johs12059 gurminder bhamra contesting imperial epistemologies

Contesting Imperial Epistemologies:Introduction

GURMINDER K BHAMBRA, ROBBIE SHILLIAM, ANDDANIEL ORRELLS*

Abstract This special issue addresses the Eurocentred nature of knowledge pro-duction by examining alternative loci of knowledge production and the conse-quences of subverting standard narratives of particular events and conceptualparadigms through a focus on “other” places and traditions of thought, especiallythose formed in colonial encounters. In contesting imperial epistemologies, thisspecial issue draws together contributors working on a variety of globally locatedphenomena and also seeks to re-examine how “foundational” concepts and eventswithin social theory and historical sociology are understood differently once we startfrom locations and traditions other than the typically hegemonic West.

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The humanities and social sciences continue to witness a concernwith the Eurocentric nature of knowledge production and thelimited ability of disciplines to address issues of race, coloniality,and modernity and, more particularly, the intersections betweenthem (see Chakrabarty 2000, Bhambra 2007). This special issuebrings together a collection of articles that respond to these con-cerns from a variety of geographical locations and scholarly tradi-tions. The articles are broadly divided into two sections. The firstsection moves beyond general critiques of the relationship betweencoloniality and modernity to implicate race and colonial rule in thedevelopment of specific academic fields and particular conceptsthat are of importance to the humanities and social sciences (seeTageldin, Fraiture, Zhang and Patil). The second section isorganised around substantive investigations that challenge thecommon sense boundaries of the West/non-West and colonizer/colonized to complicate the associated actors, relations and spacesas well as dominant ideas of the global and the local (Demir, Lee,Mayblin, Hansen and Jonsson).

The opening article of the special issue, by Shaden Tageldin,addresses the relationship of theory, particularly postcolonial

* Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Sociology at the University ofWarwick, and may be contacted at [email protected]; RobbieShilliam is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Queen MaryUniversity of London. He can be contacted at [email protected];Daniel Orrells is Associate Professor of Classics at the University ofWarwick at [email protected]

Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. •• No. •• •• 2014DOI: 10.1111/johs.12059

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

theory, to Africa and questions the marginalisation, dispersal, andreduction of Africa within these broader, avowedly critical, debates.Even within Paul Gilroy’s influential model of the Black Atlantic,only one side of the ocean – the Americas – is located as a site thatbreathes modern social agency into African descendents; theAfrican continent remains mute and, by implication, those whonever made the crossing are prefigured as socially pre-modern(Piot 2001; see also various chapters in Orrells et al 2011).Tageldin takes the lens of “contesting colonial epistemologies” andturns it onto one of the dominant critiques of Eurocentred knowl-edge to excavate these further silences that occur in the failure toacknowledge Africa and the traditions of African thought. Shesuggests that part of the problem of recognition stems from earlierdisplacements of the Atlantic diaspora that fractured Africanselves, but argues that this disapora, in its global circulations, alsoreveals the ways in which the continent is imbricated in relation-ships that span the globe and so can be used as a resource forthinking about the very meaning of the global. Tageldin’s essayexcavates a genealogy of modern African thought which has con-fronted the complexities of the African continent at the heart ofthe contemporary global age from the perspective of Africansthemselves.

Tageldin disinters a history of attempts to think through thenotion of “pan-Africanism”. More specifically, by concentrating on a1955 text by Gamal Abdul Nasser and a 1967 speech by LéopoldSédar Senghor, we learn of the difficulties Africans faced intheorising relations between the “Arab” north and the “Black”South, between Egypt and the Africa south of the Sahara, andbetween different religions in Africa. Whereas Senghor in 1967 hadtried to show that all of Africa is united through métissage (or racialand cultural mixing) Nasser had already suggested that what tiesEgypt to the African continent is a history of geopolitics. If we haverecently become interested in what it means to live in a global age,Tageldin’s article shows that the history of pan-Africanist thoughthas much to teach the rest of the world about the difficulties inunderstanding cultural and political relations across territories. Itis out of this longer history of African thinking that AchilleMbembe’s recent call to bring Africa back into postcolonial critiqueemerges. Addressing Mbembe’s notion of the postcolony of Africa,Tageldin builds a powerful argument for the realignment of theplural unity of Africa(s). She advocates an understanding of Africathat has thus far been lost to mainstream theory, including post-colonial theory, and demonstrates the necessity of a continualengagement across borders and differences in a mutual project oflearning.

