VC Open Lecture Part 1: Eurocentrism, the academy and social emancipation

evening to participate in what is going to be a really stimulating and topical discussion this is the third of our Chancellor's lecture for the year the other two have been similarly stimulating and interesting and engaging with the local and international topics you may remember the first one which were rich focused on the the forests the roses for movement and what are some of the lessons being learned locally and internationally from that and the last one two weeks ago as so Peter Hain talking about Lord Lord Peter Hain talking about globalization brexit Trump and what are some of the implications of that globalization movement and the retreat from globalization for for South Africa and for academia tonight's lecture which is entitled Eurocentrism the academy and social emancipation will be delivered by Professor Vivek Chiba who is the professor of sociology at New York University following the speech we will have some questions and answers so there will be an opportunity to engage and interact you've probably seen the the blurb the adverts and so I'm not going to repeat the the background of Professor Chavez fields just to say a few things about the highlights of his CV he is a professor of sociology at NYU he was born in India and completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin in 1999 under the supervision of a very well known academic era : right his first book was published in 2003 called locked in space State Building and late industrialization in India this book in many ways is relevant to our own debate here in South Africa on the slackin economy for it examined the rise of what is called the developmental state in India which professor tripper compared to the experience of Korea the book examined why development planning was so much more successful in Korea than it was in India he found that the relative failure of industrialization in India was not because of an overly interfering planning apparatus as neoliberal economics would have us believe but rather because the planners did not have sufficient power to direct the flow of private investments and the secret to Korean success was not an embrace of free markets but the construction of a state with the power to compel performance from local business groups the book won several awards including the Barrington word jr. prize from the American Sociological Association and you can see from that brief summary or that brief precis how that would be relevant and Israel event child abates today here in South Africa debates about the development state the impact of neoliberal economic policies and what the alternatives are to that in fact professor Cheever has been visiting us regularly he's been here four times since 2012 and many of his visits are to engage directly with people thinking about economic policy he's given a series of lectures to Cosatu to the some of the other the NGO economic policy organizations in Cape Town and elsewhere this time he has spent some time at just money with some of the and other NGOs which are focusing especially on the next generation of leaders current young activists and sharing his thoughts and insights with them and no doubt also benefitting from theirs following that first book he followed up with the second book which was called post-colonial theory and the specter of capital I was published in 2013 this book undertook a critique of post-colonial theory especially as represented by the subaltern studies collective in India it touched on very wide-ranging debates across the humanities and social sciences on capitalism the nature of colonialism the relevance of Marxism for the global south and much else besides it has undoubtedly resulted in one of the fiercest and most contentious engagements in rece years some of the key contributions with several responses from Professor Chiba are collected in a recent book which is called the debate on post-colonial theory and the specter of capital he is now working on two further books the first on the sovereign domain of capital and it further advances the agenda of his previous book seeking to present a materialist theory of capitalism class and politics and the second is a book on the relation between capitalism and imperialism from the colonization of the Americas to the US invasion of Iraq so you can see that in both that Professor Vivek is background and his his current engagement with these issues are really directly relevant to the debates were holding down it's a privilege for us to be able to host him at UCT and to deliver the Vice Chancellors open lecture I invite you to welcome into the podium and so used to having a mic in front of me I wanted to but can you hear me at all is there now I don't know how this is this huh may be the volume it so I can talk loudly I don't really I feel like I should sing something yeah but will one cancel out the other so I should hold this up yeah okay well I want to of course thanks dr. price for that that wonderful welcome and the description that went with it it's always bizarre there here one talked about when one is sitting in the room I would have added so much more if I could have but I also want to extend a special thanks to dr. Wahby long in the psychology department here who's put an extraordinary amount of work and labor into making this happen and been the most gracious guest worrying about every little thing showing up to pick me up there showing worrying about whether or not everything is working out in my apartment so a public a show of gratitude to dr. to dr. laundry sitting in the front and I'm very glad to be here in this room with so many wonderful people I should tell you a South Africa even though I hail from India and I I live in the United States South Africa has been a very important place in my heart for a very long