Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Eurocentrism K
1NC Shell
1NC Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism shapes traditional policymaking knowledge
production the state, and democratic processes are
universalized and spread with policies like the plan
Frankzi, University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law,
Graduate Student, 12
(Hannah, Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld University, Universitat
Bielefeld, Eurocentrism, http://elearning.unibielefeld.de/wikifarm/fields/ges_cias/field.php/Main/Unterkapitel52, Accessed:
7/3/13, LPS.)
Links
Topic Links
Knowledge Production
Eurocentrism shapes traditional policymaking knowledge
production the state, and democratic processes are
universalized and spread with policies like the plan
Frankzi, University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law,
Graduate Student, 12
(Hannah, Center for InterAmerican Studies, Bielefeld University, Universitat
Bielefeld, Eurocentrism, http://elearning.unibielefeld.de/wikifarm/fields/ges_cias/field.php/Main/Unterkapitel52, Accessed:
7/3/13, LPS.)
Epistemology
The Eurocentric worldview of the Aff compromises their
epistemology because it is a hegemonic and dominating lens.
It precludes the possibility of rational analysis.
Quijano, Peruvian Sociologist, 2k
(Anibal, Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed the
concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been influential in the fields
of post-colonial studies and critical theory, 2000, Duke University Press, Coloniality
of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,
http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
The intellectual conceptualization of the process of modernity produced a
perspective of knowledge and a mode of producing knowledge that gives a
very tight account of the character of the global model of power:
colonial/modern, capitalist, and Eurocentered. This perspective and
concrete mode of producing knowledge is Eurocentrism.19 Eurocentrism is,
as used here, the name of a perspective of knowledge whose systematic formation
began in Western Europe before the middle of the seventeenth century, although
some of its roots are, without doubt, much older. In the following centuries this
perspective was made globally hegemonic, traveling the same course as the
dominion of the European bourgeois class. Its constitution was associated with
the specific bourgeois secularization of European thought and with the
experiences and necessities of the global model of capitalist
(colonial/modern) and Eurocentered power established since the
colonization of America. This category of Eurocentrism does not involve all of the
knowledge of history of all of Europe or Western Europe in particular. It does not
refer to all the modes of knowledge of all Europeans and all epochs. It is instead a
specific rationality or perspective of knowledge that was made globally
hegemonic, colonizing and overcoming other previous or different
conceptual formations and their respective concrete knowledges, as much
in Europe as in the rest of the world. In the framework of this essay I propose to
discuss some of these issues more directly related to the experience of Latin
America, but, obviously, they do not refer only to Latin America.
Research
Research is directly linked to European imperialism ensures
the suppression of indigenous peoples
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples, pg. 1-2, JZ)
From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and
choose to privilege, the term 'research' is inextricably linked to European
imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, 'research', is probably one of
the dirtiest words in the indigenous world's vocabulary. When mentioned in
many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it
raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous
people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific
research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a
powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples. It
is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that
someone measured our 'faculties' by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet
seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought
offends our sense of who and what we are.1 It galls us that Western
researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to
know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It
appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our
ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then
simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas
and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own
culture and-own nations. It angers us when-practices linked to the last
century, and the centuries before that, are still employed to deny the validity of
indigenous peoples claim to existence, to land and territories, to the right
of self-determination, to the survival of our languages and forms of
cultural knowledge, to our natural resources and systems for living within
our environments.
This collective memory of imperialism has been perpetuated through the
ways in which knowledge about indigenous peoples was collected,
classified and then represented in various ways back to the West, and
then, through the eyes of the West, back to those who have been
colonized. Edward Said refers to this process as a Western discourse about the
Other which is supported by 'institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery,
doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles'.2 According to Said, this
process has worked partly because of the constant interchange between
the scholarly and the imaginative construction of ideas about the Orient. The
scholarly construction, he argues, is supported by a corporate institution which
'makes statements about it [the Orient], authorising views of it, describing it, by
teaching about it, settling it, ruling over it'.3 In these acts both the formal
scholarly pursuits of knowledge and the informal, imaginative, anecdotal
constructions of the Other are intertwined with each other and with the
activity of research. This book identifies research as a significant site of struggle
Research ensures the divide between the West and the Other
as a tool of imperialism
Smith, University of Waikato indigenous education professor, 7
(Linda Tuhiwai, 2007, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples, pg. 7-8, JZ)
Part of the project of this book is researching back in the tradition of 'writing back'
or 'talking back', that characterizes much of the post-colonial or anti-colonial
literature.10 It has involved a 'knowing-ness of the colonizer* and a recovery of
ourselves, an analysis of colonialism, and a struggle for self-determination.
Research is one of the ways in which the underlying code of imperialism
and colonialism is both regulated and realized. It is regulated through the
formal rules of individual scholarly disciplines and scientific
paradigms, and the institutions that support them (including the state).
It is realized in the myriad of representations and ideological
constructions of the Other in scholarly and 'popular' works, and in the
principles which help to select and recontextualize those constructions in such
things as the media, official histories and school curricula. Ashis Nandy argues that
the structures of colonialism contain rules by which colonial encounters
occur and are 'managed'.11 The different ways in which these encounters
happen and are managed are different realizations of the underlying rules
and codes which frame in the broadest sense what is possible and what is
impossible. In a very real sense research has been an encounter between the
West and the Other. Much more is known about one side of those encounters
than is known about the other side. This book reports to some extent on views that
are held and articulated by 'the other sides'. The first part of the book explores
topics around the theme of imperialism, research and knowledge. They can be read
at one level as a narrative about a history of research and indigenous peoples but
make much more sense if read as a series of intersecting and overlapping essays
around a theme.
Resolution
The topic itself poses the wrong question
Besse, CUNY City College Professor, 4
(Susan K., Professor in the City College division of the CUNY agency, 2004, Hispanic
American Historical Review 84.3 (2004) 411-422, Placing Latin America in Modern
World History Textbooks,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hispanic_american_historical_review/summary/v084/84.
3besse.html, Accessed 7/5/13, NC)
The recent trend in world history to prioritize the theme of technology and
environment is not one that will give us tools to integrate better the
history of Latin American societies into the global narrative. Nor will big
history. I find it interesting and stimulating to ask the sorts of questions that
underlie big history, but these should not be the ones that frame world
history curricula. The search by two of the leading proponentsFred Spier and
Jared Diamond for a single, all-encompassing theoretical framework that
can unify all knowledge is illusory and dangerous. Moreover, the answers to
the big questions they posewhich falsely claim greater scientific merit by
drawing on hard data and subordinating culture to the realm of the epiphenomenal
are not ones that can help us in the contemporary world to explain such
short-term phenomenon as racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, rapidly
shifting patterns of imperial power, and so on. In short, these frameworks of
analysis do not contribute to our understanding of our near and distant
neighbors nor to imagining how to build stable and just societies.22 We
need to ask questions that will make inquiry into the histories and
cultures of all the worlds peoples including Latin Americansrelevant.
The historical experience of Latin America since 1492 mirrors the global present, in
which the multiple pasts of Native Americans, Europeans, Africans, and Asians have
collided and intertwined, producing increasingly integrated, yet heterogeneous,
modern societies. That Latin America cannot be neatly defined as either
Western or non-Western should not be seen as a problem. Rather, the
problem lies in paradigms that naturalize and universalize the experiences
of Europe and that rank the societies of the world according to the degree to which
they achieved the technological advancement and social and political modernity of
Europe. Only when we frame new questions that move beyond strongly
materialist and developmentalist measures of historical influence and
significance will Latin America seem relevant. No amount of pressure for
equal attention can substitute for a paradigm shift that charts
intellectually compelling paths for how to write a culturally sensitive,
socially inclusive world history: one that asks how major global
transformations have been experienced by people whose impact has been
deemed insignificant and that gives priority to analyzing gender, race,
racial mixture, and cultural syncretism. As we move in this direction, Latin
American voices will begin to count for more than a few distracting passages.
USFG
State representations distance us from real world
representations of politics the policymaking paradigm
guarantees imperialism
Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor
Communication, 8
[Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Rhetoric PhD & Prof @ Pitt, and the most competitively
successful black woman in CEDA history, The Harsh Realities Of Acting Black:
How African-American Policy Debaters Negotiate Representation Through Racial
Performance And Style, http://www.comm.pitt.edu/faculty/documents/reidbrinkley_shanara_r_200805_phd.pdf, accessed 7/7/13)
Mitchell observes that the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a
sense of detachment associated with the spectator posture.115 In other words, its
participants are able to engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from
the events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around terms like
torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations can only
serve to distance the debaters from real world participation in the political
contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks:
the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered
irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were .
The relationship was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such.
When we blithely call for United States Federal Government policymaking,
we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that establishes our place on
this continent. We cannot wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated
everyday in our name simply by refusing to acknowledge these
implications (emphasis in original).116
The objective stance of the policymaker is an impersonal or imperialist
persona. The policymaker relies upon acceptable forms of evidence, engaging in logical discussion,
producing rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters note, such a stance is
integrally linked to the normative, historical and contemporary practices
of power that produce and maintain varying networks of oppression . In
other words, the discursive practices of policy-oriented debate are
developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege. Thus,
these practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony .
Economic Engagement
Economic engagement demonstrates a drive to control
uncivilized countries this justifies further attempts to
Americanize already independent countries
Peoples Daily, 63
(Peoples Daily, October 22, 1963, Foreign languages Press, Apologists Of NeoColonialism,
http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/polemic/neocolon.htm, Accessed
7/5/13, IGM)
The facts are clear. After World War II the imperialists have certainly not given
up colonialism, but have merely adopted a new form, neo-colonialism. An
important characteristic of such neo-colonialism is that the imperialists have
been forced to change their old style of direct colonial rule in some areas
and to adopt a new style of colonial rule and exploitation by relying on the
agents they have selected and trained. The imperialists headed by the United
States enslave or control the colonial countries and countries which have
already declared their independence by organizing military blocs, setting up
military bases, establishing federations or communities, and fostering puppet
regimes. By means of economic aid or other forms, they retain these
countries as markets for their goods, sources of raw material and outlets
for their export of capital, plunder the riches and suck the blood of the
people of these countries. Moreover, they use the United Nations as an
important tool for interfering in the internal affairs of such countries and for
subjecting them to military, economic and cultural aggression. When they are
unable to continue their rule over these countries by peaceful means, they
engineer military coups detat, carry out subversion or even resort to direct armed
intervention and aggression. The United States is most energetic and cunning
in promoting neo-colonialism. With this weapon, the U.S. imperialists are trying
hard to grab the colonies and spheres of influence of other imperialists and to
establish world domination. This neo-colonialism is a more pernicious and
sinister form of colonialism.
(Anibal, a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed
the concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been influential in the
fields of post-colonial studies and critical theory, 2000, Coloniality of Power,
Eurocentrism, and Latin America, P. 558,
www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
The Nation-State One of the clearest examples of this tragedy of
equivocations in Latin Amer- ica is the history of the so-called national
question: the problem of the mod- ern nation-state in Latin America. I will
attempt here to review some basic 557 Quijano . Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin
America issues of the national question in relation to Eurocentrism and the
coloniality of power, which, as far as I know, is a perspective that has not been fully
explored. 25 State formations in Europe and in the Americas are linked and
distinguished by coloniality of power. Nations and states are an old
phenomenon. However, what is currently called the modern nation-state
is a very specific experience. It is a society where, within a space of
domination, power is organized with some important degree of democratic
relations (as democratic as possible in a power structure), basically in the
control of labor, resources, products, and public authority. The society is
nationalized because democratized, and therefore the character of the state is as
national and as democratic as the power existing within such a space of domination.
Thus a modern nation-state involves the modern institutions of citizenship and
political democracy, but only in the way in which citizenship can function as legal,
civil, and political equality for socially unequal people (Quijano 1998a). A nationstate is a sort of individualized society between others. Therefore, its members can
feel it as an identity. However, societies are power structures. Power
articulates forms of dispersed and diverse social existence into one
totality, one society. Every power structure always involves, partially or
totally, the imposition by some (usually a particular small group) over the rest.
Therefore, every possible nation-state is a structure of power in the same
way in which it is a product of power. It is a structure of power by the ways in
which the following elements have been articulated: ( a ) the disputes over the
control of labor and its resources and products; ( b ) sex and its resources and
products; ( c ) authority and its specific violence; ( d ) intersubjectivity and
knowledge. Nevertheless, if a modern nation-state can be expressed by its members
as an identity, it is not only because it can be imagined as a community. 26 The
members need to have something real in common. And this, in all modern nationstates, is a more or less democratic participation in the distribution of the control of
power. This is the specific manner of homogenizing people in the modern
nation-state. Every homogenization in the modern nation-state is, of course,
partial and temporary and consists of the common democratic participation in the
generation and management of the institutions of public authority and its specific
mechanisms of violence. This authority is exercised in every sphere of social
Toward
Toward describes a relationship that is aid from one to an
irrational other. This entrenches paternalism, which reflects
innate Eurocentric practices and discourses
Baaz Gothenburg University, PhD Peace and Development
Research, 5
(Maria Eriksson, Zed Books, The Paternalism of Partnership, Google book, p.153-155,
accessed 7-6-13 KR)
(Damian, Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE, Edited by Damian Baca
and Victor Villanueva, p. 1 -2)
The Americas continue to contain the legacy of classical colonialism and remain tied
to the economic dependencies of neocolonialism, so that the "post" of
postcolonialism reflects more of a wish than a reality for too many of the Western
Hemisphere. Since the time of Columbus, colonial agendas and policies
have engendered their own rhetorics of justification and explanation.
