups demanding representation (Wynter, 1992; Deloria, 1995), particularly evident in the Northern American context, or as an issue emerging from the so-called challenges of globalization and the increasing diversity of national societies otherwise viewed as ethnically homogeneous in Europe (Goldberg, 2002, 2009). Hence the collection of chapters presented here takes as its starting point the critical enquiry of taken-for-granted assumptions underlying interpretations of the boundaries of the colonial, the national, and Europe/Europeanness (Hesse, 2007). In particular, this book engages with the construction of the ‘Euro-Immigrant nation’ (Wynter, 1992) in several American contexts and the presumed homogeneity of the nation in Europe – achieved and enforced through violence and the purging of difference (Goldberg, 2002, 2009). Both these notions consecrate the privilege of White Europeans and their descendants, albeit unwritten in historical accounts due to a depoliticizing approach (Brown, 2006). If, on the contrary, we take heterogeneity as constitutive of (post-)colonial nation-states and race as the key governing principle behind the subjugation of populations/ nature and the distribution of moral values, the privilege of unmarked whiteness (inscribed in institutions, laws and practices) becomes a terrain for academic enquiry and political struggle. This is all the more relevant with regard to historical narratives, since they constitute a crucial site for the naturalization of privilege, as is evident in contemporary discussions on colonialism, slavery and (anti-)racism. Accordingly, several chapters in this collection interrogate the ways in which different patterns of silencing articulate with, and accommodate, recognition and representation through formulas of knowledge production, consolidation and consumption that trivialize existing power arrangements and enduring political struggles. As a whole, they point to the consequences of unveiling local and regional interconnected histories opening up a tension not only with ‘other’ histories, but also with specific attempts within Eurocentric thought to continually reshape the world in racially hierarchical terms and to recentre the West/Europe.

Organization of the book

Chapters 2–8 focus on the notion of Eurocentrism as a paradigm for interpreting reality grounded in the project of Modernity, that is, in colonialism, capitalism and race. In particular, these contributions engage with the geopolitics of knowledge production in order to understand and challenge the ways in which academic narratives and methodologies are embedded in the naturalization and reproduction of racism.

Chapter 2 by Ramón Grosfoguel interrogates the historical roots of the contemporary order of knowledge (re)produced by the Westernized university, which renders other Western and non-Western knowledges inferior and outside the acceptable canon of thought. The author regards the contemporary hegemonic Human Sciences as founded on epistemic racism/sexism and locates their roots in the four genocides/epistemicides of the long sixteenth century: against Jewish and Muslim populations during the conquest of Al-Andalus and its aftermath; against Indigenous peoples in the conquest of the Americas; against Africans kidnapped and enslaved in the Americas; against women accused of witchcraft and burned alive in Europe. The chapter unfolds in dialogue with Enrique Dussel’s insightful critique of the ontological and epistemological assumptions of Cartesian philosophy. The author analyzes how these four genocides/epistemicides made it possible for ‘I conquer, therefore I am’ to be transformed into the epistemic racism/sexism of the Cartesian rationale ‘I think, therefore I am’. Grosfoguel’s approach reveals the interrelation between these four processes of violence as constitutive of the modern/colonial world’s epistemic structures and of Western man’s epistemic privilege. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the need to move beyond Eurocentred Modernity and discusses the implications and possibilities for the decolonization of the Westernized university.

