Intellectual Fugitivity v1 Neg Supplement › Eurocentrism K › Link---“the West”---2NC
Is this, though, an exercise in anti-Westernism? Takayama et al disavow the aim of ‘dividing paradigmatic Anglo-European comparativists and other comparativists in the global peripheries’ (S19), while Silova et al call for an ‘understanding of coloniality … as multilayered, interconnected and present in all societies’ (S89). However, their decolonial master-narrative is premised, in what constitutes a second move, on a vague and divisive system of categorisation. It is relevant to note the importance attached to classification by Mignolo, regarded as an authority on coloniality by all these authors, who argues that ‘epistemic racism’ is built on ‘classifications and hierarchies,’ and that ‘those who classify always place themselves at the top of the classification’ (quoted by Silova, Millei, and Piattoeva Citation2017, S84–S85).Footnote2 The categories deployed in the special issue include the ‘West’, ‘Anglo-West’, ‘Anglo-Europe’ and ‘global North.’ Each of these terms has different connotations, which are not clearly spelt out. The ‘West’ presumably encompasses Western Europe, North America and settler-colonial off-shoots such as Australia, but does it extend to Japan or Eastern or Southern Europe? ‘Anglo-West’ or ‘Anglo-Europe’ reference the English-speaking world, apparently excluding non-European societies, while leaving ambiguous the status of non-English-speaking Europeans and their settler-colonial heirs (e.g. in Latin America). The ‘global North’ is a more encompassing category, distinguishing so-called ‘developed’ from ‘developing’ countries. But it seemingly excludes Russia and the post-socialist societies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, presented here by Silova et al as victims of Western ‘coloniality.’ Deploying these terms interchangeably helps to unite disparate papers under the rubric of ‘contesting coloniality.’ The result is a target for the ‘decolonial’ argument that is large, diffuse, and readily distinguishable from a ‘periphery’ defined by shared experience of oppression or marginalisation. The ‘hierarchies’ associated by Mignolo with ‘coloniality’ are thus inverted, with those classified as victims implicitly assigned moral superiority over the perpetrators. These perpetrators are in turn associated, in a related third move, with a uniformly ‘colonial’ cultural or civilizational unit conceived in highly essentialist terms. The ‘dominant global imaginary,’ argues Stein, is a ‘racialized ordering of humanity’ whereby ‘the white/Euro-descended subject’s “civic-humanist, rational self-conception” is constituted against a racialized “irrational/sub-rational Human Other”’ (Citation2017, S29). Post-war attempts to ‘incorporate official refutations of racialism and colonialism’ are dismissed as mere ploys to disguise the ‘recasting’ of ‘colonial logics’ through development projects framed as a means to help the non-West ‘catch up’ (S30). The object of catch-up is a ‘Western modernity project’ ‘constituted’ by the ‘logic of coloniality,’ so that ‘colonial patterns of power’ continue to define ‘culture, labour, intersubjective relations and knowledge production everywhere’ (Silova, Millei, and Piattoeva Citation2017, S75). ‘The globalizing reach of this [Western] imaginary over the past six centuries,’ has meant, Stein argues, ‘that wherever one is situated within its colonial divisions, it is not possible simply to “opt out” of its unevenly distributed repressive, disciplinary, and biopolitically productive effects’ (Citation2017, S31). In other words, the supreme, inescapable and essential characteristic of the modern West is its ‘coloniality.’ This claim that the modern West is intrinsically ‘colonial’ is twinned with a fourth move: the depiction of ‘colonialism’ or ‘coloniality’ as uniquely ‘Western’ (or ‘Anglo-European,’ etc.). This equation is so taken for granted by the contributors that they hardly bother to spell it out, let alone defend it. When Shahjahan et al refer to ‘imperial powers (whether Spanish, Portuguese, British and [sic.], later on, American),’ their use of brackets reflects this assumption that ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’ are axiomatically Western (Citation2017, S52). Oddly, given that one of the co-editors is Japanese, non-Western forms of colonialism are almost entirely ignored in the special issue. Japan’s own notoriously