PSCI 3601 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: European Colonialism, Posthumanism, Eurocentrism
10 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Postcolonial and decolonial approaches
Lecture 9
Diversity of origins/backgrounds
(geography, culture, politics, disciplines, theories, etc.)
→ PC&DC not (and not intended as) a univocal theory
Two main claims/concerns of PC and DC:
(1) Enduring relevance and legacies of European
colonialism and imperialism (since 15th cent.) for
global politics
(2) Critique of Eurocentric/Western worldviews
and pluralization/”globalization”
of theory, history, and experience
Theoretical background:
• Western (political) philosophy: critique (e.g. Locke, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, J.S.
Mill, Rawls) and borrowing (e.g. Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida)
• Marxism (esp. dependency theory, world system theory): inherent relationship btw.
development and underdevelopment, and btw. Europe/the West (“core”) and the (post-
)colonial world (“periphery”)
• Poststructuralism (and feminism): concerns with representation, power/knowledge (e.g.
Orientalism), ethics → contest Western universalism and explore alternative experiences
and world orders
• Indigenous cosmologies (without essentialization or a mere reversal of the Eurocentric
epistemology & ontology)
Agency: can the subaltern speak? (G. Spivak)
• Recovery of agency of (post)colonial peoples and states, but skepticism about “heroic”
(sovereign, autonomous) accounts of agency
• Attention to identity and culture without essentialization
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