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

12059

Contesting Imperial Epistemologies: Introduction

GURMINDER K BHAMBRA, ROBBIE SHILLIAM, AND DANIEL ORRELLS*
Abstract This special issue addresses the Eurocentred nature of knowledge production by examining alternative loci of knowledge production and the consequences of subverting standard narratives of particular events and conceptual paradigms through a focus on other places and traditions of thought, especially those formed in colonial encounters. In contesting imperial epistemologies, this special issue draws together contributors working on a variety of globally located phenomena and also seeks to re-examine how foundational concepts and events within social theory and historical sociology are understood differently once we start from locations and traditions other than the typically hegemonic West.

***** The humanities and social sciences continue to witness a concern with the Eurocentric nature of knowledge production and the limited ability of disciplines to address issues of race, coloniality, and modernity and, more particularly, the intersections between them (see Chakrabarty 2000, Bhambra 2007). This special issue brings together a collection of articles that respond to these concerns from a variety of geographical locations and scholarly traditions. The articles are broadly divided into two sections. The rst section moves beyond general critiques of the relationship between coloniality and modernity to implicate race and colonial rule in the development of specic academic elds and particular concepts that are of importance to the humanities and social sciences (see Tageldin, Fraiture, Zhang and Patil). The second section is organised around substantive investigations that challenge the common sense boundaries of the West/non-West and colonizer/ colonized to complicate the associated actors, relations and spaces as 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 of Warwick, and may be contacted at G.K.Bhambra@warwick.ac.uk; Robbie Shilliam is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He can be contacted at r.shilliam@qmul.ac.uk; Daniel Orrells is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Warwick at d.orrells@warwick.ac.uk

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Gurminder K Bhambra, Robbie Shilliam, and Daniel Orrells

theory, to Africa and questions the marginalisation, dispersal, and reduction of Africa within these broader, avowedly critical, debates. Even within Paul Gilroys inuential model of the Black Atlantic, only one side of the ocean the Americas is located as a site that breathes modern social agency into African descendents; the African continent remains mute and, by implication, those who never made the crossing are pregured as socially pre-modern (Piot 2001; see also various chapters in Orrells et al 2011). Tageldin takes the lens of contesting colonial epistemologies and turns it onto one of the dominant critiques of Eurocentred knowledge to excavate these further silences that occur in the failure to acknowledge Africa and the traditions of African thought. She suggests that part of the problem of recognition stems from earlier displacements of the Atlantic diaspora that fractured African selves, but argues that this disapora, in its global circulations, also reveals the ways in which the continent is imbricated in relationships that span the globe and so can be used as a resource for thinking about the very meaning of the global. Tageldins essay excavates a genealogy of modern African thought which has confronted the complexities of the African continent at the heart of the contemporary global age from the perspective of Africans themselves. Tageldin disinters a history of attempts to think through the notion of pan-Africanism. More specically, by concentrating on a 1955 text by Gamal Abdul Nasser and a 1967 speech by Lopold Sdar Senghor, we learn of the difculties Africans faced in theorising relations between the Arab north and the Black South, between Egypt and the Africa south of the Sahara, and between different religions in Africa. Whereas Senghor in 1967 had tried to show that all of Africa is united through mtissage (or racial and cultural mixing) Nasser had already suggested that what ties Egypt to the African continent is a history of geopolitics. If we have recently become interested in what it means to live in a global age, Tageldins article shows that the history of pan-Africanist thought has much to teach the rest of the world about the difculties in understanding cultural and political relations across territories. It is out of this longer history of African thinking that Achille Mbembes recent call to bring Africa back into postcolonial critique emerges. Addressing Mbembes notion of the postcolony of Africa, Tageldin builds a powerful argument for the realignment of the plural unity of Africa(s). She advocates an understanding of Africa that has thus far been lost to mainstream theory, including postcolonial theory, and demonstrates the necessity of a continual engagement across borders and differences in a mutual project of learning.
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Contesting Imperial Epistemologies: Introduction

