Eurocentrism – Claudia Fonseca Alfaro

How do we take postcolonial critique seriously from a location in the global North?

This blog has been dormant for some time. Happy to be back after a long period of parental leave, fieldwork, and a wonderful experience as a Visiting Scholar at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield.

Last week I attended a meeting of Urban Agency III: Towards a Sustainable Integration of Disciplines in Urban Studies, a scientific research network that I am part of (alongside Guy Baeten, Carina Listerborn, Defne Kadioglu, Lorena Melgaço and Chiara Valli) through the Institute for Urban Research, IUR, at Malmö University. Urban Agency III seeks to investigate the “institutional embedding” of the discipline of urban studies across institutes in Europe and North America. The meeting was filled with interesting sessions discussing issues from “the interface between city and academia” to “collaboration and co-creation in the city.” One of the most stimulating interventions, in my view, was a presentation by two scholars who talked about how scientific networks can engage with postcolonial and comparative urbanism critiques. Two interesting questions posed to the audience were: How do scholars based in European institutes humbly try to take the postcolonial turn in urban studies seriously? Does doing urban research on European cities make you Eurocentric?

These thought-provoking questions reminded me of a workshop we had back in October at the IUR, Interrogating the South, led by the brilliant Kavita Ramakrishnan, Associate Professor in Geography and Global Development, University of East Anglia (who at that point was a Visiting Researcher at the IUR). For me, it is obvious that doing urban studies “on” European cities does not make you automatically Eurocentric since the project of postcolonizing (or provincializing) does not entail a geographical location, but a method. Drawing on Ananya Roy’s (2009) classic piece New geographies of theory, there are two contributions that have summarized this point brilliantly. The first one is by Nancy Odendaal (2021) who argues:

“Provincialising is not about rejecting Western/Northern debates, or only embracing Global South/Eastern experiences. It opens up analysis to how a phenomenon is tied to and generated by place, with a broader range of urban experiences.”

The second intervention is carried out by Lawhon et al., (2014) who state:

“… the South is not homogenous; different intellectual traditions exist throughout the global South and these can and should contribute to the development of theory from the South in different ways. This frames the “global South” as an epistemological location—rather than a geographical container—through which a provincialization of dominating theory can be crafted.”

It is necessary to stay away from the idea that the global South presumes a fixed geography—a precise location where one goes to carry out postcolonial approaches, for example. Instead, it is important to remember the “relational and on-going construction of North-South divides” that includes Imperial Souths, poor Norths, and bodies that carry the global South with them (Fonseca Alfaro, 2023). As one of the attendants argued, one can also find the postcolonial within Europe and explore the colonial remains that exist in contemporary cities.

As the discussion during the meeting moved to concrete actions, two suggestions emerged. One proposal suggested using pragmatism to respond as situations arose while a second opinion raised the issue that there is a need to create institutional space for postcoloniality. While both suggestions have their merits, I side with the second option. In my view, concrete actions that urban studies institutes based in Europe and North America could make to take postcolonial critique seriously include:

Ensuring curricula includes a variety of authors that describe urban experiences and processes from across the world (and not just the EuroAmerican heartland).
Making space for minorities in institutional spaces and teaching.
Enabling the interaction with institutes in the global South with, for example, Visiting Researcher schemes.
Acknowledging their “locus of enunciation” (i.e., location from where one speaks and produces knowledge. This includes a reflection of limitations in terms of generalizability and universalizing claims)

References

Fonseca Alfaro C (2023) Producing Mayaland: Colonial Legacies, Urbanization, and the Unfolding of Global Capitalism. Chichester: Wiley.

Lawhon M, Ernstson H and Silver J (2014) Provincializing urban political ecology: Towards a situated UPE through African urbanism. Antipode 46(2). Blackwell Publishing Inc.: 497–516.

Odendaal N (2021) Everyday urbanisms and the importance of place: Exploring the elements of the emancipatory smart city. Urban Studies 58(3): 639–654.

Roy A (2009) The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory. Regional Studies 43(6): 819–830.