European modernity presumed a universal hegemony over political
ideology, cultural meanings, and historical narrative. This legacy can be
heard today in the discourses of "advanced/ primitive,"
"development/underdevelopment," "modern/premodern," or
"citizen/alien," terms that organize geopolitical locations by their
purported relationship to the vanguard narrative of Occidentalism. But
rhetorical traditions of the Americas and the Caribbean evidence a rich discourse of
critique of Anglo- and Eurocentric ideologies. In a real sense, modernity begins
with the encounter of the "New World" and the creation of a new "Other
Within," so that rhetorical practices of the Americas stand in a unique
position vis-a-vis the development of that modernityand its
concomitants of colonialism, of racialized subjectivities, of the crisis of
European reason, and of late global capitalism. Argentine liberation
philosopher Enrique Dussel points out that the more recent metanarratives
of Western thoughtpostmodernism, transnationalism, and globalization
are themselves still mired in an Occidental teleology that imagines
European and Anglo-American cultures to be the sources of historical
advance, theoretical transformation, and literary vision.1 Conversations in
Rhetoric and Composition Studies that engage in these topics need to take notice
and understand this critique.
(Kevin, 4/20/13, The Good, the Bad, and the Benevolent Interventionist: U.S. Press
and Intellectual Distortions of the Latin American Left
http://www.nytexaminer.com/2013/04/the-good-the-bad-and-the-benevolentinterventionist-u-s-press-and-intellectual-distortions-of-the-latin-american-left/, date
accessed 7/5/13 IGM)
Mexico
Our actions towards Mexico depict a deep-seated Eurocentric
mindset, ignoring the cultures and rights of the people there.
Mexicomatters, 4
Venezuela
Venezuela is in a battle of fighting against Eurocentrism, any
increase in engagement would distrust the fight
Augusto Baldi, advisor to the Brazilian regional federal court,
12 (Csar, 2-6-12, Critical Legal Thinking, New Latin American Constitutionalism:
Challeneging Eurocentrism & Decolonizing History
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/02/06/new-latin-american-constitutionalismchallenging-eurocentrism-decolonizing-history/ accessed 7-4-13 KR).
According to Viciano Pastor and Dalmau Martinez, this new constitutionalism would be characterized by: a) the substitution of constitutional continuity for a break with the previous system, while strengthening, in a
symbolic sense, the political dimension of the Constitution; b) the innovative potential of the texts, seeking national integration and a new form of
institutionalism; c) foundations based on principles, rather than rules; d)
the extension of the constitutional text itself, as a consequence of the
constitutional past as well as of the complexity of the subject matter, but
communicated in accessible language; e) a ban on constituted powers controlling their own capability for constitutional reform and, therefore, a
greater degree of rigidity, dependent on the new constituting process; f)
seeking instruments that rebuild the relationship between sovereignty
and government, with participatory democracy complementing the system
of representation; g) an extensive bill of rights, incorporating international treaties and integrating marginalized sectors; h) breaking with the
predominance of diffuse control of constitutionalism in favour of focused
control, including mixed formulas; i) a new model of economic constitutions, alongside a strong commitment to Latin American integration, not
just in economic terms.
The two authors analysis appears on occasions to identify the Colombian Constitution (1991) as the start of the cycle, but in other instances declares it to be
that of Venezuela (1999). As a consequence, they end up placing within a
single process three distinct cycles of pluralist constitutionalism,
described well by Raquel Yrigoyen: a) multicultural constitutionalism
(19821988), which introduces the concept of cultural diversity and
recognizes specific indigenous rights; b) pluricultural constitutionalism
(19882005), which develops the concept of a multiethnic nation, and
pluricultural State, incorporating a wide range of indigenous rights, for
those of African origin and other groups, especially in response to ILO
Convention 169, while at the same time implementing neoliberal policies,
with fewer social rights and more market flexibility; c) plurinational constitutionalism (20062009), in the context of the adoption of the United
Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and which proposes the re-founding of the State, with explicit recognition of the
thousand-year-old roots linking indigenous groups to the land, and discussing the end of colonialism. And it is precisely the establishment of a new
constitutional paradigm, following the examples of Ecuador and Bolivia, that the
aforementioned constitutionalists do not seem to recognize. In this sense, Raquel
Energy Development
US self-interest has always been the driver of Latin American
policy, energy development is just a new round of imperialism
Leonard, Professor of History at the University of North
Florida, 86
(Dr. Thomas M., Central America: A Microcosm of U.S. Cold War Policy
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1986/julaug/leonard.html, date accessed 7/5/13 IGM)
In contrast, Lyndon Johnson gave support to those governments in sympathy
with U.S. policies, which meant governments of the right and extreme
right. This tendency was more pronounced after the 1965 Dominican Republic crisis
and the appointment of Thomas C. Mann as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin
American Affairs. Mann was emphatic: communism in the Western Hemisphere
was intolerable because it threatened U.S. national security.14 The
communist issue intensified as a result of Fidel Castro's rise to power in
Cuba which generated fear that his revolution would spread throughout the
hemisphere. For its part, the United States forced the isolation of Cuba from
hemispheric affairs, supported anti-Castro forces, and even sponsored
assassination plots. In response to this new communist threat, the United States
implemented the Alliance for Progress in 1961. In return for financial support, Latin
American governments pledged themselves to agrarian and tax reformsmeasures
not welcomed by Latin elites. However, little significant progress was made in
tearing down the vestiges of traditional society. Moreover, because of civil
disruptions at home, the agony of Vietnam, and the perceived lessened
threat of Fidel Castro by mid-decade, the United States lost interest in the
Alliance for Progress, which passed quietly in 1971.15
The drift away from Latin America continued under Presidents Richard Nixon
and Gerald Ford. Inter-American affairs were relegated to a veritable limbo.
Trade, not aid, was the guidepost. Agreements with the Soviet Union, the
misadventures of Ch Guevara, and Castro's growing dependence on the dtente
minded Soviet Union lessened the threat to security and, coupled with the 1973
U.S. supported overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, lessened the
communist threat to the hemisphere. Cambodia, China, and the Middle
East in global affairs, plus Watergate on the domestic scene, were more
important than Latin America. "Benign neglect" best described U.S. policy
toward Latin America during the first half of the 1970s. Without pressure
from the north, right-wing military dictatorships became commonplace in the south.
The energy crisis focused new attention on Latin America. Rich in natural
resources, including oil, Latin America became more important to the
United States. Henry Kissinger recognized this fact in 1976 and began a
new dialogue with Latin American nations. President Jimmy Carter recognized
the new realities too. He accepted the report by the Center for Inter-American
Relations (commonly known as the Linowitz Report) that Latin America had
achieved a degree of independence from the United States and that the outmoded
policies of domination and paternalism should be rejected. The 1977 Panama Canal
treaties were evidence of this change in U.S. thinking.16
Oil Development
Oil development is part of the Eurocentric logic that ignores
indigenous pleas to leave them alone and exploits the entirety
of Latin America
Stetson, Boise State Assistant Professor, 11
(George, PhD, Assistant Professor, Boise State University, 2011, Ethnicity from
Various Angles and Through Varied Lenses: Yesterday's Today in Latin America,
Indigenous Resistance to Oil Development, Google Books, Page 225, Accessed
7/10/13, NC)
There is still much work to do in terms of understanding the positions of
indigenous peoples. Part of the difficulty is related to the level of diversity within
the indigenous movement. Furthermore, indigenous peoples are often weary of
(and take offense to) attempts to speak for all indigenous peoples. However, some
of the difficulty also lies in the degree of sophistication in many of indigenous
responses, arguments, and positions. This sophistication- combined with the
state's Eurocentric mindset -has made it increasingly difficult for state to
take indigenous claims seriously.
FINAL COMMENTS: EUROCENTRIC MODERNITY AND THE ERASURE OF INDIGENOUS
POLITICS
My argument is that the Peruvian state finds it difficult to understand
indigenous political positions because they are stuck in a Eurocentric
conception of modernity, which owes its existence to Europe, not to the
realities, experiences, and histories of the indigenous peoples of Latin
America. Eurocentric modernity is based on universal values, a teleological
notion of development - the apex being Europe and the United States and a modern-capitalist ( and socialist) framework that values land and
natural resources as exploitable material for the benefit of the modern
nation. Following this logic, it is difficult for the state to understand how
anyone could oppose oil development , especially "poor" people from
the Amazon, which is perhaps why Garda repeatedly argues that indigenous
ideological backwardness is one of the main obstacles to Peruvian development
and also why the president of Perupetro finds it difficult to understand why
"poor" indigenous peoples might oppose oil development.
Oil/Resource Link
Mass scale expansion of natural resource exploitation was
started by Eurocentrism and continues to be fueled by that
same epistemology today; the end point of this is empirically
slavery and racism.
Kellecioglu, International economist, 10
(Deniz, International economist, Real-World Economics Review, issue no. 52, Why
some countries are poor and some rich a non-Eurocentric view,
http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue52/whole52.pdf, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
Western European kingdoms went imperial because they needed to - at the end of
the fifteenth century Europe was in less good shape than other parts of the world.
The continent had had its population size halved through long periods of epidemics
like the socalled Black Death (Crosby 1999). Before this time period, poverty and
richness seem to have been about at the same levels between societies (Maddison
2001). Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that imperial ambitions
and hegemony are not exclusive to Europeans. World history reveals that
human groups have for long gone imperial against each other all over the
world. In more recent times we have had the English, French, Dutch, Russian and
others going imperial from Europe; in Asia we have had the Mongols, Chinese,
Japanese, Turkish, Arabs and many others going imperial; in Africa there have been
the empires of Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Ashanti, Zulu and several others. In
America there were the Aztecs, Inca and the Maya civilizations in particular, waging
imperial wars and rule. In our context, this means European colonizers are not
particularly vicious or intelligent, since every set of ethnic groups have
been involved in colonial endeavour. In parallel, colonised people are not
particularly kind or less intelligent, since every set of ethnic groups has been
subject to colonial rule.
However, the expansion of Western Europe became significantly different
from other colonial processes. In relevance to our context, the process
particularly included:
Global proportions,
Ecological imperialism,
Mass permanent settlements,
Slaves embodied solely by darker skinned people, and
Colour-coded racism.
Considering the first point listed above, before the outreach of the Iberian
kingdoms, most imperial ambitions where continental or regional. Perhaps
it was not a coincidence that it was the Spanish and the Portuguese who initiated
this extraordinary expansion. Their geographical location is 'far out' from
continental Europe and the Mediterranean shores, hampering beneficial
interactions. In addition, the kingdoms had significant hatred for the Muslims of
northern Africa, thus impeding potentially beneficial trade (Landes 1998). Perhaps
the curiosity incentive was higher for naval exploration in such a location with
surrounding sea. Of course, it was not their intention to discover a 'new'
continent. They where lucky to do so, particularly when it turned out that
(George, PhD, Assistant Professor, Boise State University, 2012, Sage Publications,
Oil Politics and Indigenous Resistance in the Peruvian Amazon: The Rhetoric of
Modernity Against the Reality of Coloniality,
http://jed.sagepub.com/content/21/1/76.abstract, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
Modernity/Coloniality and Eurocentric Development
Modernity/coloniality (M/C) is a theoretical approach inspired by the work
of scholars, mostly from Latin America, including Walter Mignolo (Argentina),
Enrique Dussel (Mexico), Anibal Quijano (Peru), Arturo Escobar (Colombia), who
claim that the idea of modernity, along with its corollaries development
and modernization, are heavily influenced by a Eurocentric perspective.
Here eurocentric modernity is guided by a logic that informs political, economic, and
social thought and is not only predominant in mainstream institutions like the World
Bank, IMF, and the WTO, but also permeates political institutions like the modern
nation-state.5
Modernity is most often associated with the intellectual effort on the part
of Enlightenment thinkers to develop objective science, to accumulate
knowledge, and to dominate and control nature. For Harvey, modernity is
related to the pursuit of human emancipation by free and autonomous individuals,
leading to rational forms of social organization and thought that liberate humans
from irrational notions of myth, religion, and superstition (1989, p. 12). Modernity,
Science Cooperation
Marginalization of local scientific traditions
Cueto Professor in the School of Public Health at the Universidad
Peruana Cavetano, and Esguerra, Ph.D History Professor at The
University of Texas at Austin, 9
(Marcos, an historian and a professor in the School of Public Health at the
Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Per. and Jorge Caizares, s the
Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin,
2009, History of Science Society, Latin America,
http://www.hssonline.org/publications/NonWesternPub/Latin_America.html,
Accessed: 7/3/13, LPS.)
Marginality, traditional values, scarce demand from local economic forces,
and foreign dependence are considered factors that contribute to the
meager societal support for or appreciation of scientists in contemporary
Latin America. But during the past fifty years, a number of countries have
demonstrated that science can evolve under adverse conditions. For example,
during the 1950s, Argentina and Brazil created national councils of science and
technology. In the following decade, Venezuela founded a major center for scientific
research called the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientficas. Argentina
has had a consistent nuclear policy since the 1950s and developed a nuclear power
potential in the region. Yet Latin America still must struggle to overcome
isolation, lack of international visibility, and absence of a continuous
scientific tradition. The public largely fails to appreciate that research is needed
to achieve development. Administrative and political structures that encourage
scientists to accomplish their work are undeveloped. Moreover, a significant
proportion of scientists continue to depend on training abroad, which encourages a
brain drain and disrupts the continuity of research. Another important theme
addressed in this section will be the response of Latin American physicians and
scientists to the challenges of pandemics of Cholera and AIDS.