Pierre-Philippe Fraitures article contributes to this endeavour through its examination of, and engagement with, the work of VY Mudimbe, the renowned African philosopher. A long debate has divided African intellectuals over the possibility of the existence of African philosophy instead of African collective worldviews which Paulin Hountondji (1996 [1977]) dismissed as ethnophilosophy. This debate nds its coordinates in an inherited colonial division of knowledge wherein natives provide only particularist modes of thought that must be decoded by Europeans, while the latter provide the universal concepts that are the formers Rosetta stone (or key for understanding). This debate is complicated by the problem of essentialism: if we acknowledge such a thing as African philosophy in the singular do we not then reify the traditions of a whole continent? (see Masolo 1994, Eze 1998, Shilliam 2011). Fraitures contribution to this special issue confronts this dilemma. He looks at the way in which understandings of the local and the global, of community and the self, permeate Mudimbes work especially in relation to his critique of the dominant Eurocentred cultural eld. Fraiture engages with Mudimbes address of both African discourses and discourses about Africa in exploring the relationships between forms of knowledge production (particularly cultural and anthropological forms) and processes of colonialism, nationalism, and decolonisation across the continent. Mudimbes corpus of scholarly work, he argues, can be seen as a form of self-assertion that points to the particular as well as arguing for the innite plurality of experiences that constitute sub-Saharan Africa. Fraiture focuses on the discussions of Zairean national community to discuss Mudimbes analysis of community more generally; and assesses Mudimbes reections on globalisation as central to his critique of anthropology. Shifting from Africa to Asia, Chenchen Zhangs article continues the discussion of themes of nationalism, modernism and ways of knowing the world. While recognizing their implication in colonial power, Zhang seeks to go beyond the claim that nationalism and modernism, when cultivated in the non-West, are merely derivative discourses (Chatterjee 1986). Yet neither is Zhang satised with the explanatory purchase of what could be termed a hybridised discourse (see, for example, Puri 2004). Instead, she looks rst at the different approaches to modernity that have structured understandings of nationalism before looking more specically at how these themes have been developed within the work of Liang Qichao, an inuential Enlightenment thinker in modern China. Along with nationalism, Zhang examines the place of the cognate concepts of imperialism and cosmopolitanism within Liangs work and discusses their relationship both to events at the time and to
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Gurminder K Bhambra, Robbie Shilliam, and Daniel Orrells

contemporary trends within Western thought. Zhang critiques the idea of knowledge as something that is simply consumed, or creatively adapted, and argues instead for thinking about the creation of knowledge through learning across difference. The article by Vrushali Patil closes this section by bringing together a concern with the epistemological issues at stake within dominant debates around knowledge production and an address of their changing institutional organisation within universities in the United States. Patil returns us to a foundational concern for politics and the exercise of power in the creation and division of academic disciplines and elds of study (see also chapter 12 of Bloom and Martin 2013). She examines the way in which race is understood within contemporary ethnic studies departments and the consequences of an increase in these departments for crossgroup solidarities. While debates on epistemology have often devolved to issues of identity politics, Patil, instead, focuses on the possibilities for building alliances across the differences otherwise identied as forming separations. Indeed, she argues that the identication of differences can only be the beginning of social inquiry, and not its end, and cautions against forgetting the coalitions of difference that, in fact, enabled the very emergence and establishment of different epistemologies that have subsequently seemed troubling. In tackling the legacies of colonial and racialised epistemologies as currently embodied within Ethnic Studies programmes in the US, Patil offers both a thorough-going critique of the problems and also points to resources from which we can build and develop alternative positions. Speaking to the epistemic coordinates laid out in the rst section, the second section offers substantive critiques of Eurocentred knowledge precisely by questioning commonsensical and accepted notions of Europe and the European. Each essay in its own way shows how the borders of Europe have repeatedly resisted reication. Indeed, three of the case studies show that what Europe means has been contested and battled over through different discursive practices and in surprisingly global geographical loci (see, Demir, Mayblin, and Hansen and Jonsson). Furthermore, this section also seeks to complicate accounts of European colonial histories, by offering an alternative episode in Japanese/Korean colonial history, alerting us to the need to situate European colonialism within more global and more complex colonial events. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British, French and German neoclassicism, in particular the discourse of philhellenism, saw to it that the meaning of Greece in modernity, as well as in antiquity, became a critical issue. The independence of Greece from the Ottoman Empire became a Europe-wide project in the
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Contesting Imperial Epistemologies: Introduction