In Chapter 3, Arturo Arias focuses more closely on the nature of violence in the modern colonial world. Proposing a decolonial perspective, Arias explores the nature of violence exercized by hegemonic elites over subalternized and racialized civil societies in Latin America vis-à-vis the ‘visceral’ reaction of colonized subjects. This is illustrated by two cases: the nineteenth-century Yucatan Caste War and the late twentieth-century Guatemalan Civil War. Arias discusses the ways in which the justification for violence has been anchored in the ontological naturalization of racism at the centre of the everyday governance of all kinds of domestic events or, in other words, the ways in which colonialism has enabled Indigenous peoples and African ‘slaves’ to be conceived of as inferior to the conquering European subjects. Regarding the Yucatan Caste War, the author argues that the actual violence unleashed by Indigenous subjects is a solid example of a situation in which originary violence, enacted by Western elites convinced of their racial superiority, significantly contributed towards forestalling any possibility of peaceful behaviour on the part of the Indigenous population. Arias suggests that a similar case could be argued for the 37-year-long civil war in Guatemala, referring in particular to the brutal military counter-offensive against the insurrection in the Maya highlands that began in the summer of 1982. The author therefore argues that it is necessary to read and locate the Maya population’s visceral response outside the disciplinary political mythologies of Western-centred revolutionary progress and the national ideal of mestizaje. More specifically, Arias sees the Guatemalan Maya movement’s construction of a transnational field of political struggle as extending beyond the repressive epistemological frontiers of nationhood that have characterized the Marxist-oriented Ladino left. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the challenges posed by a decolonial logic: what happens when we view violence not only as inevitable, but as ‘just’?

In Chapter 4, Sadri Khiari offers an appraisal of the context in which a decolonial strategy emerged in anti-racist struggles in France. His starting point is that racism can only be successfully approached by considering the political arena as the site of a power struggle between races, thus moving beyond the legacy of the colonial progressive/conservative or left/right cleavage which structures politics and has implied rendering the racial invisible. The consequence of the universal linear Eurocentric history that unfolded with the advent of Modernity and progress has been the relegation of other spaces, experiences and accounts to non-history or to earlier stages of history. Khiari thus interrogates the French conversion of a worldwide system of racial domination established since the sixteenth century and embodied in the formation and consolidation of the (White) Republic, which preserves the privilege of the unmarked whiteness constitutive of the racial system. In analyzing the challenges faced by decolonial politics in France, he points to the need to construct a border strategy that recognizes the dislocated sites and disjointed temporalities of emancipation and liberation struggles beyond the White Eurocentric political imaginary. Khiari argues that while liberation struggles developed an internationalist character (for example, the resistance of Africans deported to America and the Caribbean, the anti-colonial wars and the converging struggles of the ‘Third World’ following independence or the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa), they should be interpreted as racial struggles against White power. Within this approach, struggles for emancipation and liberation within the French Hexagon ought to be understood as resistance to the racial order challenging the continuing renewal of the coloniality of power relations. The author illustrates this with the articulation of class and race struggles, integrationist anti-racism and contemporary academic explanations of racism, which have established race as external to any historical power relationship, thus looking to the state for the possibility of its regeneration – in harmony with the republican ideal – whilst preventing anti-raci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and the Entrenched Will-to-Ignorance: An Introduction
• 2 Epistemic Racism/Sexism, Westernized Universities and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long Sixteenth Century
• 3 Violence and Coloniality in Latin America: An Alternative Reading of Subalternization, Racialization and Viscerality
• 4 Social Races and Decolonial Struggles in France
• 5 Towards a Critique of Eurocentrism: Remarks on Wittgenstein, Philosophy and Racism
• 6 How Post-colonial and Decolonial Theories are Received in Europe and the Idea of Europe
• 7 Africanist Scholarship, Eurocentrism and the Politics of Knowledge
• 8 Scientific Colonialism: The Eurocentric Approach to Colonialism
• 9 Secrets, Lies, Silences and Invisibilities: Unveiling the Participation of Africans on the Mozambique Front during World War I
• 10 Conceptual Clarity, Please! On the Uses and Abuses of the Concepts of ‘Slave’ and ‘Trade’ in the Study of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery
• 11 Making the Teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African History and Culture Compulsory: Tensions and Contradictions for Anti-racist Education in Brazil
• 12 Race and Racism in Mexican History Textbooks: A Silent Presence
• 13 Social Mobilization and the Public History of Slavery in the United States
• Index