2 Gurminder K Bhambra, Robbie Shilliam, and Daniel Orrells

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons LtdJournal of Historical Sociology Vol. •• No. •• •• 2014

Pierre-Philippe Fraiture’s article contributes to this endeavourthrough its examination of, and engagement with, the work of VYMudimbe, the renowned African philosopher. A long debate hasdivided African intellectuals over the possibility of the existence ofAfrican philosophy instead of African collective worldviews whichPaulin Hountondji (1996 [1977]) dismissed as “ethnophilosophy”.This debate finds its coordinates in an inherited colonial division ofknowledge wherein natives provide only particularist modes ofthought that must be decoded by Europeans, while the latterprovide the universal concepts that are the former’s Rosetta stone(or key for understanding). This debate is complicated by theproblem of essentialism: if we acknowledge such a thing as Africanphilosophy in the singular do we not then reify the traditions of awhole continent? (see Masolo 1994, Eze 1998, Shilliam 2011).Fraiture’s contribution to this special issue confronts this dilemma.He looks at the way in which understandings of the local and theglobal, of community and the self, permeate Mudimbe’s work espe-cially in relation to his critique of the dominant Eurocentred cul-tural field. Fraiture engages with Mudimbe’s address of bothAfrican discourses and discourses about Africa in exploring therelationships between forms of knowledge production (particularlycultural and anthropological forms) and processes of colonialism,nationalism, and decolonisation across the continent. Mudimbe’scorpus of scholarly work, he argues, can be seen as a form ofself-assertion that points to the particular as well as arguing for theinfinite plurality of experiences that constitute sub-Saharan Africa.Fraiture focuses on the discussions of Zairean national communityto discuss Mudimbe’s analysis of community more generally; andassesses Mudimbe’s reflections on globalisation as central to hiscritique of anthropology.

Shifting from Africa to Asia, Chenchen Zhang’s article continuesthe discussion of themes of nationalism, modernism and ways ofknowing the world. While recognizing their implication in colonialpower, Zhang seeks to go beyond the claim that nationalism andmodernism, when cultivated in the non-West, are merely “derivativediscourses” (Chatterjee 1986). Yet neither is Zhang satisfied withthe explanatory purchase of what could be termed a “hybridised”discourse (see, for example, Puri 2004). Instead, she looks first atthe different approaches to modernity that have structured under-standings of nationalism before looking more specifically at howthese themes have been developed within the work of Liang Qichao,an influential “Enlightenment” thinker in modern China. Alongwith nationalism, Zhang examines the place of the cognate con-cepts of imperialism and cosmopolitanism within Liang’s work anddiscusses their relationship both to events at the time and to

Contesting Imperial Epistemologies: Introduction 3


contemporary trends within Western thought. Zhang critiques theidea of knowledge as something that is simply consumed, or cre-atively adapted, and argues instead for thinking about the creationof knowledge through learning across difference.

The article by Vrushali Patil closes this section by bringingtogether a concern with the epistemological issues at stake withindominant debates around knowledge production and an address oftheir changing institutional organisation within universities in theUnited States. Patil returns us to a foundational concern for poli-tics and the exercise of power in the creation and division ofacademic disciplines and fields of study (see also chapter 12 ofBloom and Martin 2013). She examines the way in which race isunderstood within contemporary ethnic studies departments andthe consequences of an increase in these departments for cross-group solidarities. While debates on epistemology have oftendevolved to issues of identity politics, Patil, instead, focuses on thepossibilities for building alliances across the differences otherwiseidentified as forming separations. Indeed, she argues that theidentification of differences can only be the beginning of socialinquiry, and not its end, and cautions against forgetting the coali-tions of difference that, in fact, enabled the very emergence andestablishment of different epistemologies that have subsequentlyseemed troubling. In tackling the legacies of colonial and racialisedepistemologies as currently embodied within Ethnic Studies pro-grammes in the US, Patil offers both a thorough-going critique ofthe problems and also points to resources from which we can buildand develop alternative positions.

