Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Prophets Facing Sidewise : The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02691720500084325

1464-5297

Walter D. Mignolo,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Abstract There is no safe place and no single locus of enunciation from where the uni‐versal could be articulated for all and forever. Hindu nationalism and Western neo‐liberalism are entangled in a long history of the logic of coloniality (domination, oppression, exploitation) hidden under the rhetoric of modernity (salvation, civilization, progress, development, freedom and democracy). There are, however, needs and possibilities for Indians and Western progressive intellectuals working together to undermine and supersede the assumptions that liberal thinkers in the West are better placed to understand what is the common good better than Indian thinkers in post‐partition India. Science, in the last analysis, doesn't carry in itself an ethics and politics. Therefore, it is doubtful to argue that science is beyond both, and only concerned with the advancement of the frontier of knowledge and understanding. Science could be (like Christianity, Hinduism, Liberalism or Marxism) both imperial and liberating. Knowledge and understanding, rather than science; gnoseology rather than epistemology, should be thought out as which the horizon toward a dialogical and critical cosmopolitanism (e.g., pluriversallity as universal project), could be envisioned beyond East and West, Hindu nationalism and Westertn (neo) liberalism. Keywords: ColonialityColoniality of knowledgeBorder thinkingAbstract universalsPluriversality as universal projectCritical cosmopolitanism Notes [1] Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003). [2] "Biographically motivated" is here a positive observation and not a critique. The position I am taking in my commentary argues in favor of the bio‐graphical inscription in the production of knowledge, which has been suppressed by modern Ego‐politics of knowledge behind modern and European concept of "scientific knowledge"; the absence of the bio‐graphic gave scientific knowledge the magic touch of universality. [3] Ashis Nandy, quoted in Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward, p. 211. [4] Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward, p. 231. [5] Ibid., bolds mine, italics Nanda's. [6] Ibid., bolds mine, italics Nanda's. [7] See for instance, Lewis Gordon, "Fanon and Development: A Philosophical Look" in Africa Development/Development Afrique, XXIX, 1, 2004, 65–88; and "African American Philosophy, Race and the Geography of reason" in Not only the Masters tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice. Lewis Gordon, ed. Boulder: CO Paradigm Publisher, 2005, forthcoming. [8] "Adorno in India. Revisiting the Psychology of Fascism" in Exiled at Home (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 104–5, italics mine. [9] See Vandana Shiva, "Globalization and Its Fall Out", http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003‐04/02shiva.cfm [10] Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism (Allyn and Bacon, 1999); see also Susan George, "A brief history of neoliberalism", http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/econ101/neoliberalism.html [11] Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward, p. 231. Italics mine, last sentence quotation from Nussbaum. [12] Ibid. [13] Ibid. [14] "The many faces of cosmopolis: Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism", Public Culture 12.3, 2000. [15] Steve Heims, John Von Neuman, and Norbert Wiener, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980). [16] Distinguished Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzáles Casanova, has recently published a detailed and critical analysis of the imperial dimensions and uses of the New Sciences and the need to activate critical analysis and decolonizing projects in the Humanities to unveil the dangers hidden under the marvelous achievements of the New Sciences. Las Nuevas Ciencias y las Humanidades. De la Academia a la Politica (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2004). [17] Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, "The color of reason: The idea of "race" in Kant's anthropology", in Chucwudi Eze, ed., Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (London: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 103–40. [18] Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony, quoted in Walter D. Mignolo, "Coloniality of Power and Subalternity", in Ileana Rodriguez, ed., The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 424–45. [19] Enrique Dussel, "El programa científico de investigaci'on de Karl Marx" in Hacia una filosofía política crítica (Sevilla: Palimpsesto, 2001), pp. 279–303.