Embedded in our attempt to posit a genealogy for the culture wars is a concept foundational to our critique: Eurocentrism. As we argued in Unthinking Eurocentrism, Eurocentrism is the discursive-ideological precipitate of colonial domination. Eurocentrism enshrines and naturalizes the hierarchical stratifications inherited from colonialism, rendering them as inevitable and even “progressive.” Although forged as part of the colonizing process, Eurocentrism’s links to that process are obscured through a buried epistemology. Eurocentrism does not refer to Europe in its literal sense as a continent or a geopolitical unit but rather to the perception of Europe (and its extensions around the world) as normative. In this sense, it might better be called “Euro-hegemonism” or the “occidental world view” or “coloniality” (Anibal Quijano) or “European planetary consciousness” (Mary Louise Pratt). 1 Eurocentrism has little to do with positive feelings about Europe; it has to do, rather, with assumptions about the relationship between the West and the non-West. It is not Eurocentric to love Shakespeare or Proust, but it is Eurocentric to wield these cultural figures as “proof” of an innate European superiority.
Our coinage “Eurotropism,” meanwhile, calls attention to an orientation rather than a continent, a tendency to turn toward the West as an ideal Platonic Sun, much as phototropic plants turn toward the literal Sun for their sustenance. Indeed, Hegel develops precisely this solar metaphor in The Philosophy of History: “It is in the West that the inner Sun of self-consciousness rises, shedding a higher brilliance.” 2 Tropes of light (enlightenment, rayonnement) envision democracy, science, and progress as emanating outward from a luminously radiating European source. Rather than a systematic philosophy, Eurocentrism consists in an interlocking network of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes that constitute a broadly shared epistemology. Eurocentrism is not usually a conscious political stance but rather is an implicit positioning and a dominant “common sense” or “monoculture of the mind” (Vandana Shiva). 3 Far from being a European monopoly, Eurocentrism is often shared with non-Europeans. Even the creators of the first black republic in Haiti, as Michael Dash points out, idealized Europe and denigrated an Africa they had been taught to despise. 4
Some of the basic principles of Euro-hegemonism can be found in remarkably explicit form in the writings of some of the most celebrated Enlightenment thinkers. Hegel, often regarded as the progressive John the Baptist who prepared the way for Marx, offers a striking example. On the one hand, the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit engendered the progressive lineage that leads out to Marx, Kojève, Sartre, Jameson, and Butler. On the other hand, the Hegel of The Philosophy of History leads out to Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. For that Hegel, world history “travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History.” Asia for Hegel represents the “childhood of humanity,” while Jews, Africans, and indigenous Americas are “outside of history.” At times, Hegel’s rendering of human suffering becomes chillingly matter-of-fact. Native America, Hegel tells us, “has always shown itself physically and psychically powerless, and still shows itself so. For the aborigines, after the landing of the Europeans in America, gradually vanished at the breath of European activity.” 5 In this naturalization of ethnocide, the indigenous peoples simply disappear, not because of colonial
guns, massacres, and microbes but only because of a preternaturally powerful European “breath” or “spirit.”
2
Hegel baldly states in his Encyclopedia that “against the absolute right of that people who actually are the carriers of the world Spirit [i.e., Europeans], the spirit of other peoples has no other right.” 6 In a formulation that recalls the Dred Scott decision’s claim that “the Negro has no rights that the white man need respect,” Hegel argues in Philosophy of Right that Europe knew that “the rights of barbarians [were] unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a formality.” 7 Declaring blacks “incapable of development or culture,” Hegel in The Philosophy of History seems to deny even the existence of black subjectivity:
In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to
the realization of any substantial objective existence—as for example God or Law—in
which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being.
. . . The Negro . . . exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. . . .
There is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character. 8
Unlike those who discerned black critical capacity, Hegel sees a generic intellectual and moral handicap:
Among the Negroes moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly, non-existent.
