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This study investigates the contradictions within European values and the challenges to social inclusivity, advocating for a broader perspective that recognises diverse historical and cultural contexts. It critiques Eurocentrism and explores alternative views such as Islam, Afrocentrism, and Ubuntu, proposing a more inclusive framework for global human rights and values, as well as research on social-economic development.

Eric S. Nelson is an expert on Chinese Philosophy and Continental Philosophy. In this interview, Eric S. Nelson answers questions about the meaning of philosophy, its Eurocentric interpretations and his work on both traditions. His work presents an intercultural approach to different figures and traditions of philosophy. In the interview, Nelson also explains his recent book on Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life and Heidegger and Dao.

Although the erstwhile colonies in the Third World are free from the colonial occupation, the imperialist hegemony continues, to be resisted in the societies. For, such enterprise has provided the pretext for the concepts of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ followed by occupation, a reign of violence and terror loosened upon the natives. This paper aims to study Red Birds (2018) a novel by Mohammed Hanif to highlight the plight of the ‘Other’ with their aggressive vitality and fervor of resistance to counter the imperialist agenda-hegemony. As qualitative research, it employs the postcolonial method, while seeking theoretical insights from the arguments of Orientalism by Edward Said, and the theory of hegemony by Antonio Gramsci to be interpretive in nature to analyze the text. It explores how the text, gleaned selectively from the novel offered, like Orientalism a fabric of textual analyses that is highly critical of the Eurocentric notions and hegemony of the Western world. It underlines the ways and practices sketched by the novel through the troubling encounter of the characters from the East to the West to offer a subversive narrative to the failure of the efforts and narratives of the West. For better analyses of the text to underline the American neo-imperialism and the native dreams of subversion, it takes to the tone of Gramscian precepts to conclude that the powerful subjugates through hegemony–the geo-political method used to gain indirect imperial dominance which is maintained mainly through ideology instead of using means like economic force, or coercive strategies.

The article delves into the historical trajectory of global inequality, tracing the transition from an era of relative equality to the emergence of profound disparities following the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West. It scrutinizes the Eurocentric narrative of progress, emphasizing the pivotal role of scientific advancements, technological innovations, and capitalist expansion in shaping the Western ascendancy. Furthermore, it explores the concept of life chances as a lens through which to analyse structural inequality and the distribution of resources among individuals. The discourse extends to the revaluation of values in the context of sustainability, advocating for a shift towards a more sustainable and equitable societal framework. The paper underscores the enduring challenges posed by durable inequality and the allure of the Western lifestyle to less privileged regions. Through a multidisciplinary lens encompassing historical, sociological, and ecological perspectives, it offers insights into the complexities of global development, social stratification, and the quest for a more just and sustainable world order.

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto.

The article concerns history, its origins, goals, and end. The article focuses on two concepts of historical development. One is the concept of the “end of history” by Francis Fukuyama. The article’s authors consider in detail the main provisions of this concept. However, the main emphasis is on the critical reception of this concept within the framework of the philosophy of liberation (represented by Arturo Andrés Roig). Roig’s criticism reveals the Eurocentrism inherent in this concept and shows that it carries the main features inherent in the European worldview and European mentality, which is why it is initially perceived as unsuitable for the Latin American continent. The second concept of historical development analyzed in this article is the earlier concept of the “Axial Age” by K. Jaspers. This concept is often perceived as one of the most striking anti-Eurocentric concepts. At the same time, Jaspers himself is regarded as the founder of the dialogue of cultures and intercultural philosophy and a supporter of civilizational pluralism. The article consistently analyzes three aspects of this concept - the motivation for its creation (presented by Jaspers himself), the criteria for identifying historical and prehistoric cultures (and the associated identification of three centers of the axial period), and the question of the possibility of a new axial age. The article argues that Jaspers’ concept can rightly be called Eurocentric rather than anti-Eurocentric, since both in the initial motivation for creating this concept and in the process of its development and vision of the prospects for the possibility of a new axial age, Jaspers proceeds from the presuppositions characteristic of the European worldview, which is universalized by him and presented as objective and the only correct ones. Ultimately, the study shows that the fight against Eurocentrism is a logical continuation of the latter and carries all the main features of the European mentality.

The renowned writer of historical novels Walter Scott’s representations of historical figures reach beyond his country of birth. As a man of literature, he imagines the beyond. The Talisman is a product of such excess, but it is not the first in Europe depicting the leader of the Ayyubids Saladin who conquered Jerusalem and settled within the consciousness of the West as a result. Far before romantic orientalism during the nineteenth century, Renaissance was already interested in oriental exoticism. Saladin appeared in Dante’s Inferno, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Voltaire’s Zaire in varying but positive forms. Scott continued this tradition and created a fictional Saladin who ‘was’ an oriental despot with European virtues. Even though Tariq Ali penned The Book of Saladin one hundred and seventy-three years later, Saladin has always remained a popular fictional figure. He alternates the modernist and orientalist narrations of the East with postcolonial and postmodernist literary techniques, but he falls into the same modernist trap Scott had fallen into while creating an unusual Eastern character for European readers. Their common reluctant orientalism links these two narrations of Saladin inextricably as Eurocentrism haunts their non-Eurocentric depictions ironically. By using reluctant orientalism as a term for the first time and comparing Scott and Ali contrary to the accustomed analyses, this study does more than filling a positivist lacuna. It delays the Absolute meanings of Scott and Ali.