Development
Their model of economics leads to abuses of power that cause
unending exacerbations of impoverishment and poverty.
Trainer, U of New South Wales Conjoint Lecturer, 9
(Ted, Dr. Ted Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences,
University of New South Wales, 2009, Social Work, University of NSW, THE SIMPLER
WAY: WORKING FOR TRANSITION FROM CONSUMER SOCIETY TO A SIMPLER, MORE
COOPERATIVE, JUST AND ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/OUREMPIRE.htm, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
"The impoverished and long abused masses of Latin Americawill not stay
quietly on the farms or in the slums unless they are terribly afraidthe
rich get richer only because they have the guns. The rich include a great
many US companies and individuals, which is why the United States has
provided the guns." Chomsky and Herman, 1979, p.3. "No socialist or
communist government giving top priority to the needs of its people would,
if it had any choice in the matter, willingly sell natural resources, especially the
produce of its soils, at such very low returns to the common people as the
typical Third World government does now. '. . . no democratic government
could permit its country's resources to be developed on terms favourable
to American corporate and government interests." Katsnelson and Kesselman,
1983, p. 234. To repeat, the essential evil within the system is to do with the
extremely uneven shares of wealth received. For instance, the bulk of the wealth
generated by coffee production now goes to plantation owners,
transnational corporations, and consumers in rich countries. Coffee
pickers often receive less than 1% of the retail value of the coffee they pick.
Any genuinely "socialist" or "nationalist" government would drastically redistribute
those shares, or convert the land to food production, if it could, meaning that people
in rich countries would then get far less coffee etc., or pay much higher prices.
Hence we again arrive at the basic conclusion: a more just deal cannot be given to
the people in the Third World unless rich countries accept a marked reduction in the
share they receive from wealth generated in the Third World. Any genuinely socialist
government would certainly clamp down on the bonanza terms now granted to
transnational corporations, such as long tax-free periods, few restrictions on
transfers of funds, repressive labour laws, low safety standards, controlled or
banned unions, and weak environmental laws. Even more important is the
taken for granted doctrine that development can only be of what people
with capital will make most profit from, not of the industries that will
benefit most people. (See on appropriate development, Trainer 2000.)
Advantage links
War Impacts
All their impacts are sabre-rattling and seek to justify the
same colonial mindset we criticize. Their model of threat
construction should be rejected.
Said, Columbia University English and Comparative Literature,
3
(Edward, Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature, author
Orientalism, AUGUST 05, 2003, Orientalism 25 Years Later Worldly Humanism v.
the Empire-builders, http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/05/orientalism/,
Accessed 7/5/13, IGM)
Democracy
Attempts to expand democracy to non- democratic nations are
rooted in Orientalism
Sadowski, associate professor, Political Studies and Public
Administration Beirut University, 97
(Yahya, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/52818/william-b-quandt/politicalislam-essays-from-middle-east-report Political Islam: Essays from Middle East
Report, date accessed 7/4/2013 IGM)
The collapse of communism in 1989 and the victory over Iraq in 1991
sparked a wave of triumphal declarations by Western pundits and analysts
who believed that all viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism
had now been exhausted and discredited. Some then tried to sketch foreign
policy appropriate to the new world order. A consistent theme of this new
thinking was that the peoples of the developing countries must now
acknowledge that liberal democracy is the only plausible form of
governance in the modern world. Accordingly, support for democratization
should henceforth be a central objective of US diplomacy and foreign
assistance. This trend was not welcomed by all. Autocrats in the Arab world,
particularly the rules of the Gulf states, were appalled t the thought that
Washington might soon be fanning the flames of republican sentiment. The
prevailing democratic system in the world is not suitable for us in this
region, for our peoples composition and traits are different from the traits
of that world, declared King Fahd of Saudi Arabia in March 1992. The kings
stance suits many US policy makers just fine. Former secretary of defense and CIA
chief James Schlesinger spoke for more than himself recently when he asked
whether we seriously desire to prescribe democracy as the proper form of
government for other societies. Perhaps the issues is most clearly posed in the
Islamic world. Do we seriously want to change the institutions in Saudi Arabia? The
brief answer is no- over the years we have sought to preserve those
institutions, sometimes in preference to more democratic forces coursing
throughout the region.
Regional Instability
The Latin American war impacts that they read come from a
flawed understanding of the politics in Latin America and what
has necessitated those politics. Their authors look at Latin
America from a Western Perspective and jump at any chance to
make Latin America look barbaric and uncivil.
Remmer, U of Chicago PhD, 91
(Karen L. Remmer, PhD University of Chicago, Specialties: Comparative Politics,
Political Economy, Political Institutions, 1991, Comparative Politics, Vol. 23, No. 4,
pp. 479-495, New Wine or Old Bottlenecks? The Study of Latin American
Democracy, http://www.utexas.edu/law/journals/tlr/sources/Issue
%2089.7/Negretto/fn113.remmer.pdf, Accessed 7/5/13, NC)
The development of a more adequate theoretical understanding of Latin
American democracy has been hampered rather than advanced by the
research strategies represented in recent literature: theoretical denial,
voluntarism, barefoot empiricism, and intellectual recycling. The specific
weaknesses of each of these approaches, however, point the way towards opposing
and more constructive strategies for theorizing about democracy in Latin America.
From these signposts, it is possible to suggest an alternate theoretical
agenda to guide the development of future research. The first step
toward constructing a more adequate understanding of Latin American
political democracy is to recognize the need for theoretical revision. To
continue to emphasize the cyclical nature of Latin American politics or the
fragile and epiphenomenal nature of democracy is, in effect, to ignore the
inadequacies of established theory in the face of confounding political
developments: namely, the unheralded collapse of authoritarianism and the
surprising vitality of political democracy in the face of repeated prophecies of
imminent demise. In view of the dismal predictive record established to date, it is
time scholars abandoned ahistorical cyclical theories and authoritarian
political forecasting in favor of research focused on evolving political
realities. The process of democratization that has been underway in Latin
America for more than a decade must be explained, not explained away.
Second, it should be recognized that voluntaristic approaches stressing variables
such as virti and fortuna represent a retreat from theory rather than a solution to
the problems posed by the failure of established approaches and theories. While
shifting levels of analysis often 490 Karen L. Remmer yields significant dividends in
the social sciences, focusing research upon the realm of the contingent and
particular is unlikely to provide much in way of enlightenment. The origin,
functioning, and breakdown of democracy in Latin America can not be
understood without reference to sociopolitical forces and processes that
are institutional, societal, and international in scope. An emphasis on
voluntarism results in a neglect of these levels of analysis and thus to the
discarding of the substance of theory as derived from the analysis of politics in the
rest of the world. Latin America ends up being portrayed as a region in
which political choices are unconstrained by social forces or public
opinion, leaders are unrelated to followers, and political outcomes are the
Regional Leadership
Regional hegemony is a reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine
dictating that the region is ours to own and keep, reinforcing
the worst forms of a Eurocentric paradigm
Thornton, Director of the North American Congress on Latin America
08
(Christy, 10/1,The Monroe Doctrine is Dead; Long Live the Monroe Doctrine! The
United States' "New" Approach to Latin America, Left Turn,
http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/1249, accessed 7/7/13, sbl)
And it's the attempt to get "back in the game"-on the part of both the Bush
Administration and the two major candidates vying to succeed him-that should be
cause for concern among activists here in the US. The argument that the
United States has neglected Latin America and has therefore lost its
influence in the region-that while we were looking away, Chvez and his
friends squatted our backyard-misses two obvious realities. First, more
and more Latin Americans, not just Chavistas but citizens from Argentina to
Mexico, have actively rejected policies that marry representative
democracy to neoliberal economics, and have begun to construct
alternatives, from the community to the national and regional level. Second, the
US has made very real interventions during the Bush administration, in the
name of "democracy promotion" and the "war on drugs" and the "war on
terror." It seems highly unlikely that the people of Haiti, Venezuela, Cuba,
Bolivia, Colombia, or Mexico-just to name a few-feel that they've been
"neglected" by a United States that is actively funding right-wing
movements and arming military, paramilitary, and police forces.
Of course, the very idea that the US could be losing Latin America implies
that the region is Washington's to lose in the first place: explicit in the
Monroe Doctrine, which says that the US will never allow a rival power to
challenge its hegemony in Latin America, is a paternalistic disbelief that
Latin America might have the ability to run its own affairs-in Shannon's
term, to occupy its own space. And this is the most crucial point in
understanding the "losing Latin America" debate: even within the fairly
reasonable framework of the CFR task force report, which argues that "Latin
America's fate is largely in Latin America's hands," the inherent challenge being
put forth is how to reoccupy that space-how to bolster the United States'
rapidly diminishing sphere of influence. But in more and more cases
across the region, the Latin American people have risen to defend their
own space through powerful social movements and through electing
leaders as diverse as Evo Morales of Bolivia, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Fernando
Lugo of Paraguay, Cristina Fernndez de Kirchner of Argentina, Michelle Bachelet of
Chile, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and, yes, Hugo Chvez of Venezuela. Despite their
differences, these leaders have all made independence from the United
States part of their agenda in an assertion of economic and political
sovereignty, regardless of Washington's interests. As Latin Americans
seek not just formal representation but social and economic justice from
their democracies, there is less and less space for the imposition of the
Hegemony
Hegemonic discourse obscures otherization and human rights
violations the only answer is to challenge the foundational
logic of hegemony
Miguel, U of Glasgow Masters in Human Rights and
International Politics, 10
Realism/Hegemony
American Realism and Liberalism are empirically racist
western interventionist policies rooted in a Eurocentric
model of international relations
Hobson, University of Sheffield politics and international
relations professor, 12
Terror
Concepts of cultural heterogeneity and terror are inherently
Eurocentric
Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University
and Stam, French University Professor at New York University,
97
(Ella, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University, and has taught, lectured
and written extensively on issues having to do with Eurocentrism and Orientalism,
and Robert, Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University, where he
teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on
French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and
film theory, 1997, Routledge, Unthinking Eurocentrism,
http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAB&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings
%2FUnthinkingEurocentrismIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjC
NGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6WnFAZPF8pes3AW7uuHLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, par. 3, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
Although neoconservatives caricature multiculturalism as calling for the violent
jettisoning of European classics and of "western civilization as an area of study,"2
multiculturalism is actually an assault not on Europe or Europeans but on
Eurocentrism - on the procrustean forcing of cultural heterogeneity into a
single paradigmatic perspective in which Europe is seen as the unique
source of meaning, as the world's center of gravity, as ontological "reality"
to the rest of the world's shadow. Eurocentric thinking attributes to the "West"
an almost providential sense of historical destiny. Eurocentrism, like Renaissance
perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged point. It maps
the world in a cartography that centralizes and augments Europe while literally
"belittling" Africa.3 The "East" is divided into "Near," "Middle," and "Far," making
Europe the arbiter of spatial evaluation, just as the establishment of
Greenwich Mean Time produces England as the regulating center of temporal
measurement. Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into the "West and the
Rest"4 and organizes everyday language into binaristic hierarchies
implicitly flattering to Europe: our "nations," their "tribes"; our "religions,"
their "superstitions"; our "culture," their "folklore"; our "art," their
"artifacts"; our "demonstrations," their "riots"; our "defense," their
"terrorism."
Discourse links
Calling US America
The term America has its roots in indigenous languages the
use of it reinforces imperialisms ability to homogenize culture
Forbes, late Professor Emeritus and Chair, Native American
Studies, UC Davis, 95
(Professor Jack D. Forbes, Powhatan-Delaware, What Do We Mean By America and
American, http://descendantofgods.tripod.com/id111.html, accessed 7/8/13)
Our hemisphere has for quite some time now been known as "America",
being subdivided into North America, Central America, South America, etcetera.
Indigenous peoples have a bit of a problem, however, in that: (1) the United
States and its dominant European-origin citizens have attempted to preempt the terms America and American; and (2) there has been a strong
tendency, especially since the 1780's, to deny to Indigenous Americans
the right to use the name of their own land. As a matter of fact there is a
strong tendency to also deny Native People the use of the name of any
land within America, such as being Brazilian, Mexican, Canadian, and so
on, unless the term "Indian" is also attached, as in "Brazilian Indian"(as
"American Indian" is used instead of "American").
Some people believe that America as a name stems from the mountain
range known as Amerique located in Nicaragua. Others believe that it
stem from a word common to several American languages of the
Caribbean and South America, namely Maraca (pronounced marac, marca,
and maraca). This word, meaning rattle or gourd, is found as a place name in
Venezuela (Maracapana, Maracay, Maracaibo), Trinidad (Maracas), Puerto Rico
(Maracayu, etc.), Brazil (Maraca, Itamaraca) and elsewhere.
Many very early maps of the Caribbean region show an island located to the
northwest of Venezuela (where Nicaragua is actually located) called "Tamaraque"
which has been interpreted as T. amaraque standing for tierra or terra
(land) of Amaraque. All of this is before America first appeared as a name
on the mainland roughly in the area of Venezuela. Most of us have
probably been taught that America as a name is derived from that of
Amerigo Vespucci, a notorious liar and enslaver of Native people.
