The Sunday News
After publishing his book about “living in the end times” in 2010, and detailing the crisis of global capitalism, Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek was called by critics “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.”
Not only that, but Zizek in person called himself a “monster.” Among the so called intellectually and philosophically dangerous things Slavoj Zizek has done is to write a “Leftist plea for Eurocentricism,” pleading for Eurocentric fundamentalism. Even as a leftist, Marxist and Lacanian thinker, Zizek has called for the end of the world and not the end of Eurocentricism that is the colonial and imperial ideology that has put the entire planet in danger, enveloped in financial crises, ecological calamities, terror, war and political catastrophe.
Slavoj Zizek is a perfect example of a Eurocentric critic of Eurocentricism who would rather suffer the end of the world than witness a roll back of the idea of Europe as the self-appointed centre of the world. The astute Marxist literary critic, Terry Eagleton in 2015 accused Zizek of repeating himself and reproducing old jokes and presenting dry humour as philosophy, literally clowning and joking when the world awaits strong answers for the strong questions that confront it.
The difference between Eurocentric philosophies and theories and Decoloniality is exactly that, the Eurocentrics have time and place to joke and theorise in jest, whereas decolonial philosophies and theories have only the time to engage with the human condition and human problems, the existential struggle for liberation from colonialities in the Global South and at a planetary scale.
Decoloniality projects to mobilise all the intellectual and cultural rigour and gravitas and deploy it in practical engagement with the problem of coloniality in the present economic and political world system; life and thought cannot be business as usual, and there is no time for jokes. In the present instalment of this column I present some conceptual tools with which decolonial thinkers and activists engage life and the world.
Epistemic Disobedience
In the global academy and the global media, Euro-American knowledges and culture are presented as the knowledge for the world and the culture of choice for the entire universe. Decolonial thinkers and decolonial political activists dispute this allegation and explode the myth that Europe and America could be the thought and cultural capital of the universe. The world is far too big to be seen, known and described only from the Euro-American perspective.
This intellectual and political habit of decolonial thinkers and activists to debunk the Euro-American monopoly of culture and knowledge is named epistemic disobedience. Boaventura de Soussa Santos put it well when he said “Western understanding of the world is not the only understanding of the world in the world.” Against the Euro-American cultural hegemony in the world, there are many rebel, renegade, heretic and revolutionary cultures and knowledges that propose another view and vision of the world and the planet.
Undisciplinarity
Related to epistemic disobedience is the habit of undisciplinarity. As part of colonising knowledge in the world, Euro-American philosophers invented disciplines and conventions of knowledge. Disciplines erect rules of knowledge and knowing that must be followed like a strict map and rigid regulations. For example, students of literature are told that there is a poem called a sonnet that must strictly have fourteen lines and of these lines a certain number of them must rhyme.
Mathematicians must follow given formulae and not create their own. Social scientists must follow given theories and methodology of investigation or else their work is rejected as unscientific. Decolonial thinkers agree to know and rigorously understand disciplines but also reject them as imposed and limiting, and therefore multidisciplinarity and undisciplinarity, the methods of no method are knowingly elected in rebellion to disciplinarism.
The academy may have assessors and examiners not magistrates and imperial judges. Tired are the scholars of the Global South of being forced to quote dead white Americans and Europeans as founders of knowledge so that their work may be considered scientific and of sufficient rigour and quality. Chinua Achebe is said to have laughed in contempt when he was told that Things Fall Apart was not a novel but a novella, he insisted that his was a story about his people, their history, experience and culture in the world, names and descriptions of stories can be hanged, be taken to hell or somewhere near there!
Transmodernity
Whenever Western thinkers and politicians are cornered about the evil of the Euro-American Empire in slavery, colonialism and the enduring legacy of vampiric imperialism they have a tendency to be defensive and claim that Euro-America has globalised modernity and civilisation.
There is a stubborn claim that Euro-America invented development, democracy, human rights and rapid technologisation of the globe. In that logic, the Global South must be grateful to Europe and America in that slavery, colonialism and imperialism were not pain without gain. Even military invasion of other continents and countries has been perfumed as humanitarian intervention under the United Nations mantra of the “responsibility to protect.” Enrique Dussel coined the term and concept of transmodernity as a refusal that Euro-America owns modernity.
Dussel and many other decolonial thinkers including Frantz Fanon and Eric Williams insist that Euro-America is modern and prosperous because of the free labour, natural resources and knowledge that were stolen from the Global South. For that reason, modernity is the property of the universe and the whole of humanity, not a singular privilege of the sinful Euro-American province of the world alone.
Border Thinking
In 1955, President Sukarno of Indonesia hosted the first and biggest conference of African and Asian heads of state. What has been canonised in history as the Bandung Conference was a big debate on how newly independent countries of the Global South could maintain their political and economic independence from both Western and Eastern Europe.
This was the beginning of what came to be called the Non-Aligned Movement by a total of 29 Afro-Asian states at the time. Border thinking is exactly that, non-alignment, living and thinking from the fences and borders but dwelling in countries. Border thinkers pick and choose ideas and practices that enrich their countries and states and abandon toxic impositions and prescriptions of economic and political nature that perpetuate coloniality.
Border thinkers think from their own histories and experiences, they are rooted in their ancestral soils but use their independence of thought and decolonial freedom to harvest from anywhere in the world any ideas and practices that enrich the development and progress of their localities, border thinkers oppose both international puppetry and local tyranny.
Locus of Enunciation
In 1637, a Jesuit trained French philosopher and mathematician delivered the “Cogito Ergo Sum” discourse, translated in English to mean “I think therefore I am.” This Cartesian and egoistic statement has been taken, much mistakenly, to mean that all human beings think and therefore they are human and better and different from plants, animals and other objects of nature. For that mistaken reason, Rene Descartes is considered to have enunciated the secure foundation of western philosophy as thought that separated man from nature and the animals. Eurocentricism has that habit of pretending to be thinking and knowing on behalf of all humanity, the whole universe and nature.
The history of America and Europe in the world has proven that the “I” that Rene Descartes referred to was the European white man not all humanity. In politics and economics in the world, Europe and America claim to be fair, objective and acting in the interest of all humanity everywhere, but the practical truth is that they think and act in their personal and national interests. Decolonial thinkers are very careful about who is speaking, where they are speaking from and which political and economic interests the speech overtly or covertly represents.
There is, otherwise no objective and neutral speech, every human subject speaks from an economic, social, political, cultural and even spiritual location. All thought, speech and literature is inevitably politically motivated, even so when the political motivation is denied. Locus of enunciation cannot be taken for granted.
A thinker can be fully black, have a Zimbabwean ancestry and national identity and live in Zimbabwe but think and speak on behalf of white Europeans and Americans, knowingly or unknowingly, geographic location is not necessarily epistemic location. One can think and speak from Washington while physically standing in Makokoba.
Presented above are but a few concepts of Decoloniality, many more are to come, including epistemic coyotismo, ecology of knowledges and decolonial love. The next instalment of this column delves into decolonising the teacher- student or supervisor-student relationship as part of decolonising education and knowledge in Africa.
Part of coloniality of knowledge appears in power relations and attitudinal forces between students and their teachers and supervisors that lead to students failing or dropping out of school. Schooling and education, instead of being enjoyed as liberation end up being endured as torture and punishment, and that must stop.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena is a Zimbabwean academic based in South Africa: [email protected].