The article is dedicated to an issue of Eurocentrism in American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s concept of the clash of civilisations. The arguments presented indicate that Huntington’s concept is pure Eurocentric. I start by mentioning a few of Huntington’s critics (Noam Chomsky, Samir Amin, Arjun Appadurai, and John M. Hobson). The next step includes analysing in detail the “Eurocentrism anatomy” and presenting Eurocentrism as a phenomenon based on two axes, which I call “materialistic” and “epistemological”. In other words, Eurocentrism is a kind of spectrum. Thanks to that, I compare Huntington’s concept with facts from literature embedded in both axes. Apart from other arguments, Eurocentric factors in the clash of civilisations are 1) civilisations in the past, 2) origin of the West, 3) demographic argument, and 4) the downfall of the West. I argue that the clash of civilisations is based on false, Eurocentric assumptions and prejudices.

This two-part article attempts to decipher four different critical strategies for decentering Eurocentrist narratives that promoted “the West” simultaneously as an agent, as a goal and as a yardstick for evaluating modernization processes across the globe: in the first part, it will examine Jack Goody’s interrogation of the alleged European preeminence and exceptionalism and its imposition of value-laden temporal categories on the non-Western world, as well as Eric Wolff ’s reconstruction of the so-called invention of “Eastern Europe” by the Western mind during the Enlightenment; in the second part, it will take on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s notion of “provincializing” Western epistemology and Johannes Fabian’s focus on the “denial of coevalness” for non-Western temporalities. The article will focus on the analysis these four authors provided for the emergence of specific temporal and geographical systems that backed the epistemic hegemony of the “West” and reinforced, therefore, its already established political domination. It will also examine the practice of translating spacial distance in historical time and its reverse, both at the core of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment understanding and construction of the cultural and historical “other”.

The research aims to explore constructed languages as semantic and semiotic systems by analyzing various types of languages based on their lexical, syntactic, morphological and other features. In order to achieve this goal, the author examines the existing classifications of constructed languages and attempts to establish a connection between purposes of their creation and their linguistic features on various levels. The research topic relevance is determined by a substantial rise in popularity of constructed languages, the emergence of their new roles and functions as well as a multitude of new types of media available for communication in these languages and their distribution. The author argues that the recent development in technology provides constructed language creators and enthusiasts with new non-verbal ways of expression that were previously unavailable and thus facilitates communication. This hypothesis is confirmed by several case studies, including the one of “SolReSol: The Project”, an open-source computer program developed by the author, which automates and improves the implementation of semiotic systems designed back in the 19th century. Furthermore, attention is also drawn to the problem of eurocentrism in constructed languages. The research findings lead to the conclusion that on closer inspection both a priori and a posteriori constructed languages created by native speakers of European languages inevitably reveal a certain percentage of Standard Average European features in their semantic and semiotic systems.

This article focuses on an interesting aspect of the scholarly career of Marc Ferro, one of the most famous French historians of the 20th century. He was not only the editor-in-chief of the Annales, but also the co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary History, which encouraged him to attempt experiences beyond the traditional scope of the Annales. Historians who published their findings in the Annales were either medieval or modern history researchers, i.e., they believed that contemporary history provides no suitable material for historical studies. Thus, M. Ferro was a pioneer of the study of the modern history of France. In addition, as a disciple of Pierre Renouwen, he actively developed the history of international relations. P. Renouwen and M. Ferro, unlike most historians of the Annales School of History, held to the critical assessment of the role of mentality in historical change. Here we discuss their approach to the study of the world of perceptions as a factor determining the dynamics of change in the world of people's perceptions and its reflection in the changing international situation. Based on an analysis of the works of these historians, it is concluded that a shortcoming of the traditional approaches of the Annales School is the desire for universalism, which became a source of misunderstanding of many contemporary processes that the West deals with in the former colonial countries.

TRANSCREATION IN INDIA AND BRAZIL: ON THE CONCEPTS OF PURUSHOTTAMA LALA AND HAROLDO DE CAMPOS The study aims to compare the concepts of transcreation developed in India and Brazil. The first, more extensive part of the article introduces the profile of Indian translator, poet, essayist, and publisher Purushottama Lal (1929-2010) and attempts to outline his concept of transcreation, which seems to have not been introduced to Polish translation scholars so far. The second part seeks to sketch the most significant differences between Lal’s concept and the ideas of Brazilian translation theorist, translator, and poet Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003). The analysis allows us to conclude that, despite their surprising lexical and chronological convergence, these concepts developed independently and exhibit a number of fundamental differences, which, as indicated by bibliographic reconnaissance, have not yet been discussed in the humanities.

On the occasion of the launch of the European Law Open, this article analyses two policy documents of the European Union (EU) on its ambitions in peace mediation, to think about what it could mean for European law to be open to the world. Reading these documents – ‘the Concepts’ – through the lens of the theme that I have been assigned for this opening issue – ‘Europe in the world’ – one discerns an outward-looking EU searching for a greater role in the international field of peace mediation. One also sees instances of eurocentrism: a set of assumptions about the superiority of European (or ‘western’) ways of knowing and doing. In these Concepts, the EU envisages sending EU mediators into the world – either to mediate themselves or to support mediation efforts by others. The Concepts also contain increasingly long lists of EU values to be carried along and distributed during peace mediation. But the Concepts do not consider that in the countries where the EU mediator arrives, this backpack filled with normative baggage may bring other associations. Without more explicit recognition of the EU’s obstinate baggage, the EU is unlikely to be an effective peace mediator or, indeed, a credible global actor. More generally, critical reflexivity could help the EU to address the lingering Eurocentric tendencies that these Concepts reveal. Such critical questioning by the EU of its own assumptions, as well as learning from perspectives from outside the EU or the past, can be a process of focusing on Europe in order to decentre it. That, then, could also be a mission for this bold new European journal.

This essay seeks to set to work on the question of race and the futures of the postcolonial in post-apartheid South Africa through abiding by the site of the indeterminacy between problem and critique. Arguing that reading, in the robust sense offered by Gayatri Spivak and Stuart Hall, is a necessary and urgent response to the question, the paper examines the interventions of three key figures for thinking radical black thought in our time, namely Achille Mbembe's Critique of Black Reason, Nahum Chandler's X: The Problem of the negro as a Problem for Thought, and Qadri Ismail's Culture and Eurocentrism. Through abiding by the stakes of the work of reading in this conjuncture, I argue that it is through resisting the easy route of cultural and relativized difference that the pedagogical work of reading, and teaching reading, for the future, becomes possible.