time I was acted as an undergraduate in the mid 80s in the anti-apartheid solidarity movement at Northwestern University and when I entered graduate school as somebody who saw himself as being on the Left South Africa was for all of us in the 90s a beacon of hope for what mass organizing and mass struggles against racism and against a brutal dictatorship can do and ever since then it's been an aspiration of mine to visit and to learn more so it's an honor for me to be here and it's especially an honor to be in a room full of so many people at this wonderful University so thank you for coming I will try not to take too long in this talk it is a talk that I've never given before I prepared it just for this lecture so I'm not sure if it'll be over in 30 minutes which I have been allotted but I will try to finish at least within 40 minutes if not more the issues that I'm taking up are important ones and while I do want to be brief and concise I don't want to alight or glide over any of the important dimensions of those issues so I hope you'll bear with me what I'm going to talk about as the topic suggested the title suggested is the relationship between the critique of Eurocentrism on the one hand and the aspiration for social emancipation on the other and somewhere in there about the place of the Academy which spoiler alert is not going to be too positive the 20th century that it's a century that is now passed it's considered conventionally and it's understood conventionally to be it's known as the short 20th century and that's because its inception is marked by either the onset of World War one or the Russian Revolution depending on who you're talking to and the end the close of the century is usually taken to be 1989 which is a fall of the Soviet Union it's known as a short twentieth century and so it's defined through the epical struggle between socialism and capitalism with the Soviet Union incorrectly being represented by the flag there for socialism it was a flag bearer for something not necessarily socialism but there was also a second ethical struggle in the twentieth century and that was the struggle for the colonized the people in the global south to wrest free of European and imperial rule and it's quite astonishing that in the conventional historiography of that century this struggle has not been put on the same plane as that between capitalism and socialism whereas in fact it was it is impossible to understand the 20th century if you do not also incorporate the struggles of people in Asia in the Middle East and in Africa to wrest free of colonial domination so the 20th century admired you ought to be seen as comprising of beats both of these struggles won against capitalism won against colonialism a lot of what I have to do today addresses how these struggles related to each other and what I will urge in fact is that there were powerful forces pushing for convergence of both of these struggles particularly in the global south and once they converged the content of what anti-racism was the content of what anti Eurocentrism was supposed to be changed dramatically and in a way that I think she hooves us to pay attention to to try to perhaps learn from but also perhaps try to recapture the struggle against colonialism of course was a fight against a brutal oligarchic dictatorial form of governors colonizers did not base theirs right or their power over the colonized on any sense of legitimacy per se certainly not legitimacy with the colonists their governance was based on force and force backed up by certain notions of Providence certain notions of legitimate right to rule over the inferior that colonialism therefore in addition to the force that it used in addition to the powers of the military the police also generated the way every form of domination does an ideology of its own that ideology was explicitly in virtually every case a racial ideology it was a form of racism we call it now Eurocentrism for a particular reason it has to do with the content and the mobilization of what that racism was now of course Africa came to this game a little bit late as colony they were of course brutalized by the slave trade very early on but the formal colonization of Africa came later in what we would call a third wave of colonization after the colonization of the Americas after the rise of the second British Empire which focused primarily on India the third wave of colonization is when sub-saharan Africa and North Africa are brought into the fold the early formulation of the racist ideologies which attended to and would justify the colonial project were really much more formed with the Indian experience in mind whether in India or in Africa all of these ideologies had one thing in which was the placement of Europe as the center of the morale and the scientific universe and the placement of the colonized region in the periphery that we'd being inferior in some way or form now this took distinct forms a distinct time in the early years when in the late 18th century India's being taken over the mission was to revolutionize that society the mission was to transform property relations and social institutions to look much more like what England or perhaps France look like at the time it was considered to be a revolutionary mission the ideology in the form of racism that attended attended to this was one which explicitly pointed to Europe as being more advanced and therefore superior and looked to the east and the mission of the East as being one of following as rapidly as possible in the footsteps of Europe now this is something this particular ideology is one that stays in place for the first hundred years or so of colonialism but by the latter half of the 19th century you see a change there are two forces which drive towards this change both have to do with the proceeded perception on the part of the colonizing