brutal colonial project receives only one oblique reference. This comes when Kandel is attacked for failing to support a Taiwanese student of his who sought to critique an official Japanese report on ‘Education in Formosa and Korea’ (Takayama, Sriprakash, and Connell Citation2017, S11). Invoking this instance of non-Western colonialism thus serves merely to buttress the case for recasting one of the field’s Western founding fathers as an archetypal colonialist. Neither Japanese ‘coloniality’ nor the related ethnocentricity of mainstream Japanese culture and scholarship – past and present – are otherwise acknowledged. The agenda of contesting a ‘coloniality’ construed as uniquely Western leads to further lapses in historical accuracy. With respect to Soviet Russia, Silova et al assert that ‘even though state-sanctioned racism under socialism employed racial technologies and expertise to differentiate spaces and populations through their contrasting propensities to life and death, these followed less the lines of racial “othering” apparent in former colonies’ (Citation2017, S77). While recognising that in the days of the USSR ‘Russia functioned as an imperial centre that spread its norms and models to the peripheries’ (S91), they nonetheless present Soviet power as somehow less colonial than its ‘Western’ counterpart. Elsewhere in the special issue, Tom et al acknowledge that the dividing line between colonialism and its victims also runs through ‘Northern’ societies, writing that ‘coloniality can be observed in the power the Global North (the white United States and Western Europe) exerts over the Global South (regions such as Asia, Africa and Latin America, regarded as “underdeveloped” or “developing countries,” and racialized populations in the Global North)’ (Citation2017, S125, my emphasis). But the essential dichotomy stands – between ‘the West’ (or ‘North’) as a malevolent hegemon, and its victims, defined primarily in ethno-cultural terms, wherever they are. Finally, this generalised dichotomy underpins a fifth move, linking the ethical standing, authenticity and legitimacy of researchers to their ‘location’ vis-à-vis ‘the West’. Identifying themselves as ‘critical scholars of color’ (Citation2017, S51), Shahjahan et al highlight their ‘multilayered positionality as visible minorities, having ties to countries labelled as “Third World” and working with dissenting perspectives mostly in white settler contexts’ (S58). Tom et al take aim at an ‘epistemic racism’ seen as extending to ‘the addition of some selected “other” scholars, histories or events into Eurocentric scholarship without engaging with their conceptualizations, critiques and consequences.’ They associate this tactic with ‘scholars and educators … who pretend to have transcended the problems of racism and coloniality,’ but ‘continue to enjoy and defend the privilege of epistemic perspective’ (Citation2017, S127). ‘White perspectivity,’ they continue, ‘upholds itself as self-justified educational practice’ (S127), necessitating what Khoja-Moolji calls an emphasis on ‘brown bodies as central to knowledge production’ (Citation2017, S152). ‘Colonial imaginaries of purity and authenticity’ must be abandoned, proclaim Tom et al, but this does not entail ‘a priori rejecting notions of purity and authenticity stemming from “other” onto-epistemological groundings’ (S141). Invoking divisive and essentialising forms of categorisation in the cause of contesting Western coloniality is thus apparently permissible, if it is authentically rooted in ‘subaltern epistemic locations’ (Khoja-Moolji Citation2017, S152). Several contributors demonstrate awareness of the difficulty of characterising as subaltern the ‘location’ of scholars based in prestigious Western universities, some holding influential positions in the CIE field. As of now (2019), two of those featured in this special issue sit on the Advisory Board of CER, while another is on the editorial board of Comparative Education. Silova is currently Vice-President of CIES. She and her co-authors acknowledge that ‘depending on particular circumstances, … we may be positioned as Western “experts,”’ or ‘as non-Western “others” whose expertise is limited to explaining the local context through particular analytical frames’ (Citation2017, S93). Again citing Mignolo (himself based at Duke University), they declare their intention to ‘work within and against dominant forms of knowledge