Featured image: Photo by USGS on Unsplash.

The limitations of looking at the postcolonial as a historical period

This is my last blog entry before I go on parental leave. Hope to be back with more posts in January 2023!

My academic home, the Department of Urban Studies, has for several years organized the Open Urban Seminars and during the pandemic, the tradition continued in a combination of online and face-to-face events. In December last year, I had the great pleasure of attending one of these seminars: a fascinating lecture titled Swedish Saint Barthélemy: Colonialism, Slavery, Slave Trade and Colonial Amnesia given by the historian Fredrik Thomasson. Thomasson presented findings from his latest book in Swedish, Svarta Saint-Barthélemy: människoöden i en svensk koloni 1785-1847. In the late eighteenth century, Sweden became a slave-holding nation when it purchased from France the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy. Swedish Caribbean colonialism is an under-researched topic and Thomasson has done an impressive job of going over newspaper articles of the time and documents from the French National Colonial Archives, such as ship manifestos and court papers, to expose a dark chapter in Sweden’s history. This has been important since, according to Thomasson, Sweden has traditionally held a self-image of a nation untainted by the dehumanizing and violent practices of slavery and colonialism.

While I celebrate Thomasson’s contribution to widening our understanding of colonial history, there were certain arguments during his lecture that made me think about the limitations of conceptualizing the “postcolonial” merely as a historical period. It appeared to me that this approach runs the risk of preventing us from understanding that colonial practices and ways of thinking continue to have impacts on the present. I can see that the study of history does not necessarily need to reflect on the present, but a non-critical understanding of postcolonialism or the “postcolonial” can affect the methods with which history is studied and how knowledge is produced. Let me explain. The definition of “postcolonial/post-colonial” has been one of the central debates within postcolonial studies (cf. McLeod, 2010). The discussion has centered around the following: Does the concept only refer to a historical period (that is to say what comes after colonialism)? Or does it describe a context in places that were former colonies? Or is the “post” being used in the sense that colonial relationships no longer exist (that is to say, a condition that exists beyond the colonial)? Or is the concept meant to describe a world system where colonial practices and legacies continue to play out even now in the present regardless of the “independent” status of a former colony?

Thomasson’s understanding of postcolonialism during his lecture seemed to be one based on the perception of a historical period of time that is defined by a country’s independent status from a former colonial power. This became clear to me when, for example, Thomasson mentioned that the island of Dominica is even “decolonial” because the nation has been independent for several years now. In my view, this limited understanding of “postcolonial” (or “decolonial” in this case), runs the risk of studying history through a colonial way that reproduces Eurocentric bias – despite the best intentions. This thought came to my head when a member of the audience asked what other sources could be consulted to understand the history of Saint Barthélemy. Thomasson recommended reading the accounts written by Christopher Columbus of his “discovery” of America. While I understand the difficulties of having limited resources when studying the past of certain regions, it is also important to treat certain sources with a grain of salt. (My intention is not to claim that Thomasson is unaware of this, but only to comment on the arguments developed and answers given during the lecture I attended). As argued by scholars such as José Rabasa (1993) in his book Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism, European accounts of the American continent were shaped by prejudice, a perception of superiority, a sense of fear and wonder, and a lack of ability to understand knowledge forms and ways of being outside a Christian worldview. For example, the Caribbean was named as such by European explorers because they believed the region was inhabited by lustful cannibal women (Braham, 2016). The region was also named the “West Indies” because Columbus’s misconception that he had reached India when he stumbled upon what came to be known as America. The idea of America was also a European creation: an exotic and feminized landscape that could be named and penetrated, and that perhaps even held the Earthly location of paradise (O’Gorman, 1995; Rabasa, 1993).