The interpretation of the reasons for the successes and delays in the race for industrialization is still a fundamental issue in the historiographical debate. In particular, the discussion about the “economic success” of the space commonly called the West (that practically means North America, Europe, Japan and Australia/New Zealand) is certainly lively, and its enormous theoretical impact is evident. This article focuses on three different issues: the role played by exogenous factors and endogenous factors in the historiography on different case studies and paths of industrialization; Eurocentrism/ethnocentrism in the approaches to the history of industrialization; and the debate on the roots of the supposed “victory” of the Western (or Euro-American) model. Although the debate is still open, this article shows that in recent decades a new approach on the history of industrialization has emerged and is gaining some hegemony: the need to consider not only endogenous readings of individual cases, but also to insert them into global contexts of relationships.

This article discusses the poetry of Romaine Moreton and Lisa Bellear, particularly the poems in which they address the violence against Aboriginal women and girls. It demonstrates how the two poets’ representation of Australian historical and cultural memory destabilises the continuum of colonial power relations and confronts the ongoing stereotypes of Aboriginal women constructed on the basis of a decidedly racist and misogynistic colonial ethos.

THE CONCEPT OF TRANSLATION IN INDIA: AN OVERVIEW This study aims to outline the most relevant contemporary critical remarks concerning the concept of translation and the presence of translational reflection in India, aiming to fill the gap perceived in Polish translatology.

In the early modern period, the representation of the continents by means of allegorical figures enjoyed great popularity. The book Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents, edited by Maryanne Cline Horowitz and Louise Arizzoli, is very stimulating, richly documented and fundamental with regard to the detailed source-critical examination of concrete individual visualisations of the continents. The focus of the book rather lies with the 16th century, while part 5 focuses on the 18th century. In the 18th century, continent allegories entered into the public sphere and reached broader strata in the society. In this century, Eurocentrism progressed considerably, but did not invent it. The volume’s co-authors pose the question of Eurocentrism as well as that of racism with regard to the late Middle Ages and the 16th century. Because of their widespread use, continent allegories can be counted among the most important primary sources from which we can draw conclusions about how extra-European cultures could be represented, interpreted and viewed from a European perspective. They represent much more than just an art-historical source, they are, especially when one thinks of their accessibility in public spaces for everyone, actually a historical source of the first rank, behind which not least travelogues and theoretical concepts such as the history of civilisation as a universal history compete with the Christian history of salvation in the Bible.

At least since the rise of postcolonial studies, the questioning of the supposed European-centrism of the Enlightenment has been recurrent. How can we situate Rousseau in this respect? In his justly famous analyses, Claude Lévi-Strauss recognised him as the “founder of the human sciences” and the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité as “the first treatise on general ethnology”. In De la grammatologie, however, Jacques Derrida proposed another reading, arguing that “Rousseau’s dynamics is a strange system in which the critique of ethnocentrism organically composes with eurocentrism”. Should we then consider that Rousseau, far from offering a counter-example to the European-centrism of the Enlightenment, would give an illustration of it which is all the more remarkable because it is more insidious? These are the questions that we would like to try to shed light on, by insisting on Rousseau’s grievances with regard to the European “philosophical mob”, which commit the egregious error of ignoring the essential plasticity of the human species. It is obviously no coincidence that the art of travelling constitutes Emile’s ultimate apprenticeship: it is on this condition that he will be able to become both a man and a citizen, capable of judging customs and mores while remaining radically alienated from the prejudices of his contemporaries, who despite all their books and all their travels, know of men only Europeans.

With the increased interest sparked across academia in both new materialism and epistemologies of the South, old colonial and patriarchal habits rear their vicious heads. On the one hand, feminist contributions are, in many cases, ignored or watered down in mainstream discussions in both approaches, pushing feminist political projects at the core of these epistemologies to the margins. On the other hand, the engagement in conversations and commitment to the ideas that emerge from the epistemologies of the South are limited or not recognized, a situation that contributes to perpetuating coloniality of knowledge. Accounting for these challenges, this paper puts into conversation epistemologies of the South (focusing on theorists from the Americas) and new feminist materialism in terms of specific concepts such as dualism, difference, time, universality, body-land, and relationality. By showing both the affinities and differences between the two, this paper demonstrates the richness and diversity of arguments; furthermore, it investigates what new materialism has to do with decolonization and tropicality. This paper concludes by addressing the questions: to what extent and in what way might new (feminist) materialism need to be decolonized? And how does it speak to “tropical materialisms”? Although this paper does not specifically focus on the tropics, tropical images of thought such as the “mangrove,” are evoked throughout the text.

The very act of articulating Shakespeare from a space in the Global South can trigger a maelstrom of contesting ideologies. There was always a mad scramble among academics to interpret and own the bard intimately. Undoubtedly, one of the aspects of British colonial rule was to establish its cultural hegemony and 'Englishness' in the colonies through a well-designed curriculum. However, the colonial structures of power implicated into institutional fabrics make the task of a post-colonial scholar challenging the colonial ideology, quite complex. William Shakespeare, has (often anachronistically), traversed through myriad trajectories of different cultures/ages, becoming through his works, a site of cultural contestation. Hamlet, the eponymous protagonist of the tragedy 'Hamlet', was almost the tragedian's doppelganger, created at a critical juncture in his personal life. This paper looks at the diverse interpretations of the play, to map a transformation from the local to the global and vice versa. Taking the conventional representation of Hamlet by Kenneth Branagh in his 1996 film adaptation as a frame of reference, it examines two other versions of Hamlet, the absurdist, meta theatrical experiment; 'Hamlet: The Clown Prince', directed by Rajat Kapoor and the musical, a Stockhausen media production of 2007, ‘Hamlet in Rock’.

