Culture and Eurocentrism by Ismail Qadri

Author:Ismail, Qadri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Near East, a term that’s effectively disappeared from the episteme, included the Balkans—in the nineteenth century, when they were within the Ottoman empire. One could, therefore, argue that the 1930s change wasn’t merely in designation or nomination: the entirety of what was once the “Near” “East” wasn’t transformed into the “Middle”; a part of it, now unmarked by the Islamic, was (re)admitted to Europe. Williams’s own statement, that the British military, apparently single-handedly, turned the Near into the Middle might have, again, provoked a theoretical consideration of, to resort once more to the crude phrasing, the relation between power and knowledge. (Why is such a formulation deemed crude? It could be misleading; from one frame, Williams attends to such relation: KW addresses itself to the general reader, if there is such a thing, precisely in order to empower her with knowledge. Though one could read the refusal to make a demand upon the reader as patronizing. On the other hand, those who make such a demand, use “difficult” prose, face the counter-charge of elitism, even eurocentrism if they cite European theorists, the latter charge a consequence of the refusal to distinguish between European and eurocentric, geography and episteme.) However, the term that demands attention in that semanteme is evidently, an ambivalent word that signifies both obviously and seemingly, certainty and uncertainty. It raises the possibility that some of the categories of at least one social science, geography, might be, if not quite tainted by prejudice, at least marked by a European frame. But it doesn’t affirm so unequivocally. If it did, it would have to take the same question to other disciplines, beginning perhaps with anthropology, wonder whether categories like savage and barbarian, not to mention civilized, were produced from a European—not just unilinear—perspective, too. From there, the possibility of disciplinary reason, including literature, itself being eurocentric, would have to be addressed. The movement of the semanteme suggests, but again ambivalently, that systematic geography followed (“then defined”), was a consequence of, the prior distinction between west and east Edward Said theorized in/as Orientalism. (Is it stretching things to find the trace of Said in this semanteme?)[13] Williams, however, doesn’t hold the prior distinction the product of a European frame, even though his own argument suggests it should be read thus.[14]

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