Parents sell their children, and conversely children their parents, as either has the
opportunity. Through the pervading influence of slavery all these bonds of moral regard
disappear, and it does not occur to the Negro mind to expect from others what we are
enabled to claim. 9
In a particularly egregious case of what Foucault called the “indignity of speaking for others,” Hegel portrays the enslaved, but not the enslavers, as lacking in moral feeling. Unacquainted with Africans and untraveled on the continent, presumably basing his judgments on secondary sources such as travel literature, Hegel grants himself the sovereign right to generalize about the intimate feelings of millions of black people. We are not suggesting, of course, that Hegel was “nothing but a racist” or that there were no progressive aspects of his work as a theorist of freedom. The problem is that the freedom he theorized was usually meant only for Europeans. Hegel’s provincial prejudices have migrated and “settled” in diverse regions of thought. We hear explicit Polyanish echoes of Hegelianism in Fukuyama’s End of History, with the idea of the inevitably planetary victory of neoliberal democracy 10 And even though George W. Bush has clearly never read Hegel, his declaration that “freedom is God’s gift to the world” reveals him to be an unwitting (and inarticulate) vulgar Hegelian. Hegel’s philosophy of history can be understood through philosopher Charles Mills’s concept of the “racial contract,” defined as that set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements (higher level contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contracts’ validity) between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria . . . as “white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities the whites either already inhabit or establish. 11
White supremacy, for Mills, is the “unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.” 12 Although no longer explicitly racial, the “color line” still runs through all these forms of domination. Paul Gilroy speaks of a “hemispheric order of racial domination,” while Mills speaks of “the metaphysical infrastructure of global white supremacy.” 13 African and African American philosophers such as Mills have thus called attention not only to the Eurocentric blind spots inherent in Hegel’s views on Africa but also to his ethnocentric conception of freedom.
Marxism, meanwhile, although progressive in many respects, mingles Eurocentrism with its critique. While egalitarian in economics and politics, Marxism still privileges the historical agency of Europe and Europeans. For many Marxists, an intrinsically European capitalism, despite the cruelty so lucidly noted by Marx himself, opened the way for the global liberation of productive forces. The subalternization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas ultimately served to advance human progress. At the same time, Kevin B. Anderson, in Marx at the Margins, makes a strong case, partly on the basis of previously untranslated texts, that Marx posited a strong connection between capitalism and slavery. In articles written in French, Marx argued that slavery was “an economic category of paramount importance,” since slavery “in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America [are] the pivot on which our present-day industrialism turns. . . . Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade.” 14 The “veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe,” for Marx, formed the “pedestal” for “the unqualified slave labor of the New World.” 15 Marx threw himself into the antislavery struggle and saw the fight against racism as crucial in the creation of a strong labor movement in the United States. W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and Cedric Robinson are among the black Marxists who furthered this trend within Marxist thought.
Although Eurocentric historiography invokes classical Athenian democracy as the unique and originary fount of European democracy, Jack Goody speaks of parallel forms of democratic representation in Phoenicia and in Carthage, which voted annually for its magistrates. The desire for some form of representation, he suggests, is “intrinsic to the human situation.” 16 Amartya Sen, similarly, has spoken of the “global” as opposed to exclusively European roots of democracy. Rather than seeing democracy as synonymous with formal elections and representative government, Sen focuses on cultural pluralism, minority rights, and the variegated forms of “public reason.” He quotes Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom on the subject of indigenous African forms of public reason and deliberative consensus. Mandela describes the local meetings held in the regent’s house in Mqhekesini as “democracy in its purest form. Despite a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. . . . All men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens.” 17 Venerable traditions of public reason and pluralism, Sen argues, can be found in India, China, Japan, Korea, Iran, Turkey, the Arab world, and many parts of Africa. 18
In the 20th century, we find Eurocentric formulations even in the writings of a philosopher such as Edmund Husserl. Here is a passage from his Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: “[In Europe we find] something unique, which all other human groups, too, feel with regard to us, something that, apart from all considerations of expediency, becomes a motivation for them . . . constantly to Europeanize themselves, whereas we, if we understand ourselves properly, will never, for example, Indianize ourselves.” 19 Husserl here articulates what is often assumed: that Europeans display a unique mental vitality and purpose, that Europe is the fundamental source of new ideas, and that both Europeans and non-Europeans agree that this is the normal and proper order of things. What Husserl has done, as Emmanuel Eze points out, is to naturalize within the terms of transcendental philosophy the power effects of colonialism, rendered as a racial superiority. 20 It is precisely universalization of one provincial set of cultural values that provokes the need to “decenter” Europe.