middle of the nation-state-obsessed nineteenth century. At the same time, with the development of historicism, western European scholars came to historicise Europe as an entity dened precisely in terms of east and west, so that military conicts between those two zones came to be seen as fundamental for the historical becoming of Europe itself. It will not surprise readers that the history of the crusades, stories of battles between Christians and Muslims, became a central node of western-European historical scholarship in the nineteenth century. From a Eurocentric perspective in the long nineteenth century, then, Turkey occupied a problematic and mysterious position between East and West, the familiar and the foreign. However, as Ipek Demir shows, this problem was also central for the articulation of Turkishness to the world by Turkish scholars themselves (see also Baban and Keyman 2008, Bilgin and Tanrisever 2009). Whilst numerous studies have focussed on the complicated relations between different Turkeys and various Europes, Demirs essay, Humbling Turkishness, examines how Turkeys own sense of itself since the late nineteenth century has been continually dogged by an identity politics that posits an essentialised Turkishness whose condition of possibility is its being endlessly haunted and threatened by internal political and cultural non-Turkish factions. If Eurocentric orientalisms have been continually fascinated and anxious about how (un)European Turkey may (have) be(en), so, as Demir discusses, have been many of Turkeys 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 of Kurds. The essay suggests a different future in which Kurds and Turks build solidarity zones and learn each others language, that is, cultures and senses of self, in order to imagine a less exclusionary narrative of Turkish history and modernity, where Kurdishness and Turkishness both change into something else, for the better. If Demirs article posits translation as a mode for a more hopeful future (see also Demir 2011), Hyang A Lees article examines the way in which the Japanese colonial government transformed, or translated, the habitus of Korean society for its own colonial purpose, that is, effective governance. Lee draws upon the notion of colonial governmentality (Scott 1999), and through this framework explores how newly invented Japanese burial institutions were imposed in its colonies and the effects that this had upon Korean social and religious norms. Here, translation is understood as implementation and Lees essay clearly lays out the ways in which the Japanese imperial authority consolidated its hold in Korea by translating Korean subjects into these new colonial modes of governance. In making this argument Lee mobilizes the concept of
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colonial governmentality to make sense of its operation by nonEuropean imperial powers. This innovation problematises the identication of imperialism solely with European and Western powers (see also, Duara 2003). And this is a crucial corrective in terms of understanding the fast developing South-South relationships that at the same time challenge extant global hierarchies and also reproduce some of its key technologies of rule and order. Lucy Mayblins contribution returns us to the heart of European empire. Historical narratives of the reception of refugees into Britain have often emphasised a caesura: the non-European status of the refugee since the 1990s has been underlined in contrast to earlier receptions of predominantly European refugees after the Second World War (see Chimni 1998). Recent calls either to stem or even halt the intake of refugees has been contrasted with the apparently more welcoming attitude of the British government in the 1950s. Mayblin complicates this account by showing that huge numbers of non-European refugees were moving around the globe already in the mid-twentieth century and that recent British governmental attempts to refuse entry to non-European refugees was also a central part of British political strategy in the 1950s. The Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees broached the issue of universal human rights, which profoundly questioned traditional European colonialist discourses and practices. Mayblin analyses British parliamentary debates and committee discussions in which MPs continually worried over the consequences of the Geneva Conventions statement about refugees for their own colonial territories. As a result, British representatives at the UN, along with other traditional colonial powers, argued against including nonEuropean refugees into a new refugee Convention, whilst several recently decolonised countries argued for the safe passage of nonEuropeans away from dangerous and life-threatening situations. Mayblins article powerfully shows that colonialist anxiety about the non-European refugee has been continuous in the design and implementation of British refugee and asylum seeker policy, a historical fact that should have an impact on todays politicians decision-making in this area. In the closing essay of this special issue, and drawing together the two strands in this issue of epistemic and substantive inquiry, Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson address the broad contours of colonial epistemologies, as read through the dominant narrative of the nation, and discuss the exclusions and silences that emerge as a consequence of this. As suggested by Mayblins contribution, their substantive area of concern is the way in which standard scholarship on the European Union promotes a puried account of post-war European integration that neglects the signicance of
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Contesting Imperial Epistemologies: Introduction