Strangely enough, Vespucci's first name is more often recorded as
Albrico rather than Amerigo. It may well be that the name America is not
derived from his name but we know for sure that it was first applied to
South America or Central America and not to the area of the United
States.
From the early 1500's until the mid-1700's the only people called
Americans were First Nations People. Similarly the people called Mexicans,
Canadians, Brazilians, Peruvians, etcetera, were all our own Native People.
In 1578, for example, George Best of Britain wrote about "those Americans
and Indians" by which he referred to our Native American ancestors as Americans
and the people off India and Indonesia as Indians. In 1650 a Dutch work referred to
the Algonkians of the Manhattan area as "the Americans or Natives" In 1771 a
Dutch dictionary noted that "the Americans are red in their skins" and so on. As late
Latin America
The history of the term Latin America is one grounded in
European imperialism and subordination of indigenous
peoples.
Mignolo, Duke Professor of English, 6
(Walter D., 2006, The Idea of Latin America, pg. 57-59, accessed 7/3/13, JZ)
Emancipation belonged to the rise of a new social class (the bourgeoisie) whose
members were mostly White, educated in Christian cosmology and in the curriculum
of the Renaissance university, soon to be transformed with the advent of the
Kantian- Humboldtian university of the Enlightenment. One of the consequences
of such ideas of emancipation was that while celebrating the economic
and political emancipation of a secular bourgeoisie from the tutelage both
of the monarchy and of the church (particularly in France, where the separation
of the church and the state was greater than in Germany and England), that same
bourgeoisie and its intelligentsia appointed themselves to take into their
hands the emancipation of non-European people in the rest of the
world. In general, these new directions worked in two different manners:
colonialism and imperialism, direct or indirect . The emergence of
Latinidad and of Latin America, then, is to be understood in relation
to a European history of growing imperialism grounded in a capitalist
economy and the desire to determine the shape of emancipation in the
non-European world.
Latinidad: From the Colonial Creole Baroque Ethos to the National Creole Latin
American Ethos
Latin America is actually a hyphenated concept with the hyphen hidden
under the magic effect of the ontology of a subcontinent. By the midnineteenth century, the idea of America as a whole began to be divided, not
so much in accordance with the emergent nation-states as, rather, according to
their imperial histories, which placed an Anglo America in the North and a Latin
America in the South in the new configuration of the Western Hemisphere. At that
moment, Latin America was the name adopted to identify the restoration
of European Meridional, Catholic, and Latin civilization in South America
and, simultaneously, to reproduce absences (Indians and Afros) that had
already begun during the early colonial period. The history of Latin America
after independence is the variegated history of the local elite, willingly or
not, embracing modernity while Indigenous, Afro, and poor Mestizo/a
peoples get poorer and more marginalized. The idea of Latin America is
that sad one of the elites celebrating their dreams of becoming modern
while they slide deeper and deeper into the logic of coloniality.
The idea of Latin America that came into view in the second half of the nineteenth
century depended in varying degrees on an idea of Latinidad Latinity,
Latinite that was being advanced by France. Latinidad was precisely the
ideology under which the identity of the ex-Spanish and ex-Portuguese colonies was
located (by natives as well as by Europeans) in the new global, modern/ colonial
The term Latin America is rooted in the history of AngloSaxon exploitation of indigenous people
Holloway, UC Davis history professor, 8
(Thomas, Ph.D., Latin American History, UW-Madison, 1974; MA, Ibero-American
Studies, UW-Madison, 1969; BA, Hispanic Civilization, UC Santa Barbara, 1968,
2008, Academia.edu, Latin America: Whats in a Name?,
http://academia.edu/202121/Latin_America_Whats_in_a_Name, accessed 7/4/13, JZ)
These considerations lead to a question central to the label itself: What is Latin
about Latin America? There are several historical and cultural issues that,
in fact, make the term quite problematic. The language of the Iberian groups
engaged in conquest and colonization was not Latin, despite the roots of the
Spanish and Portuguese languages in the Roman occupation of Iberia in ancient
times. While Latin remained the language of the Roman Catholic Church so central
to the Iberian colonization project, there is no apparent connection between
Church Latin and the label Latin America. Christopher Columbus himself,
mistakenly insisting until his death in 1506 that he had reached the eastern edge of
Asia, used the term Indias Occidentales, or the Indias to the West. That term lingers
today, after being perpetuated especially and perhaps ironically by British Colonials,
in the West Indies, the conventional English term for the islands of the Caribbean
Sea eventually colonized by Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
It is commonly known that the more general term America derives from the name
of Amerigo Vespucci (1451?-1512), another navigator of Italian origin who made
several voyages to the Caribbean region and along the coast of northern Brazil from
1497 to 1502. Unlike Columbus, Vespucci concluded that Europeans did not
previously know about the lands he visited in the west, and he thus referred to them
as the New World. In a 1507 map by German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller,
America appears for the first time with that name. While the protocol of European
exploration usually gives primacy to the first discoverer, there would seem to be
some justification for naming the newly known land mass after the navigator who
recognized it as separate from Asia (Amerigo Vespucci) rather than for the first
European to report its existence, but who subsequently insisted that he had
confirmed a new way to reach Asia (Christopher Columbus) (Arciniegas 1990).
In subsequent centuries, Europeans and their colonial descendants applied
the term America to the entire western hemisphere (which half of the globe is
called western and which is called eastern is itself a convention of European
origin). That usage continues today in Latin America, where it is commonly
taught that there is one continent in the western hemisphere: America.
The Liberator Simn Bolvar famously convened a conference in Panama in 1826 to
work toward a union of the American republics. He included all nations of the
hemisphere in the invitation, and it would not have occurred to him to add Latin to
the descriptors, because the term had not yet been invented. When in 1890 the
United States and its commercial and financial allies around Latin America
established the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics, which became the
(H. Micheal, Ph.D., Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, Professor of History,
Arkansas Tech, Fall 2004, World History Association, World History Bulletin,
http://www.thewha.org/bulletins/fall_2004.pdf, Accessed 7/8/13, NC)
Latin Americanism in the United States: the problem of representations
K Affs
Race
Eurocentric colonialism is the root cause of identity binaries
and Otherization
Quijano, sociologist and humanist thinker, 2000
(Anibal, a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed
the concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been influential in the
fields of post-colonial studies and critical theory 2000, Coloniality of Power,
Eurocentrism, and Latin America, P. 533,
www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
What is termed globalization is the culmination of a process that began with the
constitution of America and colo- nial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a
new global power. One of the fundamental axes of this model of power is
the social classification of the worlds population around the idea of race,
a mental construction that ex- presses the basic experience of colonial domination
and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, including its specific
rationality: Eurocentrism. The racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it
has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it
was established. Therefore, the model of power that is globally hegemonic
today presupposes an element of coloniality. In what follows, my primary
aim is to open up some of the theoretically necessary questions America
was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power of global vocation,
and both in this way and by it became the first identity of modernity. Two historical
processes associated in the production of that space/time converged and
established the two fundamental axes of the new model of power. One was the
codification of the differences between conquerors and conquered in the
idea of race, a supposedly different bi- ological structure that placed
some in a natural situation of inferiority to the others. The conquistadors
assumed this idea as the constitutive, found- ing element of the relations of
domination that the conquest imposed. On Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 Copyright
2000 by Duke University Press 533 534 Nepantla this basis, the population of
America, and later the world, was classified within the new model of power. The
other process was the constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its
resources and products. This new structure was an articulation of all
historically known previous structures of control of labor, slavery,
serfdom, small independent commodity pro- duction and reciprocity,
together around and upon the basis of capital and the world market. 3
Race: A Mental Category of Modernity The idea of race, in its modern meaning,
does not have a known history before the colonization of America.
Perhaps it originated in reference to the phenotypic differences between
conquerors and conquered. However, what matters is that soon it was
constructed to refer to the supposed differ- ential biological structures
between those groups. Social relations founded on the category of race
produced new historical social identities in AmericaIndians, blacks, and
mestizos and redefined others. Terms such as Spanish and Portuguese ,
and much later European , which until then indicated only geographic
origin or country of origin, acquired from then on a racial connotation in
Hybridization
Attempts to apply multi-culturism to the region lead to further
Americanization of culture through cross-pollination
Cueto, Professor in the School of Public Health at the
Universidad Peruana Cavetano, and Esguerra, Ph.D History
Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, 9
(Marcos, an historian and a professor in the School of Public Health at the
Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Per. and Jorge Caizares, s the
Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin,
2009, History of Science Society, Latin America,
http://www.hssonline.org/publications/NonWesternPub/Latin_America.html,
Accessed: 7/3/13, LPS.)
Western Philosophy
Eurocentrism permeates much of Western philosophy
Wood, advisory editor of Solidarity.org 1
(Ellen Meiksins, an advisory editor of Against the Current, Solidarity.org, A new,
revised and substantially expanded edition of Wood's latest book, The Origin of
Capitalism, was be published by Verso in 2001, May-June, 2001, Solidarity,
Eurocentric Anti-Eurocentric, http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/993, Accessed:
7/5/13, LPS.)
THE QUESTION OF "Eurocentrism" is a vexing problem not only for academia
but for the left. In the broadest sense, Eurocentrism can be understood as
the implicit view that societies and cultures of European origin constitute
the "natural" norm for assessing what goes on in the rest of the world. Within this
vast area of debate, one particular subtopic has been an object of intense
scrutiny among scholars: the real-or-alleged centrality of Europe in
preparing the explosion of economic development, science and
technology, the Enlightenment and the expansion of the role of the
individual-as well as intensified exploitation and colonial conquest-that
heralded the modem world. All these things, taken together, are commonly taken
to be synonymous with capitalism. It is precisely this identification that is
challenged in this essay by Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood, along with the
notion that ascribing European agrarian origins to capitalism entails a view of
Europe as a civilizing vanguard. Other writers, including the late J.M. Blaut, have
argued that Eurocentric assumptions have permeated the left's theorization
of the origins of modernity as thoroughly as they have dominated
conventional "modernization" theory. A wide range of scholars of color and
Third World writers have contributed to the discussion. The editors of Against the
Current hope that Ellen Wood's contribution will kick off an exchange taking up a
number of issues, relating particularly to the theoretical and historical debate on
capitalist origins-but also connecting this scholarly inquiry to some of the questions
for the left in today's global capitalist system. While this discussion is only one part
of developing a fuller understanding of the dynamics of liberation struggles and
anti-capitalist movements, historically and today, we believe it can be a worthwhile
one.
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is Eurocentric irony, cynicism, and the
questioning of intrinsic value or reality all have no application
to all cultures attempts to construct them as a better
foundation obscures indigenous cultures
Munck, Dublin City University Sociology Professor and
OHearn, University of Wisconsin Sociology Professor, 99
(Ronaldo Munck and Denis O'Hearn, April 15, 1999, Critical Development Theory:
Contributions to a New Paradigm, pg. 44-45 accessed July 5, 2013, Google Books,
EK)
The real power of the West is not located in its economic muscle and technological
might. Rather, it resides in its power to define. The West defines what is, for
example, freedom, progress and civil behavior; law, tradition and
community; reason, mathematics and science; what is real and what it
means to be human. The non-Western civilizations have simply to accept
these definitions or be defined out of existence. To understand
Eurocentrism we thus have to deconstruct the definitional power of the
West. Eurocentrism is located wherever there is the defining influence of Europe, or
more appropriately, the generic form of Europe - 'the West'. Wherever there is the
West, there is Europe, and Eurocentrism is not usually that far behind. So, where is
the West?
As a civilization, the West is, of course, everywhere: the Western civilization is
not located in a geographical space but in these days of globalization it
envelops the globe with its desires, images, politics, and consumer and
cultural products. As a worldview, the West is the dominant outlook of the
planet. Thus, Eurocentrism is not simply out there - in the West It is also in here - in
the non-West. As a concept and a worldview, the West has colonized the
intellectuals in non-European societies. Eurocentrism is thus just as rampant and
deep in non-Western societies as in Europe and the USA: intellectuals,
academics, writers, thinkers, novelists, politicians and decision-makers in Asia,
Africa and Latin America use the West, almost instinctively, as the standard
for judgments and as the yardstick for measuring the social and political
progress of their own societies. The non-West thus promotes
Eurocentrism, both wittingly and unwittingly, and colludes in its own
victimization as well as in maintaining the global system of inequality.
But Eurocentrism is 'in here' in another way. And it is related to my second question:
when was the West? As a conceptual and instrumental category, the West is
located in the history of colonization, from Columbus's 'discovery' of the 'New
World' to the present day. Rampant Eurocentrism is easily recognizable in
colonial constructions of the 'lazy native', the licentious and barbaric Muslim,
the shifty, effeminate and untrustworthy Hindu and other representations of the
non-West in Orientalist fiction, travel literature and scholarly explorations. But the
time dimension of the West extends from colonialism to modernity,
modernity to postmodernism and to the future. Modernity's construction
of tradition as an impediment to advancement, of the non-West as
'developing societies' and 'Third World*, and of instrumental rationality as
Agamben
Agamben participates in an unquestioned worship of
Eurocentric philosophy with disregard to the chattel slavery
that was required to make it possible
Chanter, State University of New York Professor, 11
(Tina, Professor, Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2011, Whose
Antigone?: The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery, Google Books, Page 121,
Accessed 7/8/13, NC)
Insofar as Agamben acquiesces to the unquestioned centrality of Europe
and of the critically unexamined version of ancient Athens that is taken to be its
precursor- as the originating matrix of conceptual and cultural meaning,
Agamben joins in the uncritical glorification of the philosophical
masterpieces of ancient Athens, construed as the crucible of European
culture, but fails to confront the significance of the system of chattel
slavery that afforded the philosophers and tragic poets the leisure to
create their philosophical treatises and theatrical masterpieces, which
nonetheless owe their existence to the sys tem of slavery. Agamben
thereby perpetuates a Eurocentric discourse of race, based on an
idealized version of ancient Greece that plays down the gendered
implications of his own intervention, even as his focus on race in the
modern state (albeit a Eurocentric account of race) provides a necessary
corrective to Irigaray's equally problematic and Eurocentric account of sexual
difference as foundational. At the same time, Irigaray's focus on sexual difference
serves as a corrective to Agamben's exclusive focus on race.