In this work, it is retrospectively addressed the processes of invention and transformation of the western development story over three centuries. The idea is to show the relationship that has existed between the historical conjunctures and the relaunching of civilizing narratives; for this, three moments of understanding are identified: progress, biological order, and modernization. These moments allow us to observe which way, why, and under what context the development was configured and profiled as one of the greatest promises of modernity. It is argued that development has been a discourse of transhistoric power that has made Euro-American practices, experiences and traditions a universal cultural model, through which a hegemonic and essentialist vision of the West has been strengthened, while building a deficit and outsourced alterity.

Most international academic journals are produced in Europe and the United States, and whether or not they are considered objective and inclusive forums for worldwide academic research, they are subtly imbued with elements of their own culture. First of all, the language, is, in most cases, English, but not Outer Circle Englishes or English as a Lingua Franca, but specifically British and/or American English. And this obviously creates a big barrier for authors who are not fluent in these varieties, which partly explains the dearth of authors coming from areas outside Europe and, more specifically, the United Kingdom and North America. After the language itself, the problem lies in all the western cultural elements that are found in the journals. The dates, for example, are always expressed in western terms such as the Christian era. Or the names of the authors in the references, which follow the western convention of the surname followed by the first name/s (or initials), which is at odds with the patronymic systems normally used in Muslim countries where no family names exist, for example. This paper discusses these issues and tries to offer some possible solutions.

Abstract The article offers a critique of recent efforts to read international relations theory – and its theorists – as especially positioned to offer a critique of international politics. It does so by engaging Daniel Levine’s claim that international relations theory has a special vocation for critique which is unparalleled by other disciplines. By problematizing Levine’s political, ethical and epistemological approach to sustainable critique, I argue that international relations theory has been particularly engaged with a politics of crisis that centers Western modes of subjectivity as the only frame of reference for thinking about politics and history. As a consequence, Western international relations theory has become both inadequate and dispensable for many critical theorists of international politics in much of the world, even when it comes to its most critical approaches. By way of conclusion, I offer an approach to critical international relations theory that starts from the politics of colonialism, instead of crisis.

In contrast to the field of global studies, which has seen spectacular expansion and institutionalisation since the turn of the twenty-first century, there have to date been only a few attempts to promote or institutionalise global humanities as a field of study or research. Moreover, even though several disciplines in the humanities have undergone global turns in recent years, the humanities, with the exception of a certain brand of global history, are not prominent within the field of global studies. Against this background, this article surveys the various attempts that have been made in recent years to promote the concept of global humanities in the form of international scholarly networks, departments, and study programs, and the handful of attempts to sketch the outlines of a research agenda for global humanities. The strengths and limitations of the current approaches are discussed, and the articles advocating the notion of global humanities as a field or framework of research are brought into conversation with one another. Some common themes are identified in the literature on global humanities to date, such as the ambition for the field to be globally inclusive, critical, and transdisciplinary. Building on the recent global turns in some of the humanities disciplines and the steps that have been taken to purge these of traditional national and Eurocentric biases, global humanities should aim to develop frameworks of analysis that can be used to study all cultural expressions of humankind and to foster intercultural dialogue and understanding. Such an undertaking goes beyond the study of modern globalisation, which is the subject matter of global studies.

This article problematizes the uncritical fascination zwith modern architecture, approached here through the notion of the fetish. Uncritical fascination with modern architecture has caused many architects to disengage from the socio-political realities of Colombia in order to design buildings that look like twentieth-century European precedents. Such an endogamous approach forecloses the possibility for architectural innovation, keeping architects in a vicious circle of repetition. The concept of coloniality is introduced as a vehicle to overcome the limitations of the modernist project, and the reproduction of colonising principles that give priority to European discourses and ideas. Finally, the article further discusses the concept of coloniality through recent debates on African cities and the emergence of ‘postcolonial urban theory’. The aim is to demonstrate that architectural scholarship in Colombia would benefit greatly from an engagement with southern theory, as well as from a greater emphasis on the contemporary urban condition, and the complex history that has lead us to where we are currently.

This article presents a critical analysis of how two elite media publications in the United States and the United Kingdom, the New York Times and the Guardian/Observer respectively, represented the so-called European refugee crisis in their editorials. The study foregrounds a media aporia of why Europe did not abide with human rights and democratic values vis-à-vis the refugee drama and a subsequent nostalgia for a European past of democracy and transnational unity that never really existed. These media representations, although sympathetic towards migrants, are inherently Eurocentric, helping to reproduce the existing repressive global migration regime because they do not see the crisis as a continuation of its coloniality but as a rupture.

It is increasingly argued that European colonialism has left its mark not only in the political and economic structures of the current world system, but also in the fields of culture, science and education. Against this background, the demand for a comprehensive epistemic or epistemological decolonization is raised. This issue follows on from this demand to clarify to what extent the phenomena of cultural colonization and coloniality also affect the fields of pedagogy and educational science. In particular, the meaning of the demand for epistemic or epistemological decolonization in the field of education will be discussed. In the introduction to this volume, the main features of decolonial thinking are presented. This is a movement of critical thinking that starts from the history of Latin America in order to reconstruct, criticize and deconstruct the globally powerful connection between modernity and coloniality. After this short introduction, the individual contributions from this issue on decoloniality will be briefly presented. Finally, the differences and similarities of the individual articles are briefly referred to. In the end, the question is raised, whether decolonial education should distinguish itself more strongly within the discipline.