Speaking to the epistemic coordinates laid out in the first section,the second section offers substantive critiques of Eurocentredknowledge precisely by questioning commonsensical and acceptednotions of Europe and the “European”. Each essay in its own wayshows how the borders of “Europe” have repeatedly resistedreification. Indeed, three of the case studies show that what“Europe” means has been contested and battled over through dif-ferent discursive practices and in surprisingly global geographicalloci (see, Demir, Mayblin, and Hansen and Jonsson). Furthermore,this section also seeks to complicate accounts of European colonialhistories, by offering an alternative episode in Japanese/Koreancolonial history, alerting us to the need to situate European colo-nialism within more global and more complex colonial events.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British, Frenchand German neoclassicism, in particular the discourse of philhel-lenism, saw to it that the meaning of Greece in modernity, as wellas in antiquity, became a critical issue. The independence of Greecefrom the Ottoman Empire became a Europe-wide project in the



middle of the nation-state-obsessed nineteenth century. At thesame time, with the development of historicism, western Europeanscholars came to historicise Europe as an entity defined precisely interms of “east” and “west”, so that military conflicts between thosetwo zones came to be seen as fundamental for the historical becom-ing of Europe itself. It will not surprise readers that the history ofthe crusades, stories of battles between Christians and Muslims,became a central node of western-European historical scholarshipin the nineteenth century. From a Eurocentric perspective in thelong nineteenth century, then, Turkey occupied a problematic andmysterious position between East and West, the familiar and theforeign. However, as Ipek Demir shows, this problem wasalso central for the articulation of Turkishness to the world byTurkish scholars themselves (see also Baban and Keyman 2008,Bilgin and Tanrisever 2009). Whilst numerous studies havefocussed on the complicated relations between different “Turkeys”and various “Europes”, Demir’s essay, “Humbling Turkishness”,examines how Turkey’s own sense of itself since the late nineteenthcentury has been continually dogged by an identity politics thatposits an essentialised “Turkishness” whose condition of possibilityis its being endlessly haunted and threatened by internal politicaland cultural “non-Turkish” factions. If Eurocentric orientalismshave been continually fascinated and anxious about how(un)European Turkey may (have) be(en), so, as Demir discusses,have been many of Turkey’s political elite, in the quest to “purify”the “western” Turkish nation-state of “non-Turkish” elements.Demir addresses these issues in the context of the position ofKurds. The essay suggests a different future in which Kurds andTurks build solidarity zones and learn each other’s “language”, thatis, cultures and senses of self, in order to imagine a less exclusion-ary narrative of Turkish history and modernity, where Kurdishnessand Turkishness both change into something else, for the better.

If Demir’s article posits translation as a mode for a more hopefulfuture (see also Demir 2011), Hyang A Lee’s article examines theway in which the Japanese colonial government transformed, ortranslated, the habitus of Korean society for its own colonialpurpose, that is, effective governance. Lee draws upon the notion ofcolonial governmentality (Scott 1999), and through this frameworkexplores how newly invented Japanese burial institutions wereimposed in its colonies and the effects that this had upon Koreansocial and religious norms. Here, translation is understood asimplementation and Lee’s essay clearly lays out the ways in whichthe Japanese imperial authority consolidated its hold in Korea bytranslating Korean subjects into these new colonial modes ofgovernance. In making this argument Lee mobilizes the concept of



colonial governmentality to make sense of its operation by non-European imperial powers. This innovation problematises the iden-tification of imperialism solely with European and Western powers(see also, Duara 2003). And this is a crucial corrective in terms ofunderstanding the fast developing South-South relationships thatat the same time challenge extant global hierarchies and alsoreproduce some of its key technologies of rule and order.

Lucy Mayblin’s contribution returns us to the heart of Europeanempire. Historical narratives of the reception of refugees intoBritain have often emphasised a caesura: the non-European statusof the refugee since the 1990s has been underlined in contrast toearlier receptions of predominantly European refugees after theSecond World War (see Chimni 1998). Recent calls either to stem oreven halt the intake of refugees has been contrasted with theapparently more welcoming attitude of the British government inthe 1950s. Mayblin complicates this account by showing that hugenumbers of non-European refugees were moving around the globealready in the mid-twentieth century and that recent British gov-ernmental attempts to refuse entry to non-European refugees wasalso a central part of British political strategy in the 1950s. TheGeneva Convention on the Status of Refugees broached the issue ofuniversal human rights, which profoundly questioned traditionalEuropean colonialist discourses and practices. Mayblin analysesBritish parliamentary debates and committee discussions in whichMPs continually worried over the consequences of the GenevaConvention’s statement about refugees for their own colonial ter-ritories. As a result, British representatives at the UN, along withother traditional colonial powers, argued against including non-European refugees into a new refugee Convention, whilst severalrecently decolonised countries argued for the safe passage of non-Europeans away from dangerous and life-threatening situations.Mayblin’s article powerfully shows that colonialist anxiety aboutthe non-European refugee has been continuous in the design andimplementation of British refugee and asylum seeker policy, ahistorical fact that should have an impact on today’s politicians’decision-making in this area.

