Reflections on Eurocentrism as a Disciplinary Technique

I was talking to a junior humanities colleague who was interested in reading more non-Western theory but wanted to work in Australia and I had to be honest and tell them that that was a very difficult road. The reality is that white and Westernised colleagues will not see that as equivalent expertise to those who have a strong grounding in the Western canon. For them non-Westernised scholarship is only an empirical field to be studied anthropologically in area studies, not read as interlocutors in the global production of knowledge. However, you are allowed to cite Westernised scholars in non-Western countries because they also draw on, and implicitly support, the centrality of the Western canon.

Nevertheless, there is a racial divide in the relationship between theory and object of analysis. You cannot, for example, use a Filipino conception of emotions to frame a reading of a French novel and get that published in Australia, but you can train Filipino students to read Filipino cultural products as examples of French theories of universal human experience drawn from an elite, European corpus. While there are some journals devoted to cross-pollination work, they are low-ranked journals in Australia's metric system of measuring the 'quality' of publications and thus would limit your hiring and promotion potential.

While there are obviously lots of instances of conceptual borrowing (particularly from the East to the West), this involves Western scholars appropriating a specific concept and reframing it within the Western canon. But any time you want to talk from within non-Western scholarship, or worse to assume non-Western scholarship as the measure of cultural value and the universal language of human experience, you'll need to devote huge chunks of time/space to translational work for a Westernised audience. Even then this could lead to disengagement because colleagues do not have a way to engage your ideas even if ideologically they are supportive. This will reduce your citations and again hamper your career. I'm not saying that this work is impossible, but it's hard - very hard - and you need to be strategic while also putting in more work than your colleague who just specialised in a trending French or Italian theorist.

It was a sad moment for me because I remember the same youthful excitement of reading scholars from around the world. I read theorists from Argentina and the Philippines and Cuba and Nigeria and Japan and South Korea and Greece, etc., but quickly found that this was not considered 'theory' by colleagues. I 'lost' a lot of time reading these and becoming 'irrelevant' to my disciplines rather than staying 'on trend'. Although I was trying to impart my experience to help a junior colleague, I realised that I had been disciplined and in turn was disciplining him. I realised that the joy I once found in intellectual exploration had been severely shackled by the pervasiveness of Eurocentrism and that I was unwittingly destroying his excitement as well, which is the complete opposite of what I think a teacher should be doing; namely, fostering their passion for knowledge.

Here was a student that was wanting to actually learn something new, rather than being led by fashionable theory and peer pressure, and who was excited by the prospecting of finding whole new ways of thinking and perceiving that could have enriched our intellectual landscape, and my response was to discipline him. As a young person I really hated older people assuming what I could or could not do based on their own life. Had I listened I wouldn't have come out, I wouldn't have studied humanities, I wouldn't have become an academic, etc. I think this responsibility to foster dreams, or at the very least to leave open the possibility that your experience doesn't have to become their experience, is doubled when you are a teacher and in this instance I don't believe I lived up to that responsibility.

I think I need to reflect more on what I can do to create spaces that foster this passion both for myself and my students/colleagues while still being attentive to the pressures of disciplinary and institutional demands, which is another way of saying, how to create spaces of sustainable passion that do not limit our potential for success given the material and intellectual reality of Eurocentric (though in Australia it’s probably more precise to say ‘Anglo-Americancentric’) institutions and disciplines. I’m thinking of setting up a reading group devoted to non-Western ‘critical theory’ whose goal is to produce publications that ‘translate’ such work for a Westernised audience and in doing so create the intellectual grounds for a future critical and cultural theory that is not limit by Eurocentrism or Anglo-Americancentrism.