Anti-Western sentiment is a common feature of politics in many non-Western societies such as China, Cuba, Venezuela, Turkey, Iran and various Arab countries. Challenging the scholarly literature that depicts anti-Westernism as an “irrational, extremist and fundamentalist reaction to the cultural hegemony of the West”, this article conceptualizes anti-Westernism as a rational reaction to – and an unsurprising consequence of – the problematic political/economic interactions between non-Western societies (e.g. Iran) and Western powers (e.g. Britain, France and the US). Iran is a particularly noteworthy case because anti-Westernism played a key role in the formation of the modern state in the country. The foreign policy of behavior of Iran in our time and the historical trajectory that produced the Islamic Republic after the 1979 Revolution cannot possibly be understood without acknowledging anti-Westernism. The origins of anti-Westernism in Iran are explored in this article through interpreting the path dependent historical experience of the country, with a particular emphasis on relations between Iran and Western countries. In contrast to works that attribute Iran’s anti-Western foreign policy to the Islamist ideology of the post-1979 era, I argue that hostility to the Western-dominated international political system should actually be traced to the way in which Iranian national identity evolved in the early 20th century.

This article outlines the basic traits of a responsive phenomenology of Bernhard Waldenfels by focusing on the issue of the Alien. For the reason that we are commonly confronted with the Alien (or the Foreign) in everyday life, it is of crucial importance for us to understand and describe such experience without neglecting its special features. This is shown concerning the phenomenological issues of intentionality, by emphasizing the dimension of pathos. More precisely, pathos describes such a kind of affection which starts “somewhere” and cannot be reduced to previous horizons. The Alienness is characterized as a hyperphenomenon which we experience in a paradoxical way only. In this respect, all our efforts to grasp the Alien transform into universalist pretensions that worsen the intercultural communication. To defend the modern politics from overwhelming eurocentrism, Waldenfels offers a method of a responsive epoche: the latter unveils the contingency of each order and the partiality of every universal claim. Moreover, this article covers the role of responsivity while interacting with the Alien, as well as the possible connections in the ethical perspective. In order to deepen the understanding of responsivity and its functioning, the author outlines the distinction between an answer as a merely typical reaction and a response as a part of creative discourse. All in all, the responsive phenomenology is believed to ground upon such concepts and principles which, if methodically developed, will enable more a sufficient and accurate international dialogue, as well as deepen the self-awareness. The main purposes of such phenomenology of the Alien are to demonstrate the “preceding” of the outer Demand and to introduce a special logic of responding that provides this dialogue with the peculiar dynamism.

The text explores the discussions about the curricular proposal of the 2015 BNCC that led to a break with the Eurocentric paradigm in the teaching of history content by proposing an Atlantic approach. It is proposed to reflect on the way in which the idea of Atlantic history, although outlined, was operationalized in the first attack of curricular organization from this perspective and provoked an effective break with the Eurocentric paradigm, so rooted in curricular organization in the Brazilian educational system. The analysis was performed by consulting the official document and texts produced by faculty associations, research groups and scholars because of the controversial public / academic debate established and specialized literature.

Depicting the economic and cultural problems facing its Nigerian immigrant protagonists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Americanah provides a great opportunity for its readers to understand the increasing appeal of the idea of cultures among immigrants in the West. It shows how the problems accompanying cultural dislocation compel even alienated individuals who previously idealized the West to embrace their cultures and move away from universal and individualistic perspectives such as liberalism. Cultural dislocation not only helps immigrants discover the importance and particularity of their own culture but also the continuing influence of cultures in the West. Further complicating the picture, however, the novel also reveals how the culture discovered by immigrants in exile is distinctly different from the culture lived and understood by their counterparts in their native country. By frankly depicting both the cultural problems facing African immigrants in a racialized America and the prevalence and negative effects of Eurocentric cultural alienation among non-Western youth, Americanah helps us understand the surprising turn to cultures and away from liberalism at the start of the twenty-first century.

This article explores the author’s experience teaching in ETSI as an instance of a cross-cultural intellectual encounter. It develops an account of cross-cultural encounters as defined by two moments: first, a moment of cultural shock when the encounter rebounds on the self, leading one to question one’s assumptions about the world; and second, a moment of possibility where the self, after interrogating its own ways of thinking, can pivot to accommodate a detour from its past disciplinary and cultural habits. Here, the authors use the writings of the Argentinian feminist theorist María Lugones and the North American philosopher Frederick Elliston to clarify the nature of these moments.

In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action (TRC, 2015), a school board teamed with university educators and educational partners to generate a professional learning series to support educators’ engagement with Indigenous knowledges. A research team that assembled two years later interviewed the learning series participants to explore how educators were navigating Indigenous knowledge within a Eurocentric school system. This research acknowledges the challenges of doing this work within shifting institutional policies and initiatives, the wider politics of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, building intercultural understandings and community partnerships, and negotiating epistemological difference. The researchers — including Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples — echoed resonances with the participants that occurred throughout the data collection process and often spoke about the parallel paths of research and schooling — both historically used as tools of colonization and now having a role in decolonization. To disrupt colonial propensities, we share our reflections as researchers, specifically around complexities and tensions of engaging Indigenous knowledges throughout our research processes concerning the participants’ experiences. By sharing the tensions and (un)learning that emerged on these parallel paths, we honour diverse entry-points and experiences to animate how trans-systemic knowledge building might ensue.