production by carrying the “wound” of coloniality … , but resisting efforts of self-emancipation from the experience of domination that works for, and not against, integration into the same hierarchy’ (S97). If this seems confusing, it is apparently intentionally so, since they assert ‘our right to … opacity’ (S93). In the same vein, they call for ‘border thinking, … where being is “rooted in irremovable contradictions – neither here nor there or both here and there at the same time”’ (S93). The import of this seems to be that those from ‘subaltern’ backgrounds who find themselves working within the structures of ‘Western’ privilege need to ensure that their scholarly agendas remain defined by consciousness of the epistemic ‘wounds’ inflicted by the West on the non-Western core of their identity. A note on my own ‘positionality’ A white, male, public school-and-Oxford-educated British scholar who ventures into a debate framed in these terms is clearly entering a minefield. Individuals such as myself have indeed enjoyed manifold privileges within global academia and beyond. These privileges are related to a web of structures and assumptions that can be termed ‘Eurocentric,’ as well as to legacies of colonialism. In my early career, I benefited from my family’s position in Hong Kong as British rule was winding down. There is more to the Vickers backstory: Irish Catholics here, an Indian ancestor there, working-class Liverpool grandparents, a Jewish great-grandfather, not to mention years spent in China as a lowly educational functionary. I now live in Japan with my Japanese wife and children, working for a Japanese university, where my foreignness entails a complex mix of marginalisation and advantage. But privilege there certainly has been. What, though, is the precise significance of a scholar’s personal ‘location’ for any claims to serious attention from their peers? Silova et al are right to stress that biography, auto-biography and ‘self-ethnography’ are potentially valuable resources for Comparative Education. It is worth recalling that many of the field’s early leaders, such as Nicholas Hans, were refugees or exiles from notably repressive regimes. However, there is an important line to be drawn between biography (or autobiography) as a research tool or resource, and the biographical statement as a certificate of victimhood, granting its holders a privileged voice in particular conversations. It is hard to read the racialised language in the CER special issue without wondering under what circumstances the contributors would consider a ‘white’ European scholar entitled to debate ‘coloniality’.Footnote3 Their representation of the significance of positionality, invoking race, religion and geography, implies the legitimacy of judging scholarship not so much on the basis of what is argued as of who is doing the arguing. The notion that racial, geographical or civilisational labels neatly divide humanity between the ‘subaltern’ and ‘metropolitan,’ and that ‘subalternity’ in itself confers a kind of moral authority, are deeply problematic. I return to this issue, and its implications for Comparative Education as a field, in my concluding section. Before that, however, it is important to consider the empirical basis for the assumptions underpinning the ‘moves’ outlined above. If ‘Western’ modernity is uniquely associated with ‘coloniality,’ encompassing ‘epistemic violence’ against uniformly victimised ‘non-Westerners’, then assertions of non-Western ‘positionality’ may appear more defensible. But do these claims stand up to historical scrutiny? Is it plausible to entertain a neat division of the world between victims and perpetrators of ‘colonialism’ or ‘epistemic violence’? Ethnocentrism, coloniality and ‘Western’ modernity The strongest charge levelled by the CER contributors concerns the ‘Eurocentrism’ of mainstream Anglophone academia. ‘Eurocentrism’ has undeniably been pervasive not just in the Comparative Education field, but across academia more generally. Typically underpinning this is a conviction of Western exceptionalism – the belief that features typically ascribed to ‘Western modernity’ by its cheerleaders: democracy, capitalism, the valuing of individual liberty, the rule of law, notions of ‘human rights’ and of ‘progress’ itself, are gifts from the West to the world. It is this raft of assumptions that the historical anthropologist Jack Goody has labelled The Theft of History (Citation2006). Goody’s point is that none of these concepts is in fact the unique product of post-Renaissance Europe; they have emerged at different times in various guises in multiple societies. Moreover, the forms they took in Europe (and later America) often owed much to cross-cultural influence. For example, the crucial Arabic influence on humanist thought in medieval and early Renaissance Europe is still widely overlooked (as Takayama et al note in their volume introduction). It was in the Muslim-ruled regions of the former Roman Empire that the secular-humanist learning of classical Greece was preserved, elaborated and mingled with influences from India, Central Asia and elsewhere, before finding its way back to Christian Europe. Much later, the vision of a rational, ordered, secular Chinese empire, run on ostensibly meritocratic lines by officials recruited through competitive written examinations, inspired luminaries of the European Enlightenment, including Leibniz and Voltaire. How deep-rooted, then, is ethnocentrism in European culture, and to what extent is this a peculiarly Western trait? Eurocentrism certainly pervaded the Cold War West, and received a further boost from the ‘End of History’ triumphalism of the 1990s. But contributors to the CER special issue perceive ‘six centuries of Western epistemic violence’ (e.g. Stein Citation2017, S42, S31),Footnote4 implying that Eurocentrism is intrinsically bound up with a peculiarly violent and arrogant spirit that has gripped the West since the age of Columbus, if not before. Like much else about their arguments, this view perhaps reflects an ‘America-centric’ preoccupation with the Western hemisphere. The decimation of native peoples across the Americas following the European conquest certainly involved grotesque and extreme violence, whose after-effects are still with us. But did this usher in an era in which Western violence, ‘epistemic’ and actual, was both globally dominant and allied to a uniquely virulent brand of ethnocentrism? Viewing history from the eastern end of Eurasia, this seems highly doubtful. Contemporary Chinese historians typically date their country’s ‘Century of Humiliation’ from the Opium Wars of the 1840s. Leaving aside the debate over the precise role of Western aggression in Qing China’s decline (see Cohen Citation1984), this narrative reflects the huge shock that defeat by the British delivered to elite amour propre. As Wang Zheng observes (Citation2012), this was magnified by a supremely ethnocentric conceit: the belief in the normative status of Chinese civilisation, and its moral and material superiority over ‘barbarian’ societies. That conviction was understandable: half a century before the Opium Wars, when the first official British Embassy was haughtily rebuffed by the Emperor Qianlong, China accounted for around a third of global GDP (Stuenkel Citation2016, 67). When, then, did Eurocentrism become prevalent or pervasive? Shortly before the British humiliation of China, in India Macaulay penned his notorious ‘Minute on Indian Education’ of 1835, recommending the prioritising of English-medium instruction since ‘a single shelf of a good European library’ was worth ‘the whole native literature of India and Arabia’.Footnote5 Exhibit A, perhaps, in any rogues’ gallery of Western ‘epistemic’ arrogance. However, such Eurocentric condescension was less prevalent a century earlier, when European visitors were inclined to be overawed by the splendour and sophistication of the Mughal Empire at its height (Osterhammel Citation2018). Rather, it evolved along with the changing nature and extent of British involvement in Indian society. For example, the attitudes to Indian culture of the late eighteenth-century judge and orientalist scholar, William Jones, were immeasurably more complex, nuanced and respectful than those of Macaulay (Mukherjee Citation1968). Osterhammel dates ‘the rise of Eurocentrism’ to the early nineteenth century (Citation2018). The eighteenth century was ‘an age of balance between little Europe and big Asia’; it was only in the nineteenth century, he writes, that ‘we enter a different world: a dichotomous world of … refinement versus primitivism’ (482), or of science versus superstition. If the global dominance of triumphalist Eurocentrism is rather less than six centuries old, what of its ‘epistemic’ implications and uniqueness? I shall have more to say about both in the following