Decolonizing Politics. Robbie Shilliam
Читать онлайн книгу.
to come clean with at least one of its limitations.
It is absolutely not the case that all politics in the world have a colonial heritage or logic. This is not the claim of the book. But I do maintain that political science is formed as a discipline from imperial heritages and with abiding colonial logics. In short, the purpose of this book is to decolonize the academic study of politics, not politics per se. That said, you’ll see by the end of the book that to pursue such a decolonization of knowledge requires us to commit to broader programs of global justice outside of the academy, narrowly conceived.
In pursuit of this decolonizing “impulse” I have selected various thinkers and themes not as true and full representations of every subfield: that would be impossible. Rather, I’ve picked them because I think they bring the imperial heritages and colonial logics of the discipline into sharp relief; and I’ve selected their interlocutors from the margins in the way described above – imaginatively. In other words, don’t read this book as if it is the authoritative account of political science. Read it to gain some practice in the art of decolonizing knowledge.
On this note, I want to justify to you the style of the book’s prose. Often, social science is written in the third person – as an impersonal register of the outsider looking in. I’m hoping you’ll have caught the problem with this register before you’ve even finished this sentence. Remember, we are involved in an uncanny enterprise. Uncanny enterprises require intimacy. You and I are taking this journey together.
Journeys are best represented as stories. Telling stories usually means, in some way, dwelling in the past. Most of the material that we’ll work through is historical – from the fifteenth century up to the 1980s. But this is not a history book. We are using this material to recontextualize, reconceptualize, and reimagine the study of politics. I’ve picked stories that are heavily implicated in the formation of political science’s subfields and which help to highlight the colonial logics that are integral to these formations. I’ve also picked stories that just as much bring to life different logics that contest these formations – in the academy and beyond. I’ll provide some suggestions along the way, but it’s going to be up to you to think about how all these stories resonate in the present. That’s the “decolonizing” work that you’ll have to do.
At this point you might be wondering if this book is a guide, a survey, or a series of provocations? Often, books that offer broad introductions into a field of study are presented in survey form, as non-committed and impartial engagements with various authors, issues, and arguments. I understand why. The writer does not want to tell you what to think but rather to guide you through the options. Once again, though, that strategy might not best fit a decolonizing agenda.
Stories always invoke some kind of travel – whether that be physical, intellectual, or ethical. We will be traveling from the center to the margins, from the imperial heartlands to the peripheral colonies, from the arenas of citizens to the spaces of migrants, from the offices of the powerful to the movements of the oppressed, and across physical, psychical, and social borders. Now, in order to journey, you have to commit somewhat to those whom you travel with, even if they annoy you. This commitment might sometimes mean taking their side, for a while at least. It’s fine, by the way, to be critical of your traveling companions. I’m not trying to convert you or recruit you to anything. I’m simply suggesting: it’s the journey that’s critically instructive, not the destination.
Now for the limitations. I’m sure you’ll find a number. But let me suggest one, right away. Most of the spaces that we will move in and through are Anglophone ones, that is, relics of Britain’s 450-year empire: beginning with the plantations of Ireland in the 1550s and continuing to this day with the struggle over possession of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. More than that, when we do venture into non-Anglophone territory (for instance, French Algeria), it is to engage with a thinker who is extremely well known in the English-speaking academy (i.e. Frantz Fanon). There is both a centering of English-speaking sources in the global academy, and beyond that, a centering of colonizer (European) languages. You should think about how we might need to decenter this colonial language preference in decolonizing work. That is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famous message in Decolonising the Mind (1986).
Let me now sketch out for you the chapters that follow.
In chapter 2 we investigate the subfield of political theory. We focus on the question of what it means to be human, and how the capacity to reason is implicated in this question, especially as it pertains to the justification of rights. Political theory draws upon conversations that took place in the eras of the European Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment. We consider how, in these eras, imperial expansion brought Europeans into contact with a diverse array of peoples, cultures, and practices. This diversity was tamed, if you like, by way of a fundamental philosophical distinction being made between properly human and not-properly human beings.
We engage specifically with the philosophical and anthropological writings of Immanuel Kant, and tease out the colonial logics of difference that accompanied his conception of the human. I’ll be suggesting to you that the universal rights of which Kant boasts are only universal to those racially defined as properly human. We then grapple with the work of Sylvia Wynter, a Jamaican scholar of the humanities. Wynter is concerned with many of the same themes as Kant. But she arrives at a very different conclusion. Wynter seeks a conception of the human being that no longer rests upon the colonial and racist logic that distinguishes the properly human from the non-properly human.
In chapter 3 we turn to the subfield of political behavior. This subfield seeks to uncover how citizens engage with the political process and how that process responds to citizens. We begin our analysis in the late-nineteenth-century context of expanding empire and industrial urbanization in both Britain and the USA. In this era, scholars worried that the increasing movement and mixing of different peoples would negatively impact the quality of democracy. In response, they developed a race science that attributed the inheritance of degenerative abnormal behaviors to some races and the inheritance of progressive “normal” political behavior, conducive to an orderly democratic process, to the white Anglo-Saxon race. This science was informed by eugenics.
As part of this examination we look at the work of a set of scholars: Walter Bagehot, the British editor-in-chief of the Economist magazine, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, and John Watson, an American psychologist famous for coining the term “behaviorism.” I’m going to make the argument that even if they refuted eugenics, all of these figures accepted the race logics of the science of heredity. We then explore a very different resolution to the division of citizenship into those who display normal versus abnormal political behavior. Frantz Fanon, a black clinical psychiatrist from Martinique, sought in his Algerian medical practice to repair the egos and psyches of those who had been made abnormal by structures of colonial rule. He envisaged a French citizenry that brooked no racial division on grounds of heredity.
In chapter 4 we address the subfield of comparative politics. We focus especially on the way in which comparativists have examined the distinctions between non-democratic and democratic societies and the varied paths of “political development” from one system to the other. Specifically, we track the colonial logic that inheres in what I will call the “paradox of comparison.” This phrase references how difference might be accepted analytically, that is, as part of the way in which you understand human behavior, but disavowed “normatively,” that is, as certain values and practices are set as the norm (the standard) by which all human groups should be evaluated and prepared for assimilation. We follow how scholars created and then re-shaped this paradox over a set of imperial eras from fifteenth-century Spanish colonization to twentieth-century decolonization.
Along the way, we look at the concept of “improvement” proffered by Adam Ferguson, a famous Scottish philosopher of the late eighteenth century; then we turn to the critique of “colonial development” made by famous anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early twentieth century; subsequently