Eurocentrism is criticized in many academic fields, such as International Relations, History, and many other social science fields. Over the last decades, numerous scholars demonstrated relationships between inequalities and Eurocentric approaches towards many regional studies. Many scholars whose origins are from the Middle East have cited postcolonial literature, such as Said’s criticism of Orientalism, as examples of dominant Euro-centric perspectives. Others cited problems of dominant perspectives in social sciences of being Euro-centric, notably, Wallerstein (1997). Therefore, Eurocentric view, narrowing alternativist perspectives can become a problem in the aimed universality. This article does not intend to criticize the critiques of Euro-centric perspectives but rather caution on pitfalls of reactionary approaches to Eurocentric malaise. The discussion is centered on rhetoric that often criticizes Orientalism, to the expense of not contributing viable alternatives to social development. The article takes a threefold approach. First, Euro-centrism in IR, particularly IR Theory, and mainstream History and Social Sciences, in general, are discussed. The second part focuses on Orientalism and Postcolonial literature and warns on reactionary pitfalls. The third part emphasizes the importance of universalism in literature, arts, and sciences. In order to emphasize universalism, the difference of authors such as Amin Maalouf is provided as examples of those who raised awareness and alternative perspectives from the MENA regions without necessarily taking a reactionary approach. The conclusion discusses the analysis and makes recommendations.

Russians and Germans have a long history of interactions with each other in which the reforms carried out during the reign of Peter the Great (1672–1725) – the first Russian Tsar – can be regarded as an important turning point. The adoption of a Western understanding in many fields under the reign of Peter the Great led to the emergence of a new type of Russia that grew to become a significant player between the eastern and western parts of Eurasia. It is obvious that, starting in the era of Peter the Great and continuing under the subsequent Tsars and Tsarinas, in the light of the continuing intimate relations with the European world, German culture and German philosophy have maintained a considerable position in the Russian state and society. Have all these reforms, however, made Russia a true member of the European family in the eyes of the “supreme” Western leaders? While keeping this question in mind, the intention in this article is to focus on the other side of the coin in terms of the relationships between Germans and Russians. To this end, taking the Euro-centrist line as the main catalyst, the approach to Russia here is not based on its well-known aggressive and expansionist identity, but rather its status as a target and victim of the enmity of a “European” power, predominantly the German political and intellectual elite of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This paper reflects upon a decisive issue, namely, the relation between modernity and coloniality in the Latin American context. What remains to be settled is whether European modernity is inherently colonial, or, in other words, whether all modern European thought is indistinguishably and inseparably interwoven with grammars of coloniality that, even today, are reproduced in the arenas of knowledge and power. The guiding thread of this inquiry will be the theoretical proposals of Walter Mignolo, a thinker who argues precisely for the consubstantiality of modernity and coloniality.

Bu çalışmada Avrupa-merkezcilik olgusu ve tarihyazımı kavramı incelenmektedir. Avrupalı olmayan kültürler özelinde her iki kavram açımlanmaktadır. Avrupa-merkezci bir tarihyazımı Avrupalı olmayan insan ve toplumların dünyayı ve kendilerini yanlış tanımalarına ve yanlış edimlerde bulunmalarına yol açabilmektedir. Avrupa-merkezciliğin soykütüğü modern kültürün doğuşuna değin geriye götürülebilir ve tarihyazımı tartışmalarının da yirminci yüzyılın ikinci yarısından itibaren aynı zamanda bu olguyla ilgilendiği söylenilebilir. Tarihyazımı felsefesi, yorumcu öznenin tarihi olaya ekledikleri ve anlatının ne kadarının geçmişe dayanarak bilinebileceğiyle ilgilenmektedir. Dünyada hâkim olan tarihyazımı Avrupa-merkezci ve son zamanlarda Amerikan-merkezcidir. Bir aşamadan sonra Avrupa-merkezcilik açmazı sadece Avrupalı olmayanların sorunları olarak kalabilmektedir. Bu çalışma münhasıran bu meseleyle ilgilenmekte ve kuramsal bir çözüm bulmaya çabalamaktadır.

This study aims to explore to what extent Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar's A Mind at Peace (1949) engages with and/or is in conflict with Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928) in terms of each writer's discontent with modernity and modernization. It is a comparative study of two novels embedded in different contexts, but having similar concerns. The paper basically argues that the selected novels demonstrate their writers' critical perspectives in the matters of modernity and modernization. An analysis of the formal and thematic similarities and differences between these novels reveals the ways in which these two texts offer a criticism of modernity and modernization. As the study highlights, despite their similar concerns about and criticism of modernity, the novels display significant differences in terms of their disparate formulations of the modern. More specifically, the paper argues that Huxley's Point Counter Point is structured around an understanding of modernity, which equates the modern with the West. Tanpınar's formulation of modernity in A Mind at Peace, however, is quite different from that of Huxley's novel in that Tanpınar's philosophy of the “modern,” which shapes A Mind at Peace, is founded on a vision of modernity that is local and polycentric. As a last note, the study emphasizes that despite the difference between the two novels regarding the conceptualization of the modern, both Huxley's and Tanpınar's discontent with modernity arises from their similar diagnosis of the lack of harmony and completeness in modern life which, for Huxley, corresponds to the Western world and, for Tanpınar, to his country, Turkey.

The purpose of this article is to enhance the understanding of how Classical Chinese Philosophy has been interpreted and transferred by Enlightenment thinkers into the narrative framework of European philosophy as a far-reaching source of ideas and inspiration with a driving force for promoting modern European social change. We examine outsider perspectives within the context of Enlightenment thinking that contributed to advances in the cross-cultural understanding of how Chinese stories could be disseminated in the framework of East-West dialogue.

The issue of intercultural and citizenship learning has concerned scholars for a long time while subjects such as history, geography, civic and citizenship have been shaping young peoples’ identity. Under migration pressures and the European Union’s integration these subjects have been often challenged and transformed. In the case of Greece, subject’s textbook topics on immigration and diversity have been promoting more ethnocentrism and eurocentrism. This paper presents those findings, and in so doing it explores the ways in which the Greek state’s and the EU’s intercultural education policy have impacted the specific school subject. It focuses on the Greek nation’s identity formation, while discussing the country’s response to the EU’s calls for common policies in the area of intercultural and citizenship education. The last section of this essay provides new insights into the educators’ tools to implement less ethnocentric and more inclusive curriculums and programs by exploring an extracurricular, online peer mentoring program that was initiated and implemented in Australia to foster intercultural awareness.

