Eurocentrism, Modernity and the Postcolonial Predicament in East Asia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sabaratnam : Avatars of Eurocentrism 261 What is Eurocentrism and why does it matter ?
2014
Recent scholarly critiques of the so-called liberal peace raise important political and ethical challenges to practices of postwar intervention in the global South. However, their conceptual and analytic approaches have tended to reproduce rather than challenge the intellectual Eurocentrism underpinning the liberal peace. Eurocentric features of the critiques include the methodological bypassing of target subjects in research, the analytic bypassing of subjects through frameworks of governmentality, the assumed ontological split between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘local’, and a nostalgia for the liberal subject and the liberal social contract as alternative bases for politics. These collectively produce a ‘paradox of liberalism’ that sees the liberal peace as oppressive but also the only true source of emancipation. However, the article suggests that a repoliticization of colonial difference offers an alternative ‘decolonizing’ approach to critical analysis through repositioning the anal...
Challenging or Reinforcing the Reigning Paradigm? The Paradox of Conventional Anti-Eurocentrism
Entremons, 2012
Most ―mainstream accounts of the West-East divergence gain theoretical inspiration from Max Weber and/or Karl Marx, and have therefore traced the ―rise of the West to the unique social processes that apparently fostered capitalism in Europe. Critics have labelled these accounts ―Eurocentric insofar as they imply the inherent superiority of the West over the East,1 and they have offered alternative ―anti-Eurocentric narratives which ostensibly avoid such analytical and normative pitfalls. These critics have succeeded in directing our attention to experiences in the non-European world. However, they have sought to validate these experiences by simply extending (in space and time), rather than transcending, the problematic concepts and assumptions that plagued the ―Eurocentric Weberian and Marxist accounts of the origins of capitalism. This paper argues that a truly non-Eurocentric approach requires a definitive break with these assumptions and the adoption of an alternative historical materialist understanding of the origins of capitalism pioneered by Robert Brenner. While not explicitly conceived as non-Eurocentric, Brenner‘s concept of social-property relations offers the surest foundation for understanding ―the great divergence‖ without doing violence to history or succumbing to European triumphalism.
In this chapter, our aim is to analyze a group of critical academic stances against Eurocentrism by evaluating their adequacy and relevance, together with a discussion on the possibility of a new form of critique. Eurocentrism has been criticized from diverse angles. Yet, many critiques have hardly managed to go beyond what they aimed to do. In other words, the critiques of Eurocentrism generally reproduce discourses of centrism and/or operate from within the axis of East and West. Against Eurocentrism, some counter-positions have been established by replacing the discursive element of " Europe " with another form of centrism based on geography, religion, ethnic identity, or region, such as Afrocentrism, Islamic fundamentalism, or versions of ethnocentrism. It is true that the latter constitutes a less hegemonic and all-encompassing influence compared to Eurocentrism; however, they all rely on a similar " centrist " perspective, and in that way they use the same equation with different variables. In this sense, some of the critiques of Eurocentrism operate within the same " centrist " agenda and thus are equally problematic. Another aspect of these critiques, we believe, is that they fail to reach beyond the terrain occupied by the fundamental East/West binary opposition. It is essential to ask to what extent these critiques and contra-narratives can help us to denaturalize, deconstruct, and to think and act beyond Eurocentrism. In this article we aim to criticize the critiques of Eurocentrism that are based on binary oppositions and the similar " centric " paradigm, and argue for the necessity to construct a new kind of critique. The first point of criticism can be expressed as follows: responding to one centrism with another form of centrism or essentialism with another version of essentialism is not only insufficient but also problematic. The second point of criticism relates to imagining a homogeneous Europe and basing arguments on such ground. Europe can hardly be conceived of as a consistent and homogeneous entity created by a single linear history. On the contrary, the idea of Europe cannot be imagined independent from its internal differences. Moreover, it would again be reductionist to assume the existence of a Europe that has a homogenizing effect on whatever it touches. It is always necessary to take the role of more complex identities and cultural differences into account by thinking beyond
At the forefront of the bourgeoning field of International Historical Sociology has been the effort to overcome Eurocentric conceptions of world history. This review article reconsiders the issue of Eurocentrism by critically engaging with Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu’s How the West Came to Rule, which is the most recent and arguably one of the most sophisticated contributions to the anti-Eurocentric turn in International Relations. How the West Came to Rule provides a critique of Eurocentrism through a systematic inquiry into the question of the origin of capitalism. Despite its originality, I argue that the book remains hamstrung by a number of methodological issues, which ultimately undermine the authors’ effort to go beyond the existing literature on Eurocentrism and provide a truly non-hierarchical international historical sociology. A clear specification of these problems, which haunt most anti-Eurocentric approaches to IR, provides us with the preliminary outlines of an alternative non-Eurocentric approach to world history.