Eurocentrism does not designate the consistently expressed beliefs of individuals or of a group of people, however. Nor do all elements in the system appear at the same time. Rather, it is an analytical construct pointing to a structured set of protocols or discursive tendencies disseminated around the globe. “The current dimensions of both time and space,” as Jack Goody puts it, “were laid down by the west . . . because expansion around the world required time-keeping and maps which provided the frame of history as well as geography.” 21 At this point in history, with the United States in precipitous decline and Asia and Latin America in the ascendant, Eurocentrism has a vestigial, out-of-sync quality, yet it still exercises immense discursive and mediatic power. Although Eurocentrism is complex, contradictory, and historically specific, its composite portrayal as a mode of thought might point to a number of mutually reinforcing operations.
Expanding on our very brief analysis in Unthinking Eurocentrism, an “ideal portrait” might posit the following patterns: (1) Eurocentrism’s narrative is diffusionist; it assumes that Europe generates ideas that then spread around the world thanks to their inherent power of persuasion. Eurocentrism roots Europe’s putative superiority in intrinsic traits such as rationality and curiosity, engendering a fictitious sense of superiority and entitlement. Within the Kantian conception, the enlightened nations give out the laws that eventually reach “the others.” (2) Eurocentric temporal discourse develops an evolutionary narrative within which the West is figured as “ahead” and its others as “behind.” In this metanarrative of progress, a linear (“Plato-to-NATO”) teleology sees progress as an express train moving inexorably north-by-northwest from classical Greece to imperial Rome on to the metropolitan capitals of Europe and the United States. A “presentist” historiography writes history backward so that Europe is seen as always tending toward the progressive and innovative, while the periphery is always in danger of reverting to the static and backward. (3) Eurocentrism operates through a figurative substratum of embedded metaphors and allegorical motifs that encode Western superiority through interlocking binarisms such as center/periphery, order/chaos, depth/surface, light/darkness, maturity/immaturity, activity/passivity, and self-reflexivity/blindness. (4) Eurocentric discourse denies the political, religious, juridical, and cultural agency of colonized peoples, treating the indigenous peoples of the Americas, for example, as characterized by a primordial lack through a production of nothingness that decrees native land terra nullius and native culture cultura nullius. (5) Eurocentric political discourse attributes to the West an inherent drive toward democratic institutions. The Inquisition, King Leopold II, Mussolini, Hitler, Pétain, Franco, Salazar, and other European despots, within this narrative, are mere “aberrations” to be edited out within an amnesiac logic of selective legitimation. The West’s antidemocratic practices—colonialism, slave trading, imperialism—are seen as contingent “accidents” rather than as evidence of oppressive historical patterns. (6) As a corollary to the Europe-equals-democracy formula, Eurocentric discourse elides the democratic traditions of non-Western peoples, while obscuring both the manipulative limits of Western formal democracy and the West’s not infrequent role in subverting democracies (often in collaboration with local kleptocrats) in the Global South. Non-Western social systems are seen as always in excess (Oriental despotism) or in deficit (societies without states). (7) Eurocentric ethics, meanwhile, is nonreciprocal. It demands of others what it does not itself perform. It places the West as moral arbiter, preaching nuclear nonproliferation, ecological stewardship, corruption-free elections, and other values that the West has practiced only intermittently.