This article problematizes the Human Rights conceptualization embodied in the International Human Rights Law corpus. It considers human rights as a Western construct rooted in a particular historical context, located in a specific ideological background and grounded in a concrete socio-cognitive system. Thus, in disregard of features of non-dominant cultures, the mainstream human rights grammar became a discourse of empire. Building on TWAIL and decolonial theory, this article challenges that hegemonic human rights discourse while providing a justification for incorporating other conceptualizations of rights through an inter-epistemic conversation with alternative world-views.

On his deathbed, the protagonist Harry in the story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” examines his past life. He concludes that he lived an empty life and that none but he is to blame for it. The narrative is structured in a diegetic frame, telling the past events of the protagonist by separating them off from the present events. The narrative, consequently, swings back and forth from interjected flashbacks to flashforward scenes, suggesting a triumph of the Apollonian virtue over the Dionysian vice, as the yardstick to measure a man. In setting his locales and depiction of places, Hemingway employs Manichean dialectics, indicative of his internalizing an Orientalist perspective that places Africa as opposed to the West. The bipartite representation reflects the author’s subscription to the high Victorian values that he had absorbed while growing up. This paper contends that “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” embodies a dialectical struggle between the Apollonian virtue and the Dionysian vice in the human soul, presented as thesis and as antithesis. It attempts to decode the embedded binary symbols, illustrating that the usage of the imageries of the snow-capped mountains and the peaks, as opposed to the dusty plane of Africa infested with beasts, alludes to representation of life and death. Further, it asserts that the idea of Africa is feminized when Hemingway equates the continent with the image of Helen, making the latter a synecdoche of the former; and that this blending of hegemony and misogyny reinforces a politics of aesthetics that obliterates, distorts, and dehumanizes the image of Africa.

The article ponders upon the social science controversy of late industrialization and therefore modernization with concern to imperial nations between the 18th and 20th centuries in an attempt to look for the explanations of why they didn’t fit into both waves of the industrial revolution. The research attempts to consider the case of the states that fell out of the first and second industrial revolutions, but were not the part of the traditionally understood developing world in terms of the difference in capabilities of land-based and naval-based empires. It’s also studied the ability of land-based empires to overcome the modernization challenge and the influence of Eurocentric stereotypes on this discussion. The examples of Habsburg Austria, Romanov Russia, Japan and Turkey are also analyzed. The descriptive comparison points to other factors responsible for relatively laggard modernization of these states.

Portuguese art history experienced remarkable development after World War II, especially with the work of José-Augusto França, who was responsible for establishing a historiographic canon for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Portuguese art that still endures. José-Augusto França developed a narrative that held Paris up as an artistic and cultural role model in relation to which he diagnosed a permanent delay in Portuguese art. This essay analyses França’s idea of belatedness in the context of Portuguese art historiography and political history and how it is part of a genealogy of intellectual thought produced in an imperial context, revisiting previous art historians and important authors, such as Antero de Quental and António Sérgio. Moreover, it aims to address how the concept of belatedness was associated with the idea of “civilisation” and the idea of “art as civilisation.” Belatedness also has implications in the constraints and specificities of writing a master narrative in a peripheral country – a need particularly felt in the second half of the twentieth century, to mark a political standpoint against the dictatorship that ruled from 1926 to 1974. Part of the reaction to fascism expressed the desire to follow other nations’ democratic example, but the self-deprecating judgements on Portuguese art were frequently associated with the identification of essentialist motifs – the “nature” of the Portuguese people, their way of thinking, of living, their lack of capacities or skills – and of a self-image of being “primitive” in comparison with other European countries that has antecedents going back to the eighteenth century. I will address the nostalgia for the empire and the prevailing notion of belatedness throughout the twentieth century regarding unsolved issues with that nostalgia.

Superior races, inferior races: On popularization of knowledge on human diversity in the Polish lands in the era of Positivism This article aims at demonstrating why an attitude to view the human diversity according to a criterion of race originated in the society in the epoch of Positivism. It is an outline of a specific approach of Polish popular science to popularize achievements of word science in the field of anthropology. The fact that races exist was then taken for granted and efforts were made to describe them. Readers of periodicals were acquired with racial classifications based on geographical and morphological criteria, often evaluating civilizations of individual races and the races themselves. Opinions of both foreign and Polish scientists, travelers and journalists were influenced by Eurocentric world view, and consequently the recognition of a white man, his appearance, activities and civilization, as a pattern that should be followed and imitated by all others in the name of human progress. The term race itself was not defined; moreover, it was used without consistency and arbitrarily, and frequently interchangeably with such terms as ‘generation,’ ‘people,’ ‘branch,’ ‘tribe’ and ‘nation.’ Despite the aboundance of press publications on human races, the knowledge of this notion did not became a systematic one. Notions specific for the then anthropology became more widely known, and the glorification of colonial successes of the white man helped enforce a conviction of his superiority over “wild races” and support cruelty conducted in the name of progress. However, Polish positivist thought approached scientific racism with criticism. Rasy wyższe, rasy niższe. O popularyzacji wiedzy na temat różnorodności ludzkiej na ziemiach polskich w dobie pozytywizmu Celem artykułu jest ukazanie jednej z dróg, która przyczyniła się do zakorzenienia w polskim społeczeństwie myślenia o różnorodności ludzkiej podług wartościującego kryterium rasy. W tekście została zarysowana specyfika popularnonaukowego ujęcia tego problemu w dobie pozytywizmu. Dążono wówczas do upowszechnienia zdobyczy nauki światowej w dziedzinie antropologii. Przyjmowano jako pewnik istnienie ras, starano się je opisać. Na łamach czasopism zaznajamiano czytelnika z klasyfikacjami rasowymi opartymi na kryteriach geograficznych i morfologicznych, z czasem wartościującymi, wyżej lub niżej oceniającymi zdobycze cywilizacyjne poszczególnych ras i same rasy. Na rozważaniach zarówno zagranicznych jak i polskich badaczy, podróżników i popularyzatorów wiedzy piętno wywarł światopogląd europocentryczny, a w związku z tym uznanie człowieka białego - jego wyglądu, jego działań i jego cywilizacji - za wzorzec, któremu inni powinni się podporządkować w imię ogólnoludzkiego postępu. Nie definiowano samego terminu „rasa”, ponadto używano go bez większej konsekwencji, dowolnie, a często zamiennie z takimi pojęciami jak „pokolenie”, „lud”, „szczep”, „plemię”, a także „naród”. Wielość materiału prasowego na temat ras ludzkich nie usystematyzowała więc wiedzy na ich temat. Spopularyzowano słownictwo charakterystyczne dla ówczesnej antropologii, gloryfikując kolonizacyjne dokonania „białego człowieka”, umocniono przekonanie o jego wyższości nad „rasami dzikimi”, oswojono z okrucieństwem dokonywanym w imię postępu. Polska refleksja pozytywistyczna była jednak krytyczna wobec rasizmu naukowego.