colonialism to these processes. Indeed, key war-time discourses regarding the post-fascist future of Europe were developed by colonial intellectuals and politicians who were positioned both inside the colonies and within the European metropolises (Grovogui 2006, Jennings 2001). As well as putting forward a cogent critique of this scholarship, they present an alternative, more adequate, narrative of these events through a serious engagement with the history of interconnections between Europe and Africa, or Eurafrica. Hansen and Jonsson (2011), building also on their earlier research, argue that the interconnections signied through Eurafrica were constitutive of the very possibilities of European integration and that the failure to acknowledge this history is primarily a consequence of the inherited epistemological preconceptions under critique in this collection of articles. Collectively, these articles seek to extend the arguments being made across the social sciences and the humanities with regards to the deep implication of race, modernity and coloniality in the constitution of the dominant modes of knowledge production. By situating 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 of this collection is precisely its diverse approach to geographical locations and temporal moments. As a series of case studies, the essays offer a generous array of intellectual methodologies: Mayblin, Lee, and Hansen and Jonsson show the importance of the historical archive for digging out untold colonialist and imperialist histories. More specically, Mayblins work on British refugee policy questions straightforward colonial and postcolonial periodisations showing how present-day British government policy implements practices that reect a historical continuity going back to colonialist strategies and procedures. Lee, on the other hand, gets us thinking more specically about the place of colonial history within broader global historical processes as she opens up a crucial episode in the history of south-south colonial relations. The article by Hansen and Jonsson, in turn, contests the methodological nationalism of much social scientic research that does not acknowledge the broader entanglements of coloniality as constituting a signicant aspect of contemporary politics. This volume also demonstrates the importance of close, literary reading for contesting imperial epistemologies. Both Tageldin and Fraiture show how crucial the skills of literary criticism are for unpacking the production of knowledge outside of Europe. The literary critics attentiveness to detail, as evidenced in Tageldins and Fraitures essays, imprint the necessity of tracing out how anti-imperialist epistemologies have been constructed in
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complicated, tricky and slippery texts. Patils project is similar in intent, but focuses on the macro organisation of knowledge within institutions, primarily universities. She provides an institutional analysis that addresses the importance of both diverse epistemologies and cross-cutting and overlapping group solidarities. Demirs essay, on the other hand, offers a different sort of intellectual approach: developing her essay through solid research on the cultural-political history of Turkey, she suggests a practical approach indeed readily exportable advice for scaffolding antiimperialist, non-Eurocentred knowledges. The essay by Zhang further points to the importance of engaging with diverse traditions, from locations beyond the West, and being archivally cosmopolitan in the development of our theoretical and conceptual understandings (Pollock et al 2000). The value of this collection is that it brings together humanities and social sciences scholars, from literary critics interested in deconstructing texts to scholars offering pragmatic advice for inter-cultural dialogue (from Tageldin to Demir), and demonstrates the range of methodological tools and opportunities available to us for questioning imperialist epistemologies and Eurocentred knowledges. That is, the academic interest in the minutiae of discourse analysis and the turns of language, along with the excavation of laconic notes and handwritten scrawls kept hidden in archives (see, for instance, Mayblin) show that the dismantling of imperialist thinking should be the joint project of arts and humanities scholars as well as social scientists. Ultimately this special issue argues for greater urgency in the development of perspectives adequate to the address of these extended geographical, temporal, and disciplinary horizons.
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Contesting Imperial Epistemologies: Introduction

Chimni, B. S. 1998. The Geopolitics of Refugee Studies: A View from the South, Journal of Refugee Studies 11 (4): 350374. Demir, Ipek 2011. Lost in Translation? Try Second Language Learning: Understanding Movements of Ideas and Practices across Time and Space, Journal of Historical Sociology 24 (1): 926. Duara, Prasenjit 2003. Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. Lanham: Rowman & Littleeld Publishers. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi 1998. African Philosophy: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell Publishers. Grovogui, Siba NZatioula 2006. Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hansen, Peo and Stefan Jonsson 2011. Demographic Colonialism: EUAfrican Migration Management and the Legacy of Eurafrica, Globalizations 8 (3): 261276. Hountondji, Paulin 1996 [1977]. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, translated by Henri Evans and Jonathan Re. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jennings, Eric Thomas 2001. Vichy in the Tropics: Ptains National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 19401944. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Masolo, D. A. 1994. African Philosophy in Search of Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Orrells, Daniel, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon 2011. African Athena: New Agendas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Piot, Charles 2001. Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroys Black Atlantic, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (1): 155170. Pollock, S., Bhabha, H.K., Breckenbridge, C.A. and Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Cosmopolitanisms, Public Culture 12 (3): 577589. Puri, Shalini 2004. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, PostNationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, David 1999. Colonial Governmentality in Refashioning Futures: Criticism After Postcoloniality, pp. 2352. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shilliam, Robbie 2011. Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands Unto God: Garveyism, Rastafari and Antiquity in D. Orrells, G. Bhambra and T. Roynon (eds), African Athena: New Agendas, pp. 106121. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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