power of a certain weakness that it suffers from diva V the colonized the first such force which drives it in this direction is a series of interaction massive rebellion in the colonies starting with a great rebellion of 1857 in India but in the 1870s and 80s radiating into other parts of the British Empire particularly the West Indies and these rebellions shook the Empire to its core even in non in what we would call the semi colonies like China you see rebellions fanning out from the late fifties into the 70s and 80s these rebellions made the British think once again about the Prudential value of seeing their mission as being a revolutionary mission big the destabilization of social relations that they had unleashed in their perception correctly was leading not simply to a revolution ization of that society but was leading to a revolution against colonialism so the British in India in particular draw back from the mission as they initially perceived it and with that also I'll explain in a second comes a change in the form that their racism that the Eurocentrism takes the second force that pushing in the same direction comes with decolonization of Africa particularly in West Africa where soon after taking power the firm the chartered companies that were the sharp edge of the colonial mission found that they it was impossible for them to secure the single most resource that they needed in order to make their profits in the new colony which was labour because these countries were still overwhelmingly agrarian peasant based economies with peasants having access to land it was extremely difficult to imagine how these companies might secure labour without dispossession the immediate producers from the land the experience with India had already shown that a project of changing the property relations of wholesale dispossession was fraught with too many dangers for that to be taken up the access to labor therefore was secured not by proletarianization but by reliance on indigenous ruling classes indigenous chiefs in this the strategy converged exactly with the new strategy in India in India - after the great rebellion in 1857 what the colonizing powers had found and settled upon was that instead of trying to displace or revolutionize the indigenous elite they would instead seek to use that elite as the anchor for colonial for the colonial state in all sections of the Empire therefore by the early 20th century colonialism adopts a much more defensive posture much more are considered posture in which the world particularly the rural elites cheats landlords become the chief the main allies for the colonial state but of course what this means is that the cultural accoutrements the indigenous institutions that these rural elites have their ideology their religion their internal structure now far from being denigrated the way it was denigrated in the mid 18th century of being backward as needing more civilization as leading to be advanced far from being denigrated is now seen as something to be preserved is now seen as something to be perhaps even valorized this lose to at least to a very important shift in the weight of the ideological apparatus of colonialism whereas earlier there was a straightforward denigration of the colonial culture and colonial institutions as being inferior and primitive what did the kind of Eurocentrism you get in the late 19th early 20th century is one that sees as the central linchpin of its description of the East not outright inferiority or primitiveness but simply social difference there is a description of these lands as being exotic as having different values as having different aspirations and having differently constructed notions of reality but insofar as they are different they are not necessarily explicitly inferior they are simply a different world a different cosmos than that of the West this notion of difference therefore of their being an essential cosmological cultural gap a chasm between the East and West is now enshrined as the nodal point the center of what we now called Eurocentrism but the less fancy we're simply racism and the reason it's still racism is that of course when these description when these differences are described what it is that distinguishes East from West the West is the repository of what science reason rationality conceptions of rights liberalism etc and the East is described as otherworldly as essentially religious a community oriented as not having conceptions of the same conceptions of right and wrong etc so of course in a modernizing world it's understood that even though they're being not explicitly and overtly denigrated as being inferior they're still attached to the East two conceptions and to values that are values to which it becomes hard to criticize colonialism so throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when European critics of colonialism accuse colonial administrators and the colonial state of running roughshod over the right to self-determination running roughshod over the rights of the colonized the response now becomes not they need us because they're inferior it's tough love the response becomes who are we to say that they should have the same rights they have a different conception of reality than Earth who are we to say they deserve to have parliamentary institutions when what they are attached to is their tribal chiefs who are we to say that the women should be given the right to vote when the women deferred naturally to the men in other words the urge to allow them self-determination and the calls coming from them for self-determination are seen as artificial implants being voiced up by the West onto an Eastern consciousness which has no place and no real value for these goals into these ends well this is in the late 19th and early 20th century of valence that's now given to relativism when it comes to