This article shows how the coloniality of power manifests itself through the Colombian media, replicating aesthetic whitening paradigms that penetrate into the deepest meanders of cultural representations of ethnic groups, mainly African descendants and indigenous. Through the critical analysis of discourse, applied to the newscasts of the RCN television chain, we observe subtle mechanisms in which power feeds on metaphorical systems that try to neutralize every cultural element in potential conflict with the Eurocentric hegemonic paradigms. In this study, we highlight how reality takes shape through an ad-hoc narrative designed to give an ideologically modern image of the country with a series of stereotyped social representations of cultural diversity. The article concludes by opening a question on how and to what extent the ethnic groups themselves are partly complicit in this system, legitimizing the very structure of power and its own hegemonic narrative.

Widely acclaimed as the Lithuanian national poet, the Catholic clergyman Jonas Mačiulis-Maironis (1862–1932) in his canonical poems of the epoch of national revival expressed his romantic primordialist point of view that every nation has an inherent right to its independence that had been given by divine institution. Linguistic factors determined national identity in Eastern Europe of the late 19th century. Maironis as a follower of linguocentric nationalism modelled the conditions for the elite Lithuanian culture which would be significant at the European level. The longing for the so-called European virtues (universally based on Christian ethics) penetrated through all the poet’s world-view, therefore he was impressed by the diligence and activism of Western nations but did not support the ideas of social activism and individual liberties, opposed the ideas of secular philosophical trends, especially socialism and scientism. Eurocentrist motives in his rhetoric did not mean any challenge to the governing conservative Russian regime because they did not invoke opposition to the ideology of Pan-Slavism which was supported by the Tsarist ideologues. The poetical archetype of springtime awakening was related to the youthful activism of the “new” political nations of Eastern and Central Europe. Maironis was one of the first Lithuanian authors who openly criticized ideas of socialism and positivism; on the other hand, he provoked discussions of the enlightened group of the developing Lithuanian-speaking elite. He regarded the slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity as deceptive justification of populism and collective violence. Sceptically regarding parliamentary democracy, he emphasized the principles of Classical-Christian law and justice and the need for solidarity, consciousness and creativity. Maironis related the ideological dispute of conservative and radical trends to the decisive struggle of Christianity and atheism. He was a consistent and orthodox Catholic thinker, the opponent of any revolutionary upheavals; discussing social questions he emphasized that politicians should take into account doctrine of the Holy See on the obligations of Christians and principles of charity.

This article first aims to establish a genealogy of critical stances on knowledge construction on, about, and from Romani groups in academia. It focuses on critical perspectives that have challenged Eurocentric binary categorizations. Such categories have resulted in the historical perception of a universal “Gypsy”/“non-Gypsy” divide despite the diverse contexts in which Romani identities are negotiated in daily life. The text addresses the writings of authors who have been critical of how central this divide has been to the constitution of Romani Studies as a field, most of whom have relied on insights from Edward Said´s Orientalism (2003 [1978]) and other postcolonial theorizations. The theoretical insights brought into conversation come from ethnographic work with Romani individuals and groups whose mobilities exceed imagined European borders. Based on this work, the second part of the article gives an example of the consequences of Eurocentric categorizations: a review of how Romani transatlantic migration and presence in the Americas has been conceived in academic texts. To conclude, the author puts forward engagements with Romani transatlantic passages as one of the ways in which postcolonial stances can actually be operationalized in academic practice. Throughout the argument, transatlantic experiences become not only an epistemic tool but also a case study for a refined understanding of Romani life worlds.

Can Herder's philosophy of culture be a model for what is now called intercultural philosophy? Following the list of the components of intercultural philosophy from the standpoint of Ram and the Wimer in one case, Herder's thoughts about the plurality of cultures and critique of the Enlightenment 's Eurocentrism read out, with respect to those components, to answer this question,. By this to read out, Herder's hidden ideas in this contemporary issue, or in other words, a model for it, appears. While in the Enlightenment, the rest of the cultures were immature and humiliated, for more than two centuries, Herder, with the idea of cultural diversity, provided the basis for intercultural thought in his philosophy of culture. And with critique of Enlightenment's Eurocentrism, he resolved the biggest obstacle for it. Herder's precise boundary is between Rejection of radical relativism and skepticism, and promising cultural pluralism. The ultimate causes of history or affairs, in his own words, are good and perpetual, such as humanity, Happiness, Development and providence are his facilities against radical relativism. As a result of these matters as well as on the effect of cultural openings over each other, and other common issues, Herder provided important areas and mediums for polylog and coexistence of civilizations and cultures.