Impacts
Coloniality
Accepting a criticism of Eurocentrism that starts from the point
of race is pivotal as the stepping off point for discussions of
control over labor, sex, collective authority and intersubjectivity
Lugones, Binghamton U Comparative Lit and Philosophy
Associate Professor, 8
(Maria, Argentine scholar, philosopher, feminist, and an Associate Professor of
Comparative Literature and Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture and of
Philosophy and of Women's Studies at Binghamton University in New York, Spring
2008, The Coloniality of Gender, http://globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wpcontent/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v2d2_Lugones.pdf, Accessed, 7/7/13, NC)
The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social
classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of "race."
(Quijano, 2001-2, p.1) The invention of "race" is a pivotal turn as it replaces
the relations of superiority and inferiority established through
domination. It re-conceives humanity and human relations fictionally, in
biological terms. It is important that what Quijano provides is a historical theory of
social classification to replace what he terms the Eurocentric theories of social
classes. (Quijano, 2000b, 367) This move makes conceptual room for the coloniality
of power. It makes conceptual room for the centrality of the classification of the
worlds population in terms of races in the understanding of global
capitalism. It also makes conceptual room for understanding the historical
disputes over control of labor, sex, collective authority and intersubjectivity as developing in processes of long duration, rather than
understanding each of the elements as pre-existing the relations of power. The
elements that constitute the global, Eurocentered, capitalist model of
power do not stand in separation from each other and none of them is
prior to the processes that constitute the patterns. Indeed, the mythical
presentation of these elements as metaphysically prior is an important aspect of the
cognitive model of Eurocentered, global capitalism.
In constituting this social classification, coloniality permeates all aspects of
social existence and gives rise to new social and geocultural identities.
(Quijano, 2000b, 342) America and Europe are among the new
geocultural identities. European, Indian, African are among the
racial identities. This classification is "the deepest and most enduring
expression of colonial domination." (Quijano, 2001-2, p. 1) With the
expansion of European colonialism, the classification was imposed on the
population of the planet. Since then, it has permeated every area of social
existence and it constitutes the most effective form of material and inter-subjective
social domination. Thus, "coloniality" does not just refer to "racial"
classification. It is an encompassing phenomenon, since it is one of the
axes of the system of power and as such it permeates all control of sexual
access, collective authority, labor, subjectivity/inter-subjectivity and the
production of knowledge from within these inter-subjective relations. Or,
alternatively, all control over sex, subjectivity, authority and labor are articulated
Colonialism/Imperialism
Eurocentrism separates the world into West and the Rest in
which the world is literally constructed from the European lens
outward. Multiculturalism grew as a response to these
practical and linguistic binaristic hierarchies
Shohat, New York University Cultural Studies Professor, Stam,
New York University film theory and study Professor, 97
(Ella, Robert, Published by Routledge 1997, UNTHINKING EUROCENTRISM, Pg. 1-2,
JB)
Although neoconservatives caricature multiculturalism as calling for the
violent jettisoning of European classics and of "western civilization as an area
of study,"2 multiculturalism is actually an assault not on Europe or Europeans
but on Eurocentrism - on the procrustean forcing of cultural heterogeneity
into a single paradigmatic perspective in which Europe is seen as the
unique source of meaning, as the world's center of gravity, as ontological
"reality" to the rest of the world's shadow. Eurocentric thinking attributes to
the "West" an almost providential sense of historical destiny. Eurocentrism, like
Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single
privileged point. It maps the world in a cartography that centralizes and
augments Europe while literally "belittling" Africa.3 The "East" is divided
into "Near," "Middle," and "Far," making Europe the arbiter of spatial
evaluation, just as the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time produces England
as the regulating center of temporal measurement. Eurocentrism bifurcates the
world into the "West and the Rest "4 and organizes everyday language
into binaristic hierarchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our " nations," their
"tribes"; our "religions," their "superstitions"; our "culture," their
"folklore"; our "art," their "artifacts"; our "demonstrations," their "riots";
our "defense," their "terrorism."
Eurocentrism first emerged as a discursive rationale for colonialism, the
process by which the European powers reached positions of hegemony in
much of the world. Indeed, J.M. Blaut calls Eurocentrism "the colonizer's model of
the world."5 As an ideological substratum common to colonialist,
imperialist, and racist discourse, Eurocentrism is a form of vestigial
thinking which permeates and structures contemporary practices and
representations even after the formal end of colonialism. Although colonialist
discourse and Eurocentric discourse are intimately intertwined, the terms have a
distinct emphasis. While the former explicitly justifies colonialist practices, the latter
embeds, takes for granted, and "normalizes" the hierarchical power
relations generated by colonialism and imperialism, without necessarily even
thematizing those issues directly.
The epistemological legitimization of Eurocentrism whitewashes history and legitimizes violence, imperialism,
colonialism and genocide
Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University
and Stam, French University Professor at New York University,
97
Racism/Inequality in General
Eurocentrism frame social norms the normative function of
race, gender, sex and other types identity are reinforced by
Eurocentrism
Baker, University of Rochester, Graduate Student School of
Education and Human Development, 8
(Michael, Teaching and Learning About and Beyond Eurocentrism: A Proposal for
the Creation of an Other School, March 16, 2008,
http://academia.edu/1516858/Teaching_and_Learning_About_and_Beyond_Eurocentr
ism_A_Proposal_for_the_Creation_of_an_Other_School, accessed 7/12/13)
The Other School would be oriented around an alternative framework for knowledge
and understanding that we might call the decolonial paradigm, since its central aim
is to decolonize thinking and being, in part, through dialogue (not just the study of
cultures as objects of knowledge) with the diversity of ways of knowing and being
that have been devalued and eclipsed in Eurocentric education. The decolonial
paradigm of education would focus on concepts of culture and power. Culture is not
separate from politics and economics, contrary to the taken-for-granted disciplinary
divisions. .political and economic structures are not entities in
themselves, but are imagined, framed and enacted by individuals formed
in a certain type of subjectivity; a subjectivity that is also framed in the
dominant structure of knowledge (Mignolo, 2005, p. 112). The cultural
group (in the U.S. -- Anglo-American) with the most money and the most
political power is also the dominant culture reproduced in the school
curriculum. Most of us (particularly if we not white) recognize that a racial
hierarchy exists and is maintained by the dominant cultural group (for
example, see Huntington, 2004). Cultural diversity in multicultural
education is often more a way to manage or contain difference while
maintaining the racial hierarchy. Multiculturalism only became an issue and
concept in education during the unsettling 60s, when ethnic groups labeled racial
minorities raised their voices demanding that the promises of modernity be made
available to them as well as to whites. Racism is not simply the result of individual
prejudice and hateful expressions, but the consequence of the relations of power
that are historical and structural. The power side of culture can be
conveniently neutralized in the classroom as teachers and students learn
about diversity without examining how these differences have been
constructed, how they are reproduced in the curriculum, and how these
constructions continue to serve the white power elite. In English classes for
example, students read works that movingly depict personal struggles against
discrimination, without gaining any sense of how English literature was used to
teach people their distance from the center of civilization (Willinsky, 1989, p. ).
Multicultural education needs to include the study of how five centuries of
studying, classifying, and ordering humanity within an imperial context gave rise to
peculiar and powerful ideas of race, culture, and nation that were, in effect,
conceptual instruments that the West used both to divide up and to educate the
world (Willinsky, 1989, pp. 2-3). Race, in other words, is a mental category of
modernity (Quijano, 2000, p. 536), created along with European colonization of the
For the colonisers, skin colours were one of the most important signifiers
for the status of a person (Loomba 2006). This is most visible when
considering the perspectives the British held towards Asians on one hand
and Africans on the other. The British held Africans so low in value that
they transported Indians and other Orientals to Africa to build necessary
infrastructure for the production and transportation of goods. The
Africans where believed not intelligent enough for the task. According to a
compilation presented by Floyd Dotson (1975) the number of Orientals in Africa was
(Anibal, Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed the
concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been influential in the fields
of post-colonial studies and critical theory, 2000, Duke University Press, Coloniality
of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,
http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
Parallel to the historical relations between capital and precapital, a similar set of
ideas was elaborated around the spatial relations between Europe and non-Europe.
As I have already mentioned, the foundational myth of the Eurocentric
version of modernity is the idea of the state of nature as the point of
departure for the civilized course of history whose culmination is
European or Western civilization. From this myth originated the specifically
Eurocentric evolutionist perspective of linear and unidirectional movement and
changes in human history. Interestingly enough, this myth was associated with
the racial and spatial classification of the worlds population. This
association produced the paradoxical amalgam of evolution and dualism, a
vision that becomes meaningful only as an expression of the exacerbated
ethnocentrism of the recently constituted Europe; by its central and dominant place
in global, colonial/modern capitalism; by the new validity of the mystified ideas of
humanity and progress, dear products of the Enlightenment; and by the validity of
the idea of race as the basic criterion for a universal social classification of the
worlds population. The historical process is, however, very different. To start with,
in the moment that the Iberians conquered, named, and colonized America
(whose northern region, North America, would be colonized by the British
a century later), they found a great number of different peoples, each with
its own history, language, discoveries and cultural products, memory and
identity. The most developed and sophisticated of them were the Aztecs,
Mayas, Chimus, Aymaras, Incas, Chibchas, and so on. Three hundred years
later, all of them had become merged into a single identity: Indians. This
new identity was racial, colonial, and negative . The same happened with
Reject Racism
The endpoint of racism is dehumanization, endless military
aggression and environmental destruction, it impacts us all,
but by rejecting every instance of it we can begin to
systemically break it down
Barndt, Author and Co-director of Crossroads, 91
(Joseph R., Author and Pastor in the Bronx in New York City and co-director of
Crossroads, a ministry working to dismantle racism and build a multicultural church
and society, 1991, Dismantling Racism: The Continuing Challenge to White
America, Google Books, Pages 155-156, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences, restraints
and limitations, ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism confines us all ,
people of color and white people alike. It shackles the victimizer as well as
the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color and white people separate from
each other; in our separate prisons we are all prevented from achieving the human
potential that God intends for us. The limitations imposed on people of color
by poverty, subservience, and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and
unjust ; the effects of uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed, which are the
marks of our white prison, will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also
seen that the walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to
an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick
by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and
cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are urgently called to join the
efforts of those who know it is time to tear down, once and for all, the walls of
racism. The danger point of self-destruction seems to be drawing ever
more near. The results of centuries of national and worldwide conquest
and colonialism, of military buildups and violent aggression, of
overconsumption and environmental destruction may be reaching a point
of no return. A small and predominantly white minority of the global population
derives its power and privilege from the sufferings of the vast majority of peoples of
color. For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue.
American influence means our racism is globally modeledrejection is key to stop global racism
Robinson, Lawyer, Author and Activist, 2k
(Randall Robinson, African-American lawyer, author and activist, noted as the
founder of TransAfrica, 2000, The Debt: What America owes to Blacks,
http://libgen.info/view.php?id=448737, Page 123, Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
To many, the story may initially seem out of place because it is foreign. This is
hardly the case. The U nited S tates is so unprecedentedly powerful that it
can be best understood ( even in its domestic race relations ) when
Racism Dehumanizing
Racism is the ultimate form of dehumanization and denial of
personal freedom
Feagin, U.S. Sociologist and Social Theorist, 2k
(Joe, U.S. sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on
racial and gender issues, especially in regard to the United States., 2000, Racist
America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations, Google books, Page 20,
Accessed 7/10/13, NC)
The alienation of oppression extends to other areas. In the case of black
Americans, that which should most be their owncontrol over life and workis
that which is most taken away from them by the system of racism. There is a
parallel here to the alienation described by analysts of class and gender
oppression. In Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism, the workers' labor, that which is
most their own, is that which is most taken away from their control by the capitalist
employer. The worker is separated from control over, and thus alienated
from, his or her work. In addition, feminist theorists have shown that at the
heart of a sexist society is an alienating reality of dehumanized sexuality.
Women are separated by sexism from control over how their own sexuality is
defined.is To lose significant control over one's own life choices, body definition,
future, and even self is what subordination imposes. Thus, racial oppression
forces a lifelong struggle by black Americans, as a group and as
individuals, to attain their inalienable human rights. Dehumanization is
systemic racism's psychological dynamic, and racialized roles are its
social masks. Recurring exploitation, discrimination, and inequality
constitute its structure, and patterns such as residential segregation are
its spatial manifestations.
No Solvency
Eurocentric mirror that distorts the lens in which we view the
world means should be suspect of all aff claims
Quijano, sociologist and humanist thinker, 2000
(Anibal, a Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed
the concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been influential in the
fields of post-colonial studies and critical theory, 2000, Coloniality of Power,
Eurocentrism, and Latin America, P. 558,
www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed: 7/5/13, LPS.)
