Provincializing or Delinking

Is Decolonialism a More Radical Critique of European values?

Abstract

In the last twenty years or so, decolonialism has claimed to be a more radical assessment of Eurocentrism than postcolonialism. Two distinct critical moves are at stake in this confrontation. Postcolonialism tries to rehabilitate non-European history in the development of the modern world, i.e. to conceive of Europe as a “province” among others (Dipesh Chakrabarty) and thereby to overcome a particularistic take on historiography and normativity. Only a complete account of modernity’s entanglements throughout the world would result in true universalism. Decolonialism on the other hand argues that modernity is inextricable from its “coloniality of power” (Aníbal Quijano). This is the source of the argument for a “de-linking” (Walter Mignolo) from Western epistemology and normativity. This paper presents these two strategies and discusses their consequences for European values, distinguishing their cognitive and non-cognitive levels. The last section of this paper presents a discussion of two authors that both critical frameworks engage, C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon, studying their respective strategies of breaking with Eurocentrism. These different critical strategies seem better conceived of through the postcolonial framework, rather than the decolonial.