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Though it has evaded a precise characterization, "Eurocentrism"
has been a part of the lexicon of the social sciences for
decades. "Eurocentrism" exists both in the abstract
and in the concrete. It is the ideology of world organization
today, and moreover, the model too. It is a shorthand description
of the skewed distribution of economic opportunity, political
power and presumed intellectual authority, that the revolutionary
theorist Frantz Fanon debunked with unparalleled eloquence
and insight during the global anticolonial upsurge of the
1950s. Fanon's declaration that the future of the world
would be determined by the "reentry into history"
of all those who had been denied a voice for centuries,
was a prophecy that deeply shocked older elites, mostly
of European extraction. It may today appear to have been
too deeply charged with the fervor of the Algerian war of
independence from France and insufficiently alert to the
corruptibility of national liberation struggles. But Fanon's
insistence that the survival of human civilization required
that the colonizers would have to recant, repent and yield
ground, as their former colonial subjects fashioned a world
in their own image, remains as relevant as ever.
As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his preface to Fanon's The
Wretched of the Earth, the relationship between European
colonialists and their subjects went through various phases.
In the first, the former possessed "the Word"
and the latter borrowed it. In the second, the latter began
to speak up, still swearing by the values of European humanism,
but politely reminding the colonialists of their inhumanity.
Then came another generation, which shifted the argument,
telling Europe that its "values were very poorly suited
to the reality of their lives" and that they could
"neither reject them nor assimilate them". Finally,
came the voice that Fanon uniquely represented. Convinced
of the futility of seeking to persuade the Europeans, this
voice turns the conversation inwards, addressing the colonized
people with a new conviction. And it says with surpassing
clarity that the time for "sterile litanies or nauseating
mimicry" was long past: "Let us quit this Europe
which talks incessantly of Man while massacring him wherever
it meets him, on every corner of its own streets, in every
corner of the world".
To a reluctant audience in France, only beginning to grapple
with the undeniable reality that its settler colonies in
Algeria and the imperial glory of its possessions in Africa
and East Asia were decisively being banished into the ill-remembered
pages of history, Sartre spoke with brutal clarity: "the
Third World is discovering itself and talking to itself
through this voice". The point of this rather prolonged excursus into the career
of an intellectual concept is not to uphold either Fanon
or Sartre as the most authoritative voice heard on the matter
of Eurocentrism. Indeed few discussions today take place
on the theme without references to Edward Said's indispensable
work, Orientalism, first published in 1978.
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