(Anibal, Peruvian sociologist and humanist thinker, known for having developed the
concept of "coloniality of power". His body of work has been influential in the fields
of post-colonial studies and critical theory, 2000, Duke University Press, Coloniality
of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,
http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/wan/wanquijano.pdf, Accessed 7/5/13, NC)
(Rupert G. Rhodd, April 7, 2013, Westernizing the Third World: The Eurocentricity of
Economic Development Theories Review, Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 63, No.
2, pg. 548, JSTOR, Accessed 7-4-13, EK)
The study revolves around three ideas: 1) mainstream economics has
produced flawed theories of economic development for Third World
countries 2) flawed theories that are imported from the West lack fit and
are biased and as such tend to distort Third World development and 3)
western theorists have ignored the basic flaws in their theories by
insisting on models involving perfect competition and rational (western)
behavior.
Throughout the book the author tries to show that the Eurocentricity of economic
theories and economic development based on these theories is nothing
more than an effort to westernize Third World countries. In chapter 1 the
author defines the westernizing problem as arising from the culture-bias of
mainstream economics which favors capital and capita-rich countries. In
chapter 2 he dismisses Ricardo's theory as being objective, claiming instead that
Ricardo's theory along with theories by Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith were
designed to expand the wealth of England. In chapter 3 the author recounts the
process of westernization through "western educated Third World
leaders," whom he describes as "admirers of the mystique of the West,"
and he also dismisses Arthur Lewis's model as being beneficial to Third World
countries because it depended on capital imported from the West. In chapters 4
through 6 the author looks at the postwar period and identifies macroeconomic
models as developed from experience and realities in the West to solve western
problems. The author claims that attempts by the New International Economic Order
to bring about economic development were unsuccessful because there was a lack
of unity among countries in the South. In general, the author felt that because
economic development in the Third World is based on a European centered
world-view, the interest of Europeans is often pursued at the expense of
the population in Third World countries.
(Vinicius Valentin Raduan Miguel, August 4, 2009, Political Affairs, Colonialism and
Underdevelopment in Latin America, http://www.politicalaffairs.net/colonialism-andunderdevelopment-in-latin-america/, accessed July 4, 2013, EK)
Generally speaking, Latin America has shown economic growth, although the social
structure imposed colonialism has been perpetuated. The region is extremely
unequal, with one of the worst income distributions of the world.
The explanation for this is that the initial degree of inequality, initiated with the
long process of fragmentation of local pre-capitalist and autonomous societies,
followed by the enslavement of traditional indigenous populations, the
transference of African slaves to the continent and, finally, the hyperexploitation of the free (or recently liberated) working class is still affecting
the actual development.
The legacy of the colonial times - the concentration of power, wealth and
land - led to a stratified society with an extreme inequality. The
discrimination and oppression present in those hierarchical societies are
the main inheritance of the former colonies and are a persistent tragedy,
being part of the unsolved questions of the recent past.
Conclusions
The argument that colonialism as an external imposition is the only
determinant for the actual socioeconomic situation in former colonies is
certainly not convincing: we have to take in account the role of local elites
who have benefited from those exploitative relations.
Colonialism is part of the historical process and formation of these countries. The
contemporary economies are debilitated for the following main reasons:
a) The agro-export oriented economies gave the general contours to the
colonized production, forestalling attempts at industrialization and import
substitution;
b) The agrarian structure excluded a majority from the access to the land
and privileged a non-intensive production;
c) Concentration of income, poverty and inequality impeded the creation
of internal consumption; d) the internal dynamics of the ruling classes
haven't facilitated savings, (re)investments and innovation in the national
economy.
Finally, the geography (or how it was appropriated by the colonial powers)
gave an incentive for easy exploitation of natural resources (a necessary
input to production), shaping the patterns of occupation and depopulation of the colony.
The actual development policy of Latin American countries has focused on
the exportation of agricultural products, repeating old economic patterns.
The monoculture is mystified under the label of diversification of products.
The impacts are more environmental destruction and (re)concentration of land in
favor of big and old landowners. Low cost labor is once more a comparative
Alts
Rejection Key
Must reject the Aff - Eurocentrism sweeps these impacts under
the rug. Their world becomes self-contained leading to the
forced subjugation of entire populations.
Lander, Central University of Venezuela Professor, 2k
(Edgardo, Sociologist, Venezuelan, professor at the Central University of Venezuela
and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, 2000, Nepantla: Views from South,
Volume 1, Issue 3, Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social
Thought, pp. 519-523,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html, Accessed
7/5/13, JB)
Spivak argues that once the version of a self-contained Western world is
assumed, its production by the imperialist project is ignored (86). Through
these visions, the crisis of European historyassumed as universal
becomes the crisis of all history. The crisis of the metanarratives of the
philosophy of history, of the certainty of its laws, becomes the crisis of the future as
such. The crisis of the subjects of that history turns into the dissolution of all
subjects. The disenchantment of a Marxist generation that experienced in its own
flesh the political and theoretical collapse of Marxism and socialism and lived
through the existential trauma of the recognition of the gulag evolves into universal
skepticism and the end of collective projects and politics. This justifies a cool
attitude of noninvolvement, where all ethical indignation in the face of
injustice is absent. In reaction to structuralism, economism, and
determinism, the discursive processes and the construction of meanings
are unilaterally emphasized. Economic relations and all notions of
exploitation disappear from the cognitive map. The crisis of the political
and epistemological totalizing models leads to a withdrawal toward the
partial and local, rendering the role of centralized political, military, and
economic powers opaque. The Gulf War thus becomes no more than a grand
show, a televised superproduction. For these perspectives, the crisis is not of
modernity as such, but of one of its constitutive dimensions: historical reason
(Quijano 1990). Its other dimension, instrumental reason (scientific and
technological development, limitless progress, and the universal logic of the
market), finds neither criticism nor resistance. History continues to exist only in
a limited sense: the underdeveloped countries still have some way to go
before reaching the finish line where the winners of the great universal
competition toward progress await them. It seems a matter of little
importance that the majority of the worlds inhabitants may never reach
that goal, due to the fact that the consumer patterns and the levels of
material well-being of the central countries are possible only as a
consequence of an absolutely lopsided use of the resources and the
planets carrying capacity.
Unthinking Solvency
Only unthinking Eurocentrism can solve
Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University
and Stam, French University Professor at New York University,
97
(Ella, and Robert, Unthinking Eurocentrism, http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAB&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings
%2FUnthinkingEurocentrismIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjC
NGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6WnFAZPF8pes3AW7uuHLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
Mingling discursive history with textual analysis, speculative theoretical essay with
critical survey, Unthinking Eurocentrism addresses diverse disciplinary
constituencies. While recognizing the specificity of film/media, we also grant
ourselves a "cultural studies"-style freedom to wander among diverse disciplines,
texts, and discourses, ancient and contemporary, low and high. As a disciplinary
hybrid, the book develops a syncretic, even cannibalistic methodology. Its
overall architectonics move from past to future, from didacticism to
speculation, from hegemony to resistance, and from critique to
affirmation. (Within "critique," we would add, there is also "celebration," just as
within "celebration" there is buried a "critique.") Our purpose is not globally to
endorse, or globally condemn, any specific body of texts; the point is only
to become more historically informed and artistically nuanced readers of
cultural practices. Unthinking Eurocentrism is therefore not structured as
an inexorable linear movement toward a prescriptive conclusion. The
overall "argument" concerning Eurocentrism is not stated baldly and explicitly, but
worked out slowly, over the course of the book. Diverse leitmotifs are woven into
the various chapters, creating a kind of musical echo effect whereby the same
theme emerges in different contexts. If "The Imperial Imaginary" (chapter 3)
stresses the colonialist writing of history, "The Third Worldist Film" (chapter 7)
stresses the "writing back" performed by the ex-colonized. Such themes as the
critique of Eurocentric paradigms, the elaboration of a relational methodology, the
search for alternative esthetics, and the interrogation of the diverse "posts,"
meanwhile, structure the text throughout. Some themes that appear first in a
colonialist register - hybridity, syncretism, mestizaje, cannibalism, magic later reappear in a liberatory, anticolonialist register, so that the diverse
sections reverberate together thematically.
Decolonizing Knowledge
Decolonial knowledge production is key to solve
Baker, Professor of Education and Human Development at the
University of Rochester, 12
Perm Debate
Reform DA
The affirmative and the alternative are mutually exclusive. The
attempt of trying to combine reformation with American
intervention leads to serial social failure, oppression,
exploitation, and brutalization of populations
Trainer, U of New South Wales Conjoint Lecturer, 9
(Ted, Dr. Ted Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences,
University of New South Wales, 2009, Social Work, University of NSW, THE SIMPLER
WAY: WORKING FOR TRANSITION FROM CONSUMER SOCIETY TO A SIMPLER, MORE
COOPERATIVE, JUST AND ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY
http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/OUREMPIRE.htm, Accessed 7/5/13, JB)
Most importantly, revolutions can only be made by oppressed people.
Anyone who has the slightest understanding of social movements in
general and revolution in particular realises how extremely difficult it is to
get a revolution going. It was absurd for the Reagan administration to suggest
that Russian or Cuban agents could come into a Central American country and stir
up a revolution. It is amazing what oppressed, exploited and brutalised
people will continue to endure without attempting to hit back. In much of
Latin America people have put up with decades, even centuries, of the most
appalling treatment from exploitative and vicious ruling classes, without mounting
any significant threat to those regimes. Many attempts to initiate revolution
among people who have the most clear-cut reasons for hitting back have
failed to win significant support from the oppressed classes. If there is any
move whatsoever towards popular rebellion, let alone a successful people's
revolution, you can be sure that there has been a long history of enormous suffering
at the hands of a brutal and predatory ruling class. As Blasier (1983) says,
American leaders have not understood the fundamental causes of the
revolutions . . . Their most serious misperception has been that the U.S.S.R., acting
throughout the Communist parties or conspiratorial activities, actually caused social
revolution in Latin America. Chomsky and many others would argue that American
leaders understand the situation only too well. The weakness in Blasier's account is
its failure to recognise that these and other aspects of US foreign policy are not
mistakes, but deliberate and essential elements in the defence of the empire. It is
possible for subversive agents to enter a Third World country and organise a coup
without involving the people in general. The USA and the USSR have often been
involved in activities of this sort. But this is entirely different from a popular revolt.
As Blazier says, (p. 153), Governments cannot export revolution. The groups
who made most mileage out of the communist threat were the ruling classes of
the Third World, especially in Latin America. At the slightest hint of a call for social
justice or change that might impinge upon their interests they immediately cried
communists! Dissent of any kind was branded as communist subversion. This was
a marvellous mechanism for destroying challenges to their privileges, especially as
it usually guaranteed immediate and generous US support. Herman sums the
situation up neatly: Among Latin American elites, a peasant asking for a higher
wage or a priest helping organise a peasant cooperative is a communist. And
someone going so far as to suggest land reform or a more equitable tax system is a
Answers to:
The evaluation systems currently used for academics and universities, which take
the Mexican experience as a model, are another limited but significative indicator of
these trends, with potentially menacing consequences for the possibility of more
autonomous outlooks. Universalist criteria underlie these systems, according to
which the production of the universities in Latin America should follow the scientific
production of central countries as models of excellence. An expression of this is the
privileged consideration that is given in these systems of evaluation to publishing in
foreign scientific journals. Under the mantle of objectivity, what has in fact
been established is that the intellectual creation of social scientists in
Latin American universities should be ruled by the disciplinary frontiers,
truth systems, methodologies, problems, and research agendas of
metropolitan social sciences, as these are expressed in the editorial
policies of the most prestigious journals in each discipline. These
evaluation systems are thus designed to judge performance within
normal northern science. Strictly individualized evaluation systems
based on short-term productivity seem to be purposely designed to hinder
both the possibility of the collective efforts in the reflective, innovative
long-term and the socially concerned (as opposed to market-oriented)
research and debatesfree from immediate constraints of time or
financing pressuresthat would be required in order to rethink
epistemological assumptions, historical interpretations, and present forms
of institutionalization of historic and social knowledge.3 [End Page 522] New
generations of academics are being socialized into a system that values scores, the
accumulation of points in quantitative evaluations, over original or critical thought.
These perspectives do not fully explore the immense potentialities of the
recognition of the crisis of modernity. Radically different ways of thinking
about the world are possible if we assume this historical period to [End
Page 524] be the crisis of the hegemonic pretensions of Western
civilization. Different consequences would arise from an interpretation that
recognizes that this is not the end of history, but the end of the phantasmagorical
universal history imagined by Hegel. The implications for non-Western
societies and for subaltern and excluded subjects around the world would
be quite different if colonialism, imperialism, racism, and sexism were
thought of not as regretful by-products of modern Europe, but as part of
the conditions that made the modern West possible. We could assume a
different perspective on the so-called crisis of the subject if we were to
AT: Positivism
Positivism isnt neutral. Their attempts at engaging Latin
America are merely one point in a long line of destructive
economics plagued by Eurocentric thought.