section, but here it is pertinent to make two points: one concerning Eurocentrism’s epistemic content; and the other its ‘colonial’ reach. Ethnocentrism can take multiple forms. Postcolonial writers associate ‘Eurocentrism’ with celebration of the manifold and unique contributions of Western science and civilisation to the modern world. But this ‘imperialist’ or ‘paternalist’ Eurocentrism has its mirror-image in an ‘anti-paternalist’ variant, whereby ‘Eastern societies are granted conditional agency and are unable to auto-generate or self-develop’ (Hobson Citation2012, 6, cited in Stuenkel Citation2016, 52). ‘Anti-paternalist’ West-centrism, like its ‘paternalist’ counterpart, emphasises the centrality of Western agency, but views it as overwhelmingly malevolent. That mindset, in turn, fuels efforts to ‘demonize an idea by erroneously calling it Western’ (Stuenkel Citation2016, 52), something most of the CER contributors do with respect to ‘colonialism’, ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘capitalism’ (e.g. Stein S27) – though, significantly, not socialism.Footnote6 Other postcolonial writers extend this treatment to notions such as democracy, science and human rights, though the CER group seem ambivalent on this score. While imputing Western origins to concepts they evaluate negatively (especially colonialism), they implicitly endorse values such as academic freedom, while seeing them as tainted or distorted by Western power. However, claims of ‘epistemic violence’ indicate a logic of ‘anti-paternalist Eurocentrism,’ since they involve asserting the imposition by the West of constraints on the capacity of non-Westerners to think independently or critically.Footnote7 The special issue article on global university rankings (GURs) exemplifies such ascription of Western origins to disparaged ideas or practices, and of Western agency to their dissemination. Shahjahan et al rightly point up how ‘pressures to conform to a largely arbitrary and Anglocentric set of performance indicators’ have warped higher education (S55), but ignore the agency of non-Western elites (and consumers) in promoting such indicators (see below). Claiming that most arguments for reform of GURs ‘ask only for a change of game rules rather than for game change’ (S64), they disregard critiques of metrics by numerous Western scholars from Andreski (Citation1972) to Wolf (Citation2002), Sandel (Citation2012) and Muller (Citation2018).Footnote8 Having portrayed the fetish for metrics as peculiarly ‘Western,’ they relate it to the dominance in ‘the academy’ of an ‘onto-epistemic grammar’ that ‘intellectualise[s] existence [and] prioritise[s] logical coherence and argumentation’ (S59). If a dysfunctional Western episteme is to blame, it follows (logically) that non-Western cultures may offer healthier alternative visions. We are therefore offered insights from the Dagara people of northern Ghana, who give prominence to ‘elders’ and ‘ancestral knowledge,’ believe that ‘the material is just the spiritual taking on form’ (S57),Footnote9 and view with scepticism the ‘restlessness’ of Westerners and their naïve faith in ‘progress’ (S62). The Dagara, we are told, may thus ‘be concerned’ about our capacity to ‘promote deep existential learning and sustained collective well-being’ (S65). However, the contrast between Dagara ethics and those underlying GURs does not demonstrate that Western culture in toto is inherently or uniformly instrumentalist and antipathetic to sustainability. Observations concerning the distortions of metrics and the unsustainability of a competitive, individualist ethos are commonly made by Western educational researchers and organisations such as UNESCO (Morris Citation2016; MGIEP Citation2017). Invoking indigenous African wisdom in this context serves primarily to posit a spurious and essentialising contrast between sagacious, holistic non-Western traditions and intrinsically dysfunctional ‘Western modernity.’ The underlying implication is that ‘Westerners’ and ‘non-Westerners’ inhabit radically divergent epistemic universes to begin with – or at least did so in some idyllic age before the non-West was blighted by Western colonialism and ‘epistemic violence’. But do (or did) they? Rejecting claims of ‘some radical dissonance between “Western” and “Eastern” (or generally non-Western) thinking,’ the Indian scholar Amartya Sen writes that ‘there are many differences in reasoning within the West, and within the East, but it would be altogether fanciful to think of a united West confronting “quintessentially eastern” priorities.’ Instead, he argues, ‘similar – or closely linked – ideas of justice, fairness, responsibility, duty, goodness and rightness have been pursued in many different parts of the world’ (Citation2010, xiv). This, however, is precisely the kind of dichotomy presented by the discussion in the CER special issue of ‘coloniality’ as a quintessentially Western quality. Here the contributors fall into the ‘trap’ that Goody identifies when he remarks that ‘a hidden ethnocentric risk is to be eurocentric about ethnocentricity’ (Citation2006, 5). A characteristic shared by this ‘anti-paternalist Eurocentrism’ with the ‘paternalist’ variety is to exaggerate, for better or (in this case) worse, the impact of Western influence. But in Asia, even during the height of Western dominance in the ‘long nineteenth century’, ‘the real story,’ according to the historian John Darwin, ‘is one of Asian persistence, and not of Asian defeat’ (Citation2008, 496; cited by Stuenkel Citation2016, 55). Most notably, China not only maintained its statehood in the face of the Western onslaught, but emerged from the ‘century of humiliation’ with its imperial borders largely intact. Even the British Raj, despite its enormous and enduring influence on the political geography, governance and societies of modern South Asia, operated largely through forms of indirect rule, involving manipulation rather than obliteration of indigenous culture. But in contemporary India, China and other parts of Asia, it has been convenient for elites to invoke the dichotomy of Western colonialism and indigenous victimhood, and attribute various ills to continuing Western ‘hegemonism.’ It also suits autocrats to dismiss notions such as ‘democracy,’ ‘human rights’ and ‘civil liberties’ as alien Western ideas wholly or partially incompatible with ‘Asian values’ – the sort of argument Sen dubs the ‘Lee thesis’ (after Singapore’s former leader, Lee Kuan-yew) (Sen Citation1999). The same tactic helps disguise or distract from homegrown forms of ethnocentrism, often allied to projects of internal colonialism that feed off, parallel and, in many cases, predate Western legacies. Highlighting and critiquing these forms of non-Western ‘coloniality’ is particularly urgent at a time when China’s government, for example, is blaming its problems in Hong Kong on a mixture of past indoctrination and present interference by ‘Western colonialists’ – all the while imposing an ever more stringent form of neocolonial domination on restive populations from Xinjiang to the shores of the South China Sea. Civilising missions and ‘epistemic violence’ – Western and non-Western The CER contributors argue that Western cultural or intellectual influence on the ‘non-West’, since it often takes place in a context of power imbalance, should be construed as ‘epistemic violence.’ But there are a number of problems with this view. First, it blurs the important distinction between actual violence and the so-called ‘epistemic’ variety (see discussion of China below). This example of ‘concept creep’ ironically echoes the virulent identity politics of the contemporary USA (Lukianoff and Haidt Citation2018). There, conflating speech acts that some might construe as insulting, demeaning or even mildly objectionable with acts of ‘violence’ has fed a culture of victimhood and ‘safetyism’ that threatens open academic debate. In deploying the term ‘epistemic violence’ with such enthusiasm, the contributors thus evince a mindset peculiarly prevalent at the core of the contemporary ‘West,’ in the USA. A second problem relates to how or where to draw the line between the exchange of ideas and the deployment of culture as a tool of political dominance. Even when cultural influence is clearly allied to the pursuit of political or economic control, as it frequently has been, does this necessarily imply loss of agency on the part of those borrowing or adapting ‘foreign’ ideas? For example, are anti-colonial activists invoking ‘Western’ discourses of democracy or liberty mere dupes of Eurocentric ‘epistemic violence,’ or witnesses to the cross-cultural appeal of such ideas? Indeed, is not the reality of that appeal – for example, in societies such as Hong Kong and Taiwan today – a reflection of the fact that such ideas are not intrinsically or uniquely ‘Western’ at all?