In the closing essay of this special issue, and drawing togetherthe two strands in this issue of epistemic and substantive inquiry,Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson address the broad contours ofcolonial epistemologies, as read through the dominant narrative ofthe nation, and discuss the exclusions and silences that emerge asa consequence of this. As suggested by Mayblin’s contribution,their substantive area of concern is the way in which standardscholarship on the European Union promotes a purified account ofpost-war European integration that neglects the significance of



colonialism to these processes. Indeed, key war-time discoursesregarding the post-fascist future of Europe were developed by colo-nial intellectuals and politicians who were positioned both insidethe colonies and within the European metropolises (Grovogui 2006,Jennings 2001). As well as putting forward a cogent critique of thisscholarship, they present an alternative, more adequate, narrativeof these events through a serious engagement with the history ofinterconnections between Europe and Africa, or Eurafrica. Hansenand Jonsson (2011), building also on their earlier research, arguethat the interconnections signified through Eurafrica were consti-tutive of the very possibilities of European integration and that thefailure to acknowledge this history is primarily a consequence ofthe inherited epistemological preconceptions under critique in thiscollection of articles.

Collectively, these articles seek to extend the arguments beingmade across the social sciences and the humanities with regards tothe deep implication of race, modernity and coloniality in theconstitution of the dominant modes of knowledge production. Bysituating their arguments in substantive issues and case-studies,the authors of this special issue offer alternative ways of contesting,and going beyond, standard colonial epistemologies. The value ofthis collection is precisely its diverse approach to geographicallocations and temporal moments. As a series of case studies, theessays offer a generous array of intellectual methodologies:Mayblin, Lee, and Hansen and Jonsson show the importance of thehistorical archive for digging out untold colonialist and imperialisthistories. More specifically, Mayblin’s work on British refugeepolicy questions straightforward “colonial” and “postcolonial”periodisations showing how present-day British government policyimplements practices that reflect a historical continuity going backto colonialist strategies and procedures. Lee, on the other hand,gets us thinking more specifically about the place of colonial historywithin broader global historical processes as she opens up a crucialepisode in the history of “south-south” colonial relations. Thearticle by Hansen and Jonsson, in turn, contests the methodologi-cal nationalism of much social scientific research that does notacknowledge the broader entanglements of coloniality as constitut-ing a significant aspect of contemporary politics.

This volume also demonstrates the importance of close, literaryreading for contesting imperial epistemologies. Both Tageldin andFraiture show how crucial the skills of literary criticism are forunpacking the production of knowledge outside of Europe. Theliterary critic’s attentiveness to detail, as evidenced in Tageldin’sand Fraiture’s essays, imprint the necessity of tracing outhow anti-imperialist epistemologies have been constructed in



complicated, tricky and slippery texts. Patil’s project is similar inintent, but focuses on the macro organisation of knowledge withininstitutions, primarily universities. She provides an institutionalanalysis that addresses the importance of both diverse epistemolo-gies and cross-cutting and overlapping group solidarities. Demir’sessay, on the other hand, offers a different sort of intellectualapproach: developing her essay through solid research on thecultural-political history of Turkey, she suggests a practicalapproach – indeed readily exportable advice – for scaffolding anti-imperialist, non-Eurocentred knowledges. The essay by Zhangfurther points to the importance of engaging with diverse traditions,from locations beyond the West, and being “archivally cosmopoli-tan” in the development of our theoretical and conceptual under-standings (Pollock et al 2000).

The value of this collection is that it brings together humanitiesand social sciences scholars, from literary critics interested indeconstructing texts to scholars offering pragmatic advice forinter-cultural dialogue (from Tageldin to Demir), and demonstratesthe range of methodological tools and opportunities available tous for questioning imperialist epistemologies and Eurocentredknowledges. That is, the academic interest in the minutiae ofdiscourse analysis and the turns of language, along with the exca-vation of laconic notes and handwritten scrawls kept hidden inarchives (see, for instance, Mayblin) show that the dismantling ofimperialist thinking should be the joint project of arts and humani-ties scholars as well as social scientists. Ultimately this specialissue argues for greater urgency in the development of perspectivesadequate to the address of these extended geographical, temporal,and disciplinary horizons.

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johs12059 gurminder bhamra contesting imperial epistemologies

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