Second, they might be the “abject” – the entity that is impossible for the self to bear a relationship to, although even this impossibility will be instructive to the inquiring European self. Much critical European thought – and certainly almost all of canonized European thought – speaks volumes about the ”other” but only so as to fill in the European “self” with greater clarity. If they are lucky, they are given a kind of non-speaking part in the drama. Their emptied presence is to be filled as the verso to the internal constitution of the European self. First, they might be the “other” – foils to the understanding of the self. Europe is first and foremost a sense of being that constructs its empathy and outreach in terms of a self whereby all who cannot intuitively be considered of European heritage are categorized into two entities. Let me explain a little more what I mean by all of this. That is why “Europe” is dispensable, even though for some peoples Europe has never been indispensible regardless, it must be dispensed with. For others, there is only the promise of living this drama vicariously through the thought of others. And those who look in a mirror and experience no significant cognitive dissonance when they proclaim “European” can still count themselves, to different degrees, as being a thoughtful protagonist in a contested human drama. Europe is a fantasy through and through, but one that damages different peoples with different intensities. In any case, as Ashis Nandy has shown, the monopolisation of the meaning of Europe by a fascistic figure (rational, male, hyper-patriarchal, white, civilized, propertied) has required the re-scripting of the pasts of peoples in Europe and a concomitant distillation of the traditions of European thought themselves so as to accord to this fantasy figure. In this particular respect, I take Frantz Fanon’s position and agree with Sajed: “Europe” must be dispensed with. At stake is a conception of the whys, hows and shoulds of people suffering, surviving, accommodating, avoiding, resisting and diverting the colonial relation and its many neo- and post- articulations. I read it in terms of a fantasy that captures the imagination. As a form of reflection I would like to lay out some thoughts by way of clarifying for myself what the stakes at play are in this discussion and where it might productively lead.įor myself I do not read the Europe that Chakrabarty considers in terms of the historical expansion and exercise of material colonial power. There was certainly a spectrum of opinions given and positions taken on the function, possibility and desirability of the relationship between poststructural and postcolonial approaches. Sajed challenged the panellists to debate whether Europe was in fact dispensable as well as inadequate. Alina Sajed had supplied the panellists with a provocation by way of refuting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s famous injunction that Europe was the inadequate and indispensible to frame the epistemological constellations of “modernity”. Cross-posted at Fanon/Deleuze.Īt the recent ISA conference in Montreal, I participated in a lively, weighty and difficult roundtable on postcolonial and poststructural approaches to International Relations. …(drumroll)… We are collectively joyous at being able to introduce a new contributor to The Disorder Of Things: Robbie Shilliam, currently at the Victoria University of Wellington and author of a slightly staggering array of critical texts (on the impact of German intellectuals on IR the Black Atlantic in modernity the Haitian Revolution race and sovereignty and the imperatives of decolonial thinking, among others).
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