Redeeming the Universal: Postcolonialism and the Inner Life of Eurocentrism
European Journal of International Relations, 2012
This article investigates the limits of postcolonial International Relations’ anti-Eurocentrism through an interrogation of its ambivalent relation with the category of ‘the universal.’ It argues that a decisive defeat of Eurocentrism, within and beyond International Relations, requires the formulation of a non-ethnocentric international social theory which postcolonial approaches, à la poststructuralism, reject on the grounds that it involves the idea of the universal equated with socio-cultural homogeneity. Yet, postcolonial approaches also theorize colonial modernity through deploying forms of methodological internationalism that broach the universal. Through a critical engagement with the wider field of postcolonial theory, and an anatomy of the notion of the universal in Hegel and Trotsky, this article argues that homogeneity is not an intrinsic quality of the concept of the universal, but a result of its specifically internalist mode of construction. Supplanting Eurocentrism therefore requires an explicit theoretical incorporation of the universal. But one which is fundamentally rethought away from being an immanent self-transcendence of the particular, and re-comprehended as a radical amenability to, and constitutiveness of, alterity. This is, the article argues, a defining feature of Trotsky’s idea of uneven and combined development.
A critical theory of Eurocentrism
2008
Conventional accounts of Eurocentrism tend not to recognise their own Eurocentricity. Critical theory mitigates this lack of historical reflexivity by disclosing the deep structures of Eurocentrism in the modern tradition of political and social theory and in the forms of modern social relations and social formation. 'Eurocentrism' tends to express negative judgements about the world and its representation from the perspective of civil sociality and its sense of commutative justice, and to point to distorted distributions of modem goods. That perspective is treated here as the ideologeme which provides the conceptual framework of the Eurocentric, 'Modem Imaginary'. This ideologeme it establishes the forms of civil sociality as transhistorical, universals. It also operates as an empirico-transcendent doublet, generating the tradition's contradictory and antinomial categorical structure. The Eurocentric nature of this contradictory structure is disclosed in terms o...
From Eurocentrism to Sinocentrism: the New Challenges in Global History
Volume 119, No 3 March, 2014, pp. 337-352, 2014
The intent of this passage is to examine strengths and weaknesses of global history in European and Chinese academy, the so-called Eurocentrism for the first case, and what I define a new Sinocentrism, for the second one. The latter of the two which has also been promoted by some western scholars, more specifically, the School of California, it gives further details on the shift from an Eurocentric (more precisely Anglocentric) to a Sinocentric perspective of global history. In recent years western scholars have recognized such errors by assuming that the pivotal axis of analysis for the study of global movements, connections, exchange, meetings and encounters between the West and the East should not be uniquely focused on the European powers and their colonies. However, this has led to a very Sinocentric focus, firstly fostered by the School of California and secondly by Chinese scholarship whose particularities on global history are primarily linked with political issues in a neo-Confucianist attempt to glorify Chinese history and civilization. Therefore, this essay explores such shift from Eurocentrism to Sinocentrism in global history, how currently in China global history is marked by national and patriotic issues that constitute a major challenge for practitioners of global history, and the pedagogical turn and challenges that we should bear in mind when doing global history.