It would not be convenient for a Maori, Aymara or Ghanian philosopher or an Indian from Calcutta who are modern/colonial subjects and would rather have ‘our modernity’ than to listen to vanguard post-modern critics or Western experts on developing underdeveloped countries. Thus, geo-politics of knowledge comes to the fore. There are many kinds of... See more

However, de-colonial and de-westernizing options diverge in one crucial and in-disputable point: while the latter do not question the ‘civilization of death’ hidden under the rhetoric of modernization and prosperity, of the improve-ment of modern institutions (e.g. liberal democracy and an economy propelled by the principle of growth and... See more

we did not know how to use land and other resources from the natural world, we did not practice the ‘arts’ of civilization. By lacking such values we disqualified ourselves, not just from civilization but from humanity itself. In other words, we were not ‘fully human’; some of us were not even considered partially human. Ideas about what counted as... See more

As an honest liberal, you would recognize that you do not want to ‘impose’ your knowledge and experience but to ‘work with the locals’. The problem is, what agenda will be implemented, yours or theirs?

For that reason, “we” have never quite been able to believe that there exists a universal domain of free discourse, unfet-tered by differences of race or nationality.’ Chatterjee closes his argument: Somehow, from the very beginning, we had made a shrewd guess that given the close complicity between modern knowledge and modern regimes of power, we... See more

We have, so to speak, ‘our own’ ways of being. In fact, I would translate Chatterjee into my own vocabulary: ‘we know that we have to decolonize being, and to do so we have to start by decolonizing knowledge’.

A common topic of conversation today, after the financial crisis on Wall Street, is ‘how to save capitalism’. A de-colonial question would be: ‘Why would you want to save capitalism and not save human beings? Why save an abstract entity and not the human lives that capitalism is constantly destroying?’

I would surmise, following Chatterjee’s argument, that what Foucault did not have was the colonial experience and political interest propelled by the colonial wound that allowed Chatterjee to ‘feel’ and ‘see’ beyond both Kant and Foucault

That is not to say that scientific theories from evolution to neuroscience have nothing to say about the materiality of living organisms propelled by nervous systems, but there are many thou-sands of miles from there to reach a conclusion about ‘human natures’. Furthermore, sociogenesis locates its origins not in the creation of the world by God or... See more