Justice Unbound

Voices of Justice for the 21st Century

Patrizia Longo

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786608154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Introductions to political philosophy/theory mostly exclude discussions of race, and anthologies of political theory and philosophy cover readings from the ancient Greeks to contemporary theorists but without the voices of nonwhite authors. So Western political thought seems circumscribed to the theories of white men thus providing a misleading narrative of Western political theory to college students. The debates presented between liberalism and absolutism, libertarianism and communitarianism, capitalism and socialism leave out discussions of racism, sexism, abolitionism, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy. This textbook is ideal for a variety of courses including social and political philosophy, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, political theory, sociology, social justice programs/course, and theories of justice. Student features:

• Offers an accessible reader that combines theory with historical and contemporary case studies that encourage students to apply their theoretical understandings of justice to real world issues.

• The case studies offer teachers built-in class activities to explore the implications and applications of theory.

• Includes introductions at the beginning of each section and contemporary case studies at the end of each section of theoretical readings. At the end of each section there will also be reflection questions and paper topics.

Section V

Global Justice

Confronting Colonialism and Imperialism

245Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

—Chinua Achebe

Memory is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.

—Homi Bhabha

The last reading in the previous section addressed Native American women’s struggle for the survival of their people, their identity and culture, still suffering from the long-term devastating effects of European colonisation of North America. In fact, colonialism impacted the environment, health, culture and identity of the colonised in every area of the world where Europeans settled. The intersectionality of race, gender and class becomes clear once more in the international context and in the divisions between the Global South and the Global North.

The political end of European colonialism as a result of two world wars and the rise of movements for independence and self-determination did not end cultural imperialism and its effects. The imperial culture was appropriated in projects of countercolonial resistance, thus giving rise to post-colonial literary work as the interaction between colonial and indigenous cultures. As a result, post-colonial theory came into being as a mixture of imperial language and local experience. One may say that the post-colonial condition starts with the onset rather than the end of colonial occupation since the psychological resistance to colonialism begins with its onset, and post-colonial theory is a theoretical resistance to the amnesia of the colonial aftermath and the repression of painful memories of colonial subordination, as expressed in the above quotation by Bhabha. Colonisation, as Said argued, is a ‘fate with lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair results’.1

Some would date the start of Postcolonial Studies as a discipline in the Western academy from the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, a critique of Western knowledge and scholarship about the East as generated from false assumptions and marked by a ‘subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their cultures’.2 Said argued that a long tradition of romanticised images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture has served as an implicit justification for European and American colonial and imperial 246ambitions. These images portray ‘Eastern’ societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to ‘Western’ societies. This establishes ‘the East’ as antithetical to ‘the West’, and the ‘Orient’ is constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture. As Said puts it, ‘Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)’.3

Said showed that the myth of the Oriental was possible because of European political dominance of the Middle East and Asia. Influenced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Said argued that Orientalism is a full-fledged discourse, not just a simple idea, and that all knowledge is produced in situations of unequal relations of power. A person who dominates another is the only one in the position to write a book about it, to establish it, to define it. Creating an image of the Orient and a body of knowledge about the Orient and subjecting it to systematic study became the prototype for taking control of the Orient. By taking control of the scholarship, the West also took political and economic control.

It follows, therefore, as Mignolo argues, that philosophy and scholarship must be decolonised. Decolonisation works from the double bind of the ‘colonial difference’: as Bernasconi writes, ‘Western philosophy traps African philosophy in a double bind: either African philosophy is so similar to Western philosophy that it makes no distinctive contribution and effectively disappears; or it is so different that its credentials to be genuine philosophy will always be in doubt’.4 Decolonisation becomes an undoing of the colonial difference and a redoing, ‘another thinking’, which includes a critique of Occidentalism from the perspective of the colonial history of North Africa.

Europe, as a body of scholarship that defines how academics view the world, must be returned to its rightful place as one world region amongst many, without the privilege that it has continued to hold in academic circles, where the theory of development presented a linear history where modernity, capitalism and civilisation appear ‘first in Europe and then elsewhere’.5 As Said writes, ‘Without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’.6 Similarly, ‘Provincializing Europe’, suggests Dipesh Chakrabarty, implies that Western social science and the universal ideas of the Enlightenment need to be recognised in their limitations in explaining the historical experiences of political modernity in South Asia.

Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, describes the brutal impact of European capitalism and colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisy implicit in Western notions of ‘progress’ and ‘civilisation’ upon encountering the ‘savage’, ‘uncultured’, or ‘primitive’. Like Fanon and Gandhi after him, Césaire calls for the decolonisation of the African mind, the liberation of the colonised people from their imposed sense of inferiority. ‘The problem of colonialism includes not only the interrelations of objective historical conditions but also the human attitudes toward these conditions’, remarked Fanon.7 For Fanon, as well as for Gandhi, national and cultural liberation were central to the project of independence, and both addressed the ‘inferiority complex’ of the colonised that culminates, for Fanon, in the native’s desire to be White. Fanon attempted to articulate the cultural and psychological effects of colonialism as they were experienced by those subjected to them. ‘How does it feel to be a problem’? as Du Bois put it.8 What was it like to find oneself transformed into a colonial subject? How does it feel to have your culture devalued and appropriated, your language debased into a vernacular, detached from all forms of power which are accessible and enacted only in a foreign tongue? How does it feel today to be a ‘post-colonial subject’? What, in short, has been the human experience of colonialism 247and decolonisation? What are the psychological effects for both coloniser and colonised? This juxtaposition of the objective with the subjective, of seeing yourself as a subject who is also an object, amounts to what Du Bois described as ‘double consciousness’.

Fanon, however, like other critics of colonialism, does not include gender in his discussion of the coloniser and the colonised. As Oyèrónke´. Oyěwùmí reminds us in her book, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, the histories of both coloniser and colonised have been written from the male point of view and have marginalised women and their experiences. She demonstrates how the colonial experience threw women ‘to the very bottom of a history that was not theirs’.9 The precolonial seniority system was replaced by a patriarchal system in which women were inferior and subordinate to men, a system that unfortunately survived the demise of colonialism.

How should we respond to the cultural injustices of colonialism? How should we respond to continuing cultural injustice? As previous readings have shown and Oyèrónke´. Oyěwùmí has discussed in her study of Nigeria, injustices that started in a somewhat distant past are still continuing and the effects of colonialism are still present. In his essay, Rajeev Bhargava underlines the importance of coming to terms with the past in a search for ethnocentric biases and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface by Charles W Mills
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction
• Section I From the State of Nature to Society: The Social Contract and Its Critics
• Section II Racial and Gender Justice: The Quest for Civil Rights
• Section III Economic Justice and Social Welfare
• Section IV Environmental Justice: Confronting Racism and Imperialism
• Section V Global Justice: Confronting Colonialism and Imperialism
• Section VI Transitional and Restorative Justice: Working towards a Just World
• Glossary
• Index