An obvious question comes to mind: what are the limitations of studying a historical period through Eurocentric categories and sources? (By Eurocentric I mean, biased and bounded by a worldview that believed in the supremacy of knowledge and customs from Europe). What do we lose when the other side, in this case, the conquered, does not get to tell its side of the story? José Rabasa, for example, has attempted to bridge this gap by exploring an account of the Aztecs and how they experienced the Spanish conquest in Tell me the Story of How I Conquered You. While I understand the context of the Caribbean is different, I wonder (as a scholar that is not a historian) if there are any methods to recover the histories and voices of the colonized? (Echoing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous Can the subaltern speak?) Are there strategies that can be put to use to understand history avoiding the trap of Eurocentric bias? The answer might lie in understanding the “postcolonial” beyond a historical period.

References

Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 17–48.
McLeod J (2010) Beginning Postcolonialism. 2nd editio. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
O’Gorman E (1995) La Invención de América. Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Rabasa J (1993) Inventing America. Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Duncan: University of Oklahoma Press.

Featured image: “abstract world map” by fronx is licensed under CC BY 2.0

How do we navigate Eurocentrism? Reflections from teaching postcolonial urban studies

For the past four years I have been teaching a lecture on postcolonial urban theory within The Urban Question—a first-semester course in the international Master’s Program in Urban Studies. In this lecture, I try to explain the relationship between the postcolonial and its impacts on both the urban condition and the production of urban knowledge. (Meaning: the traces of Eurocentrism in how we learn about and teach urban studies today). I encourage students to reflect on examples of postcolonial conditions in their own countries—regardless if their country has an official colonial past or not. This opens a series of interesting reflections and questions. Last year, a student asked if trying to tackle Eurocentrism meant being at odds with the aims of modernity, for example, democracy. A few years ago, a student from Turkey wondered: what happens when ultra-nationalist governments hijack the emancipatory aims of postcolonialism to oppress their own populations by arguing “Western” notions, for example, LGBTQ rights, are “colonial” and therefore have no place in their society?

These important questions are at the heart of postcolonial and decolonial debates and are precisely two points that Kanishka Goonewardena and Tanja Winkler touched upon during their interventions in A Non-Occidentalist West: Learning from Theories Outside the Canon, workshop #1 of the Dislocating Urban Studies Series (which was also a PhD course in which I contributed). Pointing out that not all critique of the West that comes from the global South aims towards emancipatory goals, Kanishka wondered: What forms of critique of Europe and the West are then valid? What is the nature of critique of the West? While Kanishka was thinking about the ultra-nationalist governments in India and Sri Lanka, his point had echoes of the question the student from Turkey had posed in my class. Tanja, in turn, reflected how the concerns of the left had been hijacked by the intellectual political right but for negative purposes. For example, the post-structuralist concern that “all knowledge is important” had been twisted to dismiss science, support regressive standpoints, and promote undemocratic contexts. This reminded of the first student’s concern that postcolonialism could be wielded as a tool to attack democracy.

While we have not been able to settle these debates in class, the discussions around them have stayed with me because of the important question that they raise: how do we navigate Eurocentrism? In Kanishka’s view, we need to have a dialectical understanding of binaries, (for example, center-periphery and north-south), in order to engage with thinkers that are genuine internationalists in the sense that they are not constrained by their geographical locations. The point is to look at the global North and global South as locations that both contain centers and peripheries. For Tanja, our epistemic tools need to be reclaimed. Adding to this, a source of guidance for me has been the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010) and his intervention A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge. Arguing that it is meaningless to carry out epistemological divisions across north/south, de Sousa Santos instead proposes engaging with thinkers that are anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, regardless if their work can be labeled as “Western.” In his view, there is much to learn from theories that, even though were produced within Western modernity, can nevertheless offer tools to fight capitalism and colonialism. At the end of the day, as Aníbal Quijano (1992) argues through his work on coloniality of power, what we are trying to dismantle is the colonial side of modernity, not necessarily modernity itself.

I am eager to hear what questions students raise this year.

References

Quijano A (1992) Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad. Perú Indígena 13(29): 11–20. DOI: 10.1080/09502380601164353.
Santos B de S (2010) A Non-Occidentalist West?: Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8): 103–125. DOI: 10.1177/0263276409348079.

Featured image: “Perpetual Ocean – Gulf Stream” by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC BY 2.0