understanding the East so moving away from explicit integration of the institutions to a kind of tacit racism a paternalistic racism playing they don't know they don't have the same aspirations as we do by the way this continues to our the 20th century as a more acceptable justification for colonialism and imperial famously when the United States was in the middle of bombing Vietnam into smithereens their commander of the forces general Westmoreland when he was criticized for the slaughter and for the rampage the American soldiers were conducting in Vietnam his response most famously was you don't understand they have a different conception of death than we do this ideology of difference therefore exempted the Western power from taking responsibility for the brutalization that it was carrying out in the colonies by changing the inflection of what the racial discourse was okay well this is the ideological universe that independence movements encountered as they started taking up the critique of colonialism and indeed in the early years of it these independence movements you see the the articulate expressions of what the movements and the leaders of those movements are seeking and you see their justification for what they're trying to achieve very much inhabiting the same ideological universe so the early independence movements in India even in South Africa certainly in other parts of the Middle East were ones which allowed that the West was the repository of moral progress of scientific processes etc but the East was not only religious otherworldly etc but in being this way was superior in other words they accepted the binary opposition of the East being religious of the world lead cetera the West being scientific and rational all they did was change the valence given the value given to anyone whereas the colonizer said we are superior because we're rational now the critics said no we're superior because we don't know how to count we're in direct contact with God or something like that so it was a bizarre debate it did not of course go very far because these elites who were carrying out the critique of colonialism were themselves a very privileged back did not have any particular problem with the economic foundations of colonialism nor did they have a problem with this brutal force they simply wanted to have more space for themselves within the order the difficulty of course was there was no reason to expect that the white overlords would give them that space because they were doing pretty fine the change comes after World War one in South Asia and Southeast Asia a couple of decades later in African sub-saharan Africa the change comes when these independence movements start reaching out to the masses to shift from being elite petitioning societies debating societies to becoming actual movements that put pressure on the colonial state but in order to become these movements in order to gain traction amongst the masses amongst working people the credit the the program of the anti colonial parties the anti colonial organizations now had to broaden and it had to bring to its core not simply an embrace of the notion of difference which the colonizers had implanted but also had to bring to its core social and economic demands which initially the anti colonial nationalists had been loath to take up essentially they were asking workers and peasants adjoined the movements for a program that had nothing to do with the workers and peasants material interest in order to bring them into the movement now the program had to include economic justice rights to lamp higher wages job security all these sorts of things in other words the program had to move simply from critiquing a racial order to becoming a program for social what we would now call social emancipation in other words these parties recognized that in order to overturn not just a colonial but the racial order that came with colonialism you would have to attack the material inequalities that colonialism had put into place so what you start getting now is a change in these anti-colonial movements so that they become mass movements and those movements now incorporate into their dimension into their program these much more materially economically oriented demands this brings about a change in the character of the anti-racism as well whereas initially it is a narrow critique coming within the parameters of the colonial discourse now the intellectual resources of actually moving beyond the colonial discourse into an entirely new conceptualization of what it means to be anti-racist you start getting that and this has two different dimensions to it first of all these movements start recognizing that if you're going to have a rejection of the colonial order to get colonization it cannot simply mean replacing white skin rulers with dark-skinned rulers because while that means the transformation of the nature of your economic and political elite it does nothing for the actual quality of life for the political social and economic fortunes of the vast majority of Browns black whatever the skin color happens to be of the people in the country so first of all in order to be committed to carry out the critique of Eurocentrism and the critique of racism first idea is when you kick out the colonizers that leads open the issue of the content of the domestic dispensation the new post-colonial state so therefore the anti-racism is going to have to be accompanied by social and economic reforms as well but that opens the door to the second dimension of this anti racism which is that it opens the door to a critique of the domestic and internal configurations of power as well what these anti what this form of anti racism does is that it now reveals what the domestic obstacles to the redistribution of resources that the anti-colonial movement is calling for what the domestic optical to that