Lander, Central University of Venezuela Professor, 2k
(Edgardo, Sociologist, Venezuelan, professor at the Central University of Venezuela
and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, 2000, Nepantla: Views from South,
Volume 1, Issue 3, Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social
Thought, pp. 519-523,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html, Accessed
7/5/13, JB)
Political and social thought regarding Latin America has been historically
characterized by a tension between the search for its specific attributes
and an external view that has seen these lands from the narrow
perspective of European experience. There has also been an opposition
between the challenge of the rich potentialities of this New World and distress over
its difference, which stands in contrast with the ideal represented by European
culture and racial composition. Nonetheless, external colonial views and regrets
because of the difference have been widely hegemonic. A brief revision of
the texts of the first republican constitutions is enough to illustrate how liberals, in
their attempt to transplant and install a replica of their understanding of the
European or North American experience, almost completely ignore the specific
cultural and historical conditions of the societies about which they legislate. When
these conditions are considered, it is with the express purpose of doing away with
them. The affliction because of the differencethe awkwardness of living in a
continent that is not white, urban, cosmopolitan, and civilizedfinds its
best expression in positivism. Sharing the main assumptions and
prejudices of nineteenth-century European thought (scientific racism,
patriarchy, the idea of progress), positivism reaffirms the colonial
discourse. The continent is imagined from a single voice, with a single
subject: white, masculine, urban, cosmopolitan. The rest, the majority, is
the other, [End Page 519] barbarian, primitive, black, Indian, who has
nothing to contribute to the future of these societies. It would be
imperative to whiten, westernize, or exterminate that majority.
AT: Realism
Decolonization is key to discussion about IR. Centering our
discussion around Eurocentric policies makes things like
racism, imperialism and colonialism inevitable while
magnifying the West and the Rest mindset
Foneseca and Jerrems, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
graduate students, 12
Melody, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid, Ari, Universidad Autnoma de Madrid,
June 2012, Why Decolonise International Relations Theory?, Pg. 2-3,
http://academia.edu/1631024/Why_Decolonise_IR_theory, JB)
In this paper we propose that the coloniality of power, a concept developed
by Decolonial Thinking, provides a useful tool for theorizing International
Relations (IR).Decolonial Thinking is a perspective that was conceived by a group
of (mainly) Latin American academics involved in the modernidad/colonialidad
group Despite receiving little attention in IR, we argue that this approach
aids critical academics by connecting with recent literature discussing the
foundational role of colonialism. Here we will firstly recap on the body of work
that has been emerging in the discipline before exploring how the coloniality of
power allows us to conceptualize the material and ideational residues of
colonialism. We will pay particular attention to the coloniality of historical and
contemporary IR theory. Through this analysis we high light that despite the end of
official colonization there has been a continuation of coloniality.
Since the mid-1980s numerous critical voices have challenged traditional IR
theory by drawing on Feminist, Neo-Marxist, Poststructuralist, Postcolonial and
Frankfurt School theories. These theorisations have gained greater influence after
the end of the Cold War. Decolonial Thinking is of most relevance to these
approaches and to the growing number of theorists who, over the last decade,
have focused on the coloniality problem. These scholars have analysed how
the Eurocentric origins of the discipline have led, not only to the exclusion
of knowledge from the non-Western world, but also, a general amnesia
and ignorance about imperialism, colonialism, and racism.
Critical researchers have sought to unearth a wide range of issues that
have been silenced. As Branwen G. Jones has pointed out, how is it possible
that IR has paid so little attention to race, colonialism, and imperialism, to
the intertwined nature of the histories of the West and the rest? Authors
underline the importance of being able to find a way of engaging with rather than
ignoring non-Western political thought in a manner that is not beholden to colonial
ideologies that drain the non-Western world of all significant content for the study of
a modernity that is now, and perhaps was always, integrally global. This is
particularly relevant if, as we suggest, the knowledge and imaginaries
produced in the discipline are reflected in global politics: from
securitization to governability or local reproductions of violence. Scholars
have also begun to question who the subjects of IR are. Meera Sabaratnam has
argued, [t]he notion of dialogue[] requires that we ask questions about
their identities, horizons and interests, and indeed how these are situated
AT: Bruckner
Bruckner misunderstands the criticism, it is an indictment of
the centrality of Eurocentrism, not that Europe is source of all
evils
Shohat, Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University
and Stam, French University Professor at New York University,
97
(Ella, , and Robert, Unthinking Eurocentrism, http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&sqi=2&ved=0CDkQFjAB&url=http
%3A%2F%2Fwww.csus.edu%2Findiv%2Fo%2Fobriene%2Fart112%2Freadings
%2FUnthinkingEurocentrismIntroduction.rtf&ei=0v7VUcj6C8agigLbt4FI&usg=AFQjC
NGzs72xcKKnpIfpEkBPsIhMONn0eQ&sig2=6WnFAZPF8pes3AW7uuHLw&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE, Accessed: 7/4/13, LPS.)
Our critique of Eurocentrism is addressed not to Europeans as individuals
but rather to dominant Europes historically oppressive relation to its
internal and external "others." We are in no way suggesting, obviously,
that non-European people are somehow better than Europeans, or that
Third World and minoritarian cultures are inherently superior. There is no
inborn tendency among Europeans to commit genocide, as some "ice people"
theorists would suggest - such theories merely colonialist demonizations - nor are
indigenous or Third World peoples innately noble and generous. Nor do we
believe in the inverted European narcissism that posits Europe as the source of
all social evils in the world. Such an approach remains Eurocentric ("Europe
exhibiting its own unacceptability in front of an anti-ethnocentric mirror," in
Derrida's words) and also exempts Third world patriarchal elites from all
responsibility.7 Such "victimology" reduces non-European life to a
pathological response to Western penetration. It merely turns colonilialist
claims upside down. Rather than saying that "we" (that is, the West) have
brought "them" civilization, it claims instead that everywhere "we" have
brought diabolical evil, and everywhere "their" enfeebled societies have
succumbed to "our" insidious influence. The vision remains Promethean, but
here Prometheus has brought not fire but the Holocaust, reproducing what Barbara
Christian calls the "West's outlandish claim to have invented everything, including
Evil."8 Our focus here, in any case, is less on intentions than on institutional
discourses, less on "goodness" and "badness" than on historically
configured relations of power. The question, as Talal Asad puts it, is not "how
far Europeans have been guilty and Third World inhabitants innocent but,
rather, how far the criteria by which guilt and innocence are determined
have been historically constituted."9 The word "Eurocentric" sometimes
provokes apoplectic reactions because it is taken as a synonym for "racist." But
although Eurocentrism and racism are historically intertwined - for example, the
erasure of Africa as historical subject reinforces racism against African-Americans they are in no way equatable, for the simple reason that Eurocentrism is the
"normal" consensus view of history that most First Worlders and even many Third
Worlders learn at school and imbibe from the media. As a result of this normalizing
operation, it is quite possible to be antiracist at both a conscious and a practical
AT: Euro-narcissism
Even if there is a level of self-reflection in their Eurocentric
epistemology they are still ignorant to the pervasiveness of
their methodology as well as what truly constitutes
multiculturalism
Shohat, New York University Cultural Studies Professor, Stam,
New York University film theory and study Professor, 97
(Ella, Robert, Published by Routledge 1997, UNTHINKING EUROCENTRISM, Pg. 4,
JB)
Rather than attacking Europe per se, an anti-Eurocentric multiculturalism, in
our view, relativizes Europe, seeing it as a geographical fiction that flattens the
cultural diversity even of Europe itself. Europe has always had its own
peripheralized regions and stigmatized communities (Jews, Irish, Gypsies,
Huguenots, Muslims, peasants, women, gays/lesbians). Nor do we endorse a
Europhobic attitude; our own text invokes European thinkers and concepts. That we
emphasize the "underside" of European history does not mean we do not recognize
an "overside" of scientific, artistic, and political achievement. And since
Eurocentrism is a historically situated discourse and not a genetic inheritance,
Europeans can be anti-Eurocentric, just as non-Europeans can be Eurocentric.
Europe has always spawned its own critics of empire. Some of the European
cultural figures most revered by today's neoconservatives, ironically,
themselves condemned colonialism. Samuel Johnson, the very archetype of the
neoclassical conservative, wrote in 1759 that "Europeans have scarcely visited any
coast but to gratify avarice, and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without
right and practice cruelty without incentive."11 Even Adam Smith, the patron
saint of capitalism, wrote in his Wealth of Nations (1776) that for the natives of
the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits resulting from the
discovery of America "have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes
which they have occasioned."12 Yet when contemporary multiculturalists
make the same points, they are accused of "Europe-bashing."13 Or the
critiques are acknowledged, but then turned into a compliment to Europe,
in a kind of "fallback position" for Euro-narcissism: "Yes, Europe did all
those cruel things, but then, only Europe has the virtue of being selfcritical."
Eurocentric thinking, in our view, is fundamentally unrepresentative of a
world which has long been multicultural. At times, even multiculturalists
glimpse the issues through a narrowly national and exceptionalist grid, as when
well-meaning curriculum committees call for courses about the "contributions"
of the world's diverse cultures to the "development of American society,"
unaware of the nationalistic teleology underlying such a formulation.
"Multiculturedness" is not a "United Statesian" monopoly, nor is
multiculturalism the "handmaiden" of US identity politics.14 Virtually all
countries and regions are multicultural in a purely descriptive sense. Egypt melds
Pharaonic, Arab, Muslim, Jewish, Christian/Coptic, and Mediterranean influences;
India is riotously plural in language and religion; and Mexico's "cosmic race" mingles
at least three major constellations of cultures. Nor is North American
Framework
Framework is Eurocentric
The alt is key to deconstruct Eurocentric frameworks
academia is a key starting point
Ucelli, founder, New York Marxist School and ONeil, regular
contributor to Forward Motion, 92 (Juliet and Dennis, Challenging
Eurocentrism http://www.wengewang.org/read.php?tid=19345, date accessed
7/4/13 IGM)
Ongoing battles over the content of social studies classes in public schools
and the canon in liberal arts education are thrusting the term
eurocentrism toward the mainstream of political discourse in the United
States. It is a concept which has been fairly easy for those of us on the left to
become comfortable with, but that sense of ease could actually pose a problem of
complacency for revolutionary socialists. The fact is that the critique of
eurocentrism is still in its early stages, and that the extraordinarily
pervasive hold this framework has on the thinking of everyone raised in
Western societies is not fully appreciated. And the problem of what kind of
worldview it is to be replaced with has barely been considered.
The point, then, is that eurocentrism will not be understood, neutralized or
superseded without considerable effort and, as shown by the current
counterattack waged by the bourgeoisie against political correctness,
without fierce struggle.
A good starting point in thinking about eurocentrism is the recent spate of books
produced by African, North American and European academics. They have thrown
down the gauntlet inside classics, comparative linguistics, economic history,
sociology and other academic disciplines. This recent scholarship builds on the
pioneering work of African American scholars like C.L.R. James and W.E.B. Dubois,
whose work was marginalized by white supremacist academia, yet studied
continuously over the past fifty years by organic intellectuals of color and some
white leftists. Another foundation is the insistence on the centrality of culture,
psychology and the internalization of oppression coming from African thinkers like
Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral and Cheikh Anta Diop.
To some extent, a critique of eurocentrism is implicit in the opposition to
imperialism which (however flawed) has characterized the revolutionary
wing of the socialist movement since the time of Lenin. However, at least
until Maos writings became an influence, European socialists generally grasped
more easily the concepts of the super-exploitation and victimization of nonEuropean peoples and had more difficulty recognizing their scientific achievements
and cultural contributions. The concept of eurocentrism as currently used
pays more attention to precisely this aspect: the distortion of the
consciousness and self- knowledge of humanity by the insistence of
people of European descent that all valid, universal scientific
knowledge, economic progress, political structures and works of art flow
only from their ancestors. Or, in its more subtle form, eurocentrism
acknowledges contributions from non-European cultures but says that if theyre
important enough, theyll be subsumed within the Western legacy; that the current
AFF ANSWERS
Link Answers
Permutations
Perm - General
Permutation do both an approach will facilitates policy action
is key to re-conceptualize power. The alt alone ensures
cooption, vote aff to use the masters tools to take down the
shed
Park, University of Oklahoma and Wilkins, University of Texas,
5
(Jane, Univ. of Oklahoma, Karin, Univ of Texas @ Austin, Global Media Journal, Reorienting the Orientalist Gaze, http://lass.purduecal.edu/cca/gmj/sp05/gmj-sp05park-wilkins.htm, accessed 7/6/13, IGM)
By implication, the north/south and west/east divisions conventionally understood
as the way to organize national settings within a global system are now less
relevant. A dominant geometry of development (Shah & Wilkins, 2004),
divides countries along political (communism in east vs. democracy in west),
economic (industrialized north vs. agricultural south), cultural (modern vs.
traditional), and hierarchical (first =west; second =east, and third=south) lines.
However, the validity of these regional distinctions should be questioned. This
model has been critiqued for its ethnocentric and arrogant vision,
collapsing diverse communities with a wide range of cultural histories into
monolithic groups. More often than not, the interests of domestic elites in poorer
countries are identical to the interests of the elite in the wealthier countries. These
categorizations, such as West/East, are problematic, given rapidly shifting politicaleconomic contexts involving changing patterns of political and economic dominance
among national actors, the strengthening of regional institutions and identities, the
globalization of economic and communication systems, and the privatization of
industries (Hagopian, 2000; Schuurman, 2000). New global categorizations may
need to focus on access to resources, whether economic, political, social
or cultural, within and across geopolitical territories. Inequity in terms of
access to resources then becomes the overarching concern (Schuurman, 2000).
