“All resistance is a rupture with what is. And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself.” – Alain Badiou
I start this reflective blog invoking the words of one of my favourite postmodern philosophers Alain Badiou as his words accurately lay the foundation for beginning the tale of the philosophy student who once had an experience of ontological and epistemological ‘decentring’; and has since not been able to look back.
This decentring relates on the one hand to the general disenchantment I felt as a Global South student, the more I learnt about the professional field of development. This is because following much of the lessons I learnt throughout my masters, it became evident that the discourse of Development found its roots in events like the Marshall Plan of 1947 and Truman Doctrine of 1949 where the world got divided into the one-thirds, “developed” nations and the two-thirds, “underdeveloped” or previously colonized nations which resulted in creating the episteme of post WWII order on past colonial lines (Peña, 2015). Moreover, I learnt that development functioned as a mode of thinking which institutionalized itself through practices like leveraging scientific and technological knowledge of the West and providing foreign aid and investment through agencies like IMF or WB which rendered Development into a legitimizing force of Western economic intervention into the newly emerging ‘Third World’ (Rist, 2014).
Yet this experience of decentring more so came about following an experience I had in my ‘Practical Ethics for Development’ class last year. The format of the class unfolded such that there were weeks exclusively dedicated to teaching us about Western ethical frameworks like Utilitarianism, Deontology and Virtue Ethics whereas Eastern ethical frameworks like Buddhism, Confucianism and Afro-Ethics were crammed into one single class. I found this format problematic as to me it reinforced the same power dynamics I had learnt of that existed within Development discourse where epistemological privilege was given to the knowledge of the One-Thirds over the knowledge of the Two-Thirds world. But as I sat there critiquing the course for its Eurocentricism I came to realize something very discomforting about myself. I realized that although my knowledge of Western moral philosophies were quite comprehensive given that I could trace these traditions right from ancients like Plato and Aristotle to more contemporary post-structural or postmodern thinkers like Badiou; I nevertheless lacked this comprehensive knowledge about my own Indian philosophical traditions. Hence I realized that even my critique of Eurocentricism was in many ways Eurocentric (Grosfoguel, 2007).
And this was the moment I experienced what Katherine Walsh calls ‘decentring’ as this experience made me confront and challenge the ontological and epistemological assumptions I bore within me despite my own declared critical stance of an anti-Eurocentric Global South student (Walsh and Mignolo, 2018). This experience was an important one as it made me aware of my positionality as a Global South student who had lived a relatively privileged middle-class life compared to those I would generally end up working with during my career. But more importantly this rupture in my being was so profound as for the first time I was truly able to think and feel from the position of the Development’s ‘Other’. And it is by acknowledging this rupture within me with an air of humility that I believe I will be able to go about learning to unlearn all that disenchants me about Development both within my practice and myself. For now, it is here within my IDRP that I (dis)-locate myself.
References
Mignolo, W.D. and Walsh, C.E., 2018. On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press.
Grosfoguel, R., 2007. The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms. Cultural studies, 21(2-3), pp.211-223.
Peña, G.J., 2015. Is Development a form of Neo-Colonialism?. Dialéctica Libertadora, (7), pp.36-42.
Rist, G., 2014. The history of development: From western origins to global faith. Zed Books Ltd.
IDRP 1 & 2 