are going to be and if the domestic obstacles to that happen to be groups of people with the same skin code as the masses of people in the country then they too will have to come under the microscope they too will have to be criticized and in criticizing them there is then an opening an invitation to say the displacement of the domination of the colonizer has to be accompanied by displacement of the internal forces of social domination as well without which the social emancipation vision that the colonize the colonized countries and the forces of D : : is Ammar committed to will not be able to be carried forth now this has a final dimension to it that the once the commitment to broadening the scope of the transformation comes to include social emancipation it also opens the door for seeing the universality of these struggles so they are not just struggles that are confined to India or Ghana or Guinea Bissau or even South Africa the same struggles against internal domination are taking place in Europe as well in the United States as well in South America as well so the lines of solidarity now subtly shift the lines of solidarity whereas at the inception of these movements are purely racial in orientation they gradually come to be racial but with a very strong inflection of economic and social solidarity as well that it is a class solidarity it now moves this anti-colonial movement has a strong pole a central pole throughout the 20th century which while starting out more purely racial consciousness moves to a universalizing consciousness a consciousness which sees domestic interests domestic interests of the vast majority of the population as in fact converging in important ways with the interest also of the oppressed and have be exploited not just in the global South but elsewhere and as you look if you look at the P figures the intellectual figures in mid 20th century anti-colonial movements they are virtually all without exception embracing a humanism and a universalism of just this kind whether it's Cabral whether it's Walter Rodney whether it's say there whether it's for non even whether it's narrow whether in Latin America its Che Guevara all of them have this in common none of them are white or maybe che he might dispute that none of them like all of them proclaim a commitment to universal emancipation not just racial emancipation none of this involves moving away from or weakening your commitment to the racial emancipation what it's saying is that the eradication of racial inequalities cannot come about without attacking the material foundations of that order which is going to move me which is going to involve a critique of the domestic forms of domination as well which is going to be forms of domination overseen by people of the same skin color as the people on the bottom rungs of that society all right this now embodies the marriage as it were the convergence which I talked about at the beginning of the lecture between the movement against colonial domination and the movement against capitalism by mid-century all the way into the 60s and 70s in fact the most articulate proponents of colonial emancipation are also in some way or form taking inspiration from Marx and from the inheritors of the Marxist project they do not see any contradiction between their opposition to racism and their opposition to capitalism well things change what had brought the convergence of these two social forces together that is the opposition to colonialism and the opposition to capitalism what had brought them together was not the intellectual disks or talents of particular academics or party leaders what it brought them together was the coming onto the stage in massive numbers the working people of the global south and of the global North who through their own political practice were able to see the convergence of their actual interests the whole epoch from starting from 1905 all the way into the late 1960s is one of ordinary people stepping forward steps holding stepping forth onto the global stage as real historic actors of every particular color that had been the social and material basis for this new ideology of humanism and universalism that had enveloped the commitment to fight Eurocentrism and racism not surprisingly by the late 1970s and 1980s as those movements going to retreat as they weaken and as they fall back from the global stage so the moral and intellectual resources through which the racial order had been critiqued as an order which was not only brutalizing by virtue of its racial practices but also its economic practices the moral and intellectual foundations of that critique also start to weaken and ironically under the banner of such intellectual movements as post-colonial theory post structuralism certain narrow forms of identity politics what you get by the 1990s is perversely anti-colonial and anti racial critique falling back once again into the discourse of differences the very discourse which in the early years had been the linchpin of the justification of colonialism that is to say there is an unbridgeable gap between blacks and whites between the south and the colonizing countries between the east and west that unbridgeable unbridgeable gap is once again revived under the same terms you see it either implicitly when in current theorists of this coming out of this tradition notions like self-determination liberalism democracy rationality are always prefaced with the qualifier Western as if there's something Western about the drive for democratic governance as a black or brown people cannot be rational

Channel: University of Cape Town South Africa

Views: 8,099

Keywords: UCT, University of Cape Town, VC, vice-chancellor, open lecture, cape town, south africa, lecture, talk, vivek chibber

Id: ioJNQjDylLc

Length: 35min 24sec (2124 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2017