Eurocentric literary discourse (8) emplots literary history as emerging out of biblical Hebraism and classical Hellenism, all retroactively projected as “Western,” even though the Bible was rooted in Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt, and ancient Greece was impacted by Semitic, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Ethiopian cultures. A provincial narrative has the novel beginning in Europe—with Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe often posited as origins—although one could just as easily see the novel, defined as fiction in prose, as emerging from outside of Europe and then spreading to Europe. (9) The Eurocentric narrativization of artistic modernism, similarly, has the West generating artistic forms such as Cubism and collage, which then spread to the “rest of the world.” The non-West provides unsigned raw materials to be refined by named Western artists, while Western museums retain the power not only to own non-Western artifacts but also to define what qualifies as “art.” (10) A white-supremacist “aesthetic corollary” grants whites a monopoly on beauty, while associating people of color with darkness and moral ugliness. (11) Eurocentric philosophical discourse traces philosophical
thinking to the “Greek miracle,” with the history of philosophy as working out the problematics formulated from the pre-Socratics up to the present. It cultivates the myth of self-critical reflexivity as a Western monopoly, whence the self-aggrandizing claim that only the West has had the reflexive capacity to criticize its own practices. Eurocentric philosophical discourse inscribes Western thought as Universal and non-Western thought as Particular. Western thinkers address universal subjects; non-Western thinkers address only their “particular” concerns. (12) Eurocentric religious discourse determines that the entire world lives by the Christian periodization (BC/AD) and the Christian calendar. The Enlightenment enshrines a secularism that remains subliminally Christian, recoding divine Providence as Progress and Sin as Unreason. While placing Christianity at the apex, Eurocentrism also hyphenizes Christianity with Judaism (Judeo-Christian) while marginalizing the third Abrahamic “religion of the book” (Islam). Non-Abrahamic and polytheistic religions are condemned as animist, fetishistic, and superstitious. (13) Eurocentric narrations of nationalism contrast the older, mature, civic, and inclusive forms of Western nationalism with the young, irresponsible, and exclusivist forms of non-Western nationalism. Forgetting the nation-state’s definitional tendency to monopolize legitimate violence (Weber) both toward otherized indigenous peoples and toward internal minorities, Eurocentrism projects the “new” nationalisms as unprecedentedly violent. (14) Eurocentric discursive and mediatic practices devalue non-Western and nonwhite life in a media-saturated world where white, Western lives are taken as more valuable than the lives of people of color. Within the algorithms of human devalorization, people of color have to die en masse for the Western media to take notice.
Eurocentrism also concerns (15) political economy. Eurocentric economics attributes Europe’s spectacular success to its enterprising spirit, forgetting that European advantages derived largely from the immense wealth that flowed to Europe from the Americas and other colonized regions. Eurocentric political economy in its various mutations (free-trade imperialism, modernization take-off theory, and neoliberal globalization discourse) develops a diffusionist “trickle-down” economics on a global scale. Just as wealth supposedly trickles down from rich to poor within Western nation-states, so the wealth of the Global North trickles down to the Global South. Eurocentrism does not acknowledge that this one-way narrative can be reversed, that the West became developed thanks to precious metals, fertile land, and enslaved and indentured labor from the non-West. European progress is seen as self-generated, autonomous, unrelated to the appropriation of wealth or ideas from colonized regions. The “Northern” nations, after pursuing protectionist policies in their own interest, discourage such policies in the Global South. Economic crises in the South are seen as serious only when they impact the North. In the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street exported not prosperity but rather what were oxymoronically called “toxic assets.”
In sum, a Eurocentric perspective systematically upgrades one side of the civilizational ledger and systematically downgrades the other. As a form of hubris, it rigs the historical balance sheet by sanitizing Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West and the nonwhite. It thinks of the non-West in terms of its deficiencies, real or imagined, but thinks of itself in terms of its noblest achievements—science, progress, humanism—while forgetting to add that “science” was often racist science, that “progress” could be genocidal, and that humanism could be a mask for barbarism. All of which is not to say that Eurocentrism is the only “-ism” plaguing the world or that generic social ills cannot be found in other cultural locations or that some other “-centrism” is not lurking around the corner. We do not believe in the inverted narcissism that posits Europe as the source of all evil in the world and exempts non-Western patriarchal elites from all responsibility . Our narrativization of the debates does not emphasize the “virtue” of non-European peoples but rather their cultural and intellectual agency in relation to historically configured relations of power. The point is not to demonize Europe but to relativize and relationalize Europe (lato sensu) as a (multi)culture alongside and interacting with other (multi)cultures. The point is not to disqualify the Western “look” but rather to multiply looks and to analyze the power relations that inform them.
From Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Race in Translation: Culture Wars in the Postcolonial
Atlantic (New York: Routledge, 2012)
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