Although we need to foreground tangible issues related to basic human needs, the
broader concern with access to resources addresses the intangible as well, touching
on social, cultural, political and spiritual resources (Steeves, 2002). Access to
resources builds from ones position within a socio-political network. This vision
offers a more nuanced framework of power, in which networks offer the
possibility for some to reach certain goals, such as employment, education,
media production, policy making, and more. Power is not only activated
within state and corporate institutions, but also within social groups,
though these networks tightly intersect. While issues of territory are still
relevant, particularly when clearly many groups, such as Palestinians, are struggling
for a sovereignty rooted in place, and nation-states are still critical actors in
the global sphere (Morris & Waisbord, 2001), we need to rethink relationships
of power as partly connected with spatial arrangements (Escobar, 2000;
Escobar et al., 2002), and not just in terms of place. And when we do
consider place, we may need to attend to the critical role of regional
actors and not just the US.
Perm - Methodology
Permutation do both. Engaging in one methodology falls
short. Institutional debate about these issues creates the
possibility for difference
Lander, Central University of Venezuela Professor, 2k
(Edgardo, Sociologist, Venezuelan, professor at the Central University of Venezuela
and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute, 2000, Nepantla: Views from South,
Volume 1, Issue 3, Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social
Thought, pp. 519-523,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/summary/v001/1.3lander.html, Accessed
7/5/13, JB)
These debates create possibilities for new intellectual strategies to
address the challenges posed by the crisis of modernity for Latin American
critical theory. In view of the fact that we are at a point in our work where we
can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context of our studies (Said
1993,6),it is absolutely necessary to question whether postmodern theories offer an
adequate perspective from which to transgress the colonial limits of modern social
thought. Some of the main issues of postcolonial perspectives have been
formulated and taken anew at different times in the history of Latin American social
thought of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Mart 1987; Maritegui
1979; Fals-Borda 1970; 526 Nepantla Fernndez Retamar 1976). There have been
extraordinary developments associated with the revitalization of the
struggles of indigenous peoples in recent decades.5 Nonetheless, these
issues paradoxically have been of relatively marginal concern in the
academic world, outside anthropology and some areas of the humanities. Western
social sciences, which must be applied creatively to the study of the realities of
Latin America, are still assumed to be the best of universal thought. Due to
both institutional and communicational difficulties, as well as to the
prevailing universalist orientations (intellectual colonialism? subordinate
cosmopolitanism?),6 today the Latin American academy has only limited
communication with the vigorous intellectual production to be found in Southeast
Asia, some regions of Africa, and in the work of academics of these regions working
in Europe or the United States. The most effective bridges between these
intellectual traditions are being offered today by Latin Americans who work in North
American universities (Escobar 1995; Mignolo 1996a,1996b; Coronil 1996, 1997).
Impact Answers
No Internal Link
No internal link-Eurocentrism is merely a knowledge archetype
Solomon, a professor in the Institute of Arts and Humanities,
Shanghai Jiaotong University, 13
(Jon, a professor in the Institute of Arts and Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong
University 2013, TransEuropeennes, The Experience of Culture: Eurocentric Limits
and Openings in Foucault,
http://www.transeuropeennes.eu/en/articles/voir_pdf/108, P.7-8, Accessed: 7/6/13,
LPS.)
AT-Root Cause
Their root cause claims are false-there is no single cause of
events, rather many different causes
Wallerstein, is an American sociologist, historical social
scientist, and world-systems analyst, 97
(Immanuel, an American sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems
analyst. His bimonthly commentaries on world affairs are syndicated, 1997,
Binghamton.edu "Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science,"
http://www2.binghamton.edu/fbc/archive/iweuroc.htm, Accessed: 7/6/13, LPS.)
But even if we agree on the definition and the timing, and therefore so to
speak on the reality of the phenomenon, we have actually explained very
little. For we must then explain why it is that Europeans, and not others, launched
the specified phenomenon, and why they did so at a certain moment of history. In
seeking such explanations, the instinct of most scholars has been to push
us back in history to presumed antecedents. If Europeans in the eighteenth or
sixteenth century did x, it is said to be probably because their ancestors (or
attributed ancestors, for the ancestry may be less biological than cultural,
or assertedly cultural) did, or were, y in the eleventh century, or in the
fifth century B.C. or even further back. We can all think of the multiple
explanations that, once having established or at least asserted some
phenomenon that has occurred in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, proceed
to push us back to various earlier points in European ancestry for the truly
determinant variable.
There is a premise here that is not really hidden, but was for a long time undebated.
The premise is that whatever is the novelty for which Europe is held responsible in
the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, this novelty is a good thing, one of which
Europe should be proud, one of which the rest of the world should be envious, or at
least appreciative. This novelty is perceived as an achievement, and numerous book
titles bear testimony to this kind of evaluation.
There seems to me little question that the actual historiography of world
social science has expressed such a perception of reality to a very large
degree. This perception of course can be challenged on various grounds, and this
has been increasingly the case in recent decades. One can challenge the accuracy
of the picture of what happened, within Europe and in the world as a whole in the
sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. One can certainly challenge the plausibility of the
presumed cultural antecedents of what happened in this period. One can implant
the story of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in a longer duration, from several
centuries longer to tens of thousands of years. If one does that, one is usually
arguing that the European "achievements" of the sixteenth to the nineteenth
centuries thereby seem less remarkable, or more like a cyclical variant, or less like
achievements that can be credited primarily to Europe. Finally one can accept that
the novelties were real, but argue that they were less a positive than a negative
accomplishment.
Alternative Answers
AT: Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism falls short on both sides of the methodological
spectrum
Mowitt, University of Minnesota Cultural studies and
Comparative Literature professor, 1
John, is professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, and English at the
University of Minnesota In the Wake of Eurocentrism An Introduction, Cultural
Critique 47 (2001) 3-15,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cultural_critique/v047/47.1mowitt.html, Muse,
Accessed July 6 2013, JB)
However, there is another--perhaps even more challenging--limitation to the
Western critique of Eurocentrism. Intellectuals and cultural producers in
the West disturbed by the paradoxical fate of humanism have, in large part,
responded by calling for what is commonly referred to as "multiculturalism."
Initially a strategic political category and now a burgeoning cottage industry,
multiculturalism has lately been deployed by those seeking to displace
Eurocentrism within academia by diversifying the core curriculum of the
humanities. It has, perhaps predictably, been assailed from both the Right
(by the likes of Arthur Schlesinger) and from the Left (by, among others, Slavoj
Zizek), thereby confronting its critics with a field that is as volatile as it is
congested. However, as a constitutive element of the wake of
Eurocentism, the multicultural initiative would appear to be critically
compromised in two pertinent ways. First, because it reinvests in Man, that
is, in a notion of global human identity that prompts one to mistake
immediate, socially specific opportunities to broaden one's cultural
horizons for humanity's alleged universal capacity for choosing which
identity markers it wishes to affirm. And second--as others have observed-because it fails to differentiate meaningfully between contexts where
multiculturalism effectively has been imposed (true, for example, of virtually
all colonial encounters) and contexts where it is fostered as an intellectual
innovation. Even when, in the former colonies of Asia and Africa, an imposed
multiculturalism is vigorously reappropriated, it is done with an eye toward
renegotiating a distinctly local version of an often imported tension between
tradition and modernity. Thus, to the extent that multiculturalism is
represented as a necessary corollary to the critique of Eurocentrism
(especially in the West), it threatens to contradict the ends of such a critique
by authorizing means for [End Page 11] realizing it that obscure crucial
differences "on the ground." Not to put too fine a point on it: multiculturalism to
a Bolivian tin miner, who wears Tweeds T-shirts (assembled in Bolivia, sold in the
United States, black-marketed everywhere) while listening to Ricky Martin on the
camp radio, does not mean what it does to a Midwestern student in the United
States who carries his copy of Cien aos de soledad in a book bag made of leather
from Argentina that, in the semiotics of North American youth subcultures, signifies
alternative. Despite the fact that multiculturalism is under siege (especially from the
Right), and criticism of it is now fashionable, if it cannot meaningfully
differentiate among cultural contexts and serves, in effect, to protect the
AT: Deconstruction/Decolonization
Decolonization requires an encounter with the colonized
simply deconstructing one knowledge base doesnt allow for
any new modes of thought
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance
Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter
2002, The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, Pg. 69-71, The
South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10
2013, JB)
Decolonization Bad
Colonialism included the colonial expansion of knowledge
regardless of whether it not it was critical of itself means the
alternative links to the K
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance
Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter
2002, The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, Pg. 79-80, The
South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10
2013, JB)
AT: Quijano
Quijanos theory relies on coloniality being constitutive
history proves the two existed independent of each other
Mignolo, Duke University professor of Literature and Romance
Studies, 2
(Walter, Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University, Published Winter
2002, The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference, Pg. 81-82, The
South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 101, Number 1, Winter 2002, Accessed July 10
2013, JB)
Coloniality of Power, Dependency, and Eurocentrism
Wallerstein, Quijano, and Dussel have in common their debt to
dependency theory. They are apart (although not enemies) because of the
epistemic colonial difference. Quijano's concepts of coloniality of power and
historic-structural dependency emphasize this complicity, similar to Dussel's
arguments with and against Vattimo. 68
To understand Quijano's coloniality of power, it is first necessary to accept
coloniality as constitutive of modernity and not just as a derivative of modernity
that is, first comes modernity and then coloniality. The emergence of the
commercial Atlantic circuit in the sixteenth century was the crucial moment in which
modernity, coloniality, and capitalism, as we know them today, came together.
However, the Atlantic commercial circuit did not immediately become the
location of Western hegemonic power. It was just one more commercial
circuit among those existing in Asia, Africa, and Anahuac and Tawantinsuyu
in what would later become America. 69 Modernity/coloniality is the moment
of Western history linked to the Atlantic commercial circuit and the
transformation of capitalism (if we accept from Wallerstein and Arrighi that the
seed of capitalism can be located in fifteenth-century Italy) 70 and the foundation of
the modern/colonial world-system.
In the preceding paragraph I purposely mixed two macronarratives. One I will call
the Western civilization macronarrative and the other the modern/colonial worldsystem narrative. The first emerged in the Renaissance and was consolidated during
the Enlightenment and by German philosophy in the early nineteenth century. As
such, this macronarrative is tied to historiography (the Renaissance) and philosophy
(the Enlightenment). The second macronarrative emerged during the Cold War as it
is linked to the consolidation of the social sciences. The first macronarrative has its
origin in Greece; the second in the origin of the Atlantic commercial circuit. Both
macronarratives are founded in the same principles of Western epistemology, and
both have their own double personality complex (double side). For instance, the
narrative of Western civilization is at the same time celebratory of its
virtues and critical of its failings. In the same vein modernity is often
celebrated as hiding coloniality and yet is critiqued because of coloniality,
its other side. Both macronarratives can also be criticized from the inside
(Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Wallerstein, Gunder Frank, etc.) and [End Page 81]
from the exteriority of the colonial difference. 71 Both coloniality of power and
historico-structural dependency are key concepts in Quijano's critique of
the above macronarratives from the exteriority of the colonial difference.
Eurocentrism Inevitable
General
Eurocentric Framing is inevitable human nature
Zahrai, Ethics Journalist, 8
(Koorosh Zahrai, March 18, 2008, Control Structures Review, Eurocentrism: The
basis of our society, culture, and source of our problem coexisting with nature,
http://controlstructures.spheerix.com/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=19:eurocentrism-the-basis-of-our-societyculture-and-source-of-our-problem-coexisting-with-nature&catid=5:digitalculture&Itemid=6, accessed July 6, 2013, EK)
The Eurocentric worldview permeates every aspect of our lives, as we are
all products of the system of the United States. Whether at home or
abroad, in our relationships with each other and nature, each of us
participates in and replicates these notions of Western society and
culture, as we are all indoctrinated through the education system and
communal socialization. Creating new living experiences and narratives free of
these constraining and altered states of being begins with liberation of our selves,
minds, and actions and becoming harmonious in our relations with nature and each
other. More positive present and future experiences will shape our paths so that we
can all join together to work on attaining a more meaningful relationship with our
surroundings.
Unthinking Eurocentrism focusses on Eurocentrism and multiculturalism in popular
culture. It is written in the passionate belief that an awareness of the
intellectually debilitating effects of the Eurocentric legacy is indispensable
for comprehending not only contemporary media representations but even
contemporary subjectivities. Endemic in present-day thought and education,
Eurocentrism is naturalized as "common sense." Philosophy and literature are
assumed to be European philosophy and literature. The "best that is thought and
written" is assumed to have been thought and written by Europeans. (By
Europeans, we refer not only to Europe per se but also to the "neo-Europeans" of
the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere.) History is assumed to be European history,
everything else being reduced to what historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (in 1965!)
patronizingly called the "unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque
but irrelevant corners of the globe."1 Standard core courses in universities stress
the history of "Western" civilization, with the more liberal universities insisting on
token study of "other" civilizations. And even "Western" civilization is usually taught
without reference to the central role of European colonialism within capitalist
modernity. So embedded is Eurocentrism in everyday life, so pervasive, that
it often goes unnoticed. The residual traces of centuries of axiomatic
European domination inform the general culture, the everyday language,
and the media, engendering a fictitious sense of the innate superiority of
European-derived cultures and peoples.
Eurocentrism inevitable
Dirlik, Former Duke University History Professor, 99
Epistemology Specific
Eurocentric epistemological reproduction is inevitable
OBrien, Professor of Economic History, London School of
Economics, 10
Eurocentrism Good