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Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge: Debates on History and Power in Europe and the Americas

February 2015

DOI:10.1057/9781137292896

Edition: Basinstoke and New York
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Editor: Marta Araújo and Silvia R. Maeso
ISBN: 9781137292902

Project: 'Race' and Africa in Portugal: a study on history textbooks

Authors:

Marta Araújo

University of Coimbra

Silvia Maeso

University of Coimbra

This collection is an interdisciplinary effort drawing on the work of international scholars and political activists. It addresses key questions in the critique of Eurocentrism and racism regarding debates on the production and sedimentation of knowledge, historical narratives and memories in Europe and the Americas. By conceiving Eurocentrism as a paradigm of interpretation, and race as the key principle of the modern order, the authors bring the relation between knowledge and power to the centre of debate. The book invites to consider institutionalized violence as pervading the regulation of the heterogeneity of (post-)colonial territories and peoples, and to see the politics of knowledge production as a struggle for power seeking profound change. At the heart of this collective endeavour is the long history of international and domestic liberation politics and thought, as well as academic and political reaction through formulas of accommodation that re-centre the West.

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Contents

List of Maps and Tables vii

Acknowledgements viii

Notes on Contributors ix

1 Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and the Entrenched

Will-to-Ignorance: An Introduction 1

Silvia Rodríguez Maeso and Marta Araújo

2 Epistemic Racism/Sexism, Westernized Universities and the

Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long Sixteenth Century 23

Ramón Grosfoguel

3 Violence and Coloniality in Latin America: An Alternative

Reading of Subalternization, Racialization and Viscerality 47

Arturo Arias

4 Social Races and Decolonial Struggles in France 65

Sadri Khiari

5 Towards a Critique of Eurocentrism: Remarks on

Wittgenstein, Philosophy and Racism 80

S. Sayyid

6 How Post-colonial and Decolonial Theories are Received

in Europe and the Idea of Europe 93

Montserrat Galcerán Huguet

7 Africanist Scholarship, Eurocentrism and the Politics of

Knowledge 114

Branwen Gruffydd Jones

8 Scientiﬁc Colonialism: The Eurocentric Approach to

Colonialism 136

Sandew Hira

9 Secrets, Lies, Silences and Invisibilities: Unveiling the

Participation of Africans on the Mozambique Front

during World War I 154

Maria Paula Meneses and Margarida Gomes

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vi Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

10 Conceptual Clarity, Please! On the Uses and Abuses of the

Concepts of ‘Slave’ and ‘Trade’ in the Study of the

Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery 178

Kwame Nimako

11 Making the Teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African History

and Culture Compulsory: Tensions and Contradictions for

Anti-racist Education in Brazil 192

Nilma Lino Gomes

12 Race and Racism in Mexican History Textbooks: A Silent

Presence 209

María Dolores Ballesteros Páez

13 Social Mobilization and the Public History of Slavery in

the United States 229

Stephen Small

Index 247

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles

and the Entrenched Will-to-

Ignorance: An Introduction

Silvia Rodríguez Maeso and Marta Araújo

This edited collection is an interdisciplinary production, bringing the

work of international scholars and political activists within a wide range

of approaches and disciplines, including History, Anthropology, Political

Sociology, Philosophy, International Relations, Political Economy and

the Sociology of Education. It addresses key contemporary issues in

the critique of Eurocentrism and racism, in relation to debates on the

production, sedimentation and circulation of (scientiﬁc) knowledge,

historical narratives and memories in Europe and the Americas. It takes

as its crucial starting point the concept of Eurocentrism as grounded in

the project of Modernity and, in particular, its speciﬁc conﬁguration

of colonialism, history and Being which has led to the emergence of

race as a key organizing principle in the modern world order from the

geopolitical perspective of the creation of Europe/Europeanness, the

expression of its hegemony and its contestation.

We consider Eurocentrism as a paradigm for interpreting a (past,

present and future) reality that uncritically establishes the idea of

European and Western historical progress/achievement and its political and

ethical superiority, based on scientiﬁc rationality and the construction of

the rule of law. Accordingly, we propose that it is essential to debate

Eurocentrism within the formation of Western knowledge and its claims

for universal validity, since this provides a certain historical mapping of

the world that unambiguously establishes which events and processes

are scientiﬁcally relevant and how they are interpreted – simultaneously

discovering and covering them.

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2 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

In order to understand the consequences of Eurocentrism in terms

of the way in which certain patterns of interpretation are produced

and contested, it is vital to question the fundamental basis of the

centuries-old project of Modernity: coloniality/racism. More speciﬁcally,

following authors such as Enrique Dussel (2000, 2008), Sylvia Wynter

(1995, 2003) and Aníbal Quijano (2000, 2007), we consider that

Eurocentrism is rooted in the Eurocentred colonization of America in

the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries and in two interrelated processes:

the production of onto-colonial taxonomies based on the ‘Western Idea

of Man’ (Wynter, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2004) in the distribution

of (ir-)rationality/(sub-)humanity (that is, race), and the gradual

establishment of capitalist accumulation as a global standard for labour

and market control. Hence, Eurocentrism is not mere ethnocentrism,

that is, the perspective from which each people tells their history, nor is

racism simply the product of ‘exacerbated ethnocentrism’ (Cox, 1970

[1948]), pp. 477–9).

This conceptual framework calls for a critical analysis of modern

and contemporary conﬁgurations of race and racism. In other words,

‘modernity is racial’ (Hesse, 2007, p. 643), and the speciﬁc relationships

between power and knowledge that forge the contemporary contours of

Eurocentrism can tell us about the histories of race and racism and their

enduring legacies. This is paramount to unsettling a key epistemologi-

cal and political effect of the ways in which we interpret Modernity and

the idea of a European speciﬁcity (implicitly read as superiority), that

is, the drawing of an ‘abyssal line’ (Santos, 2007) in the production of

history. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has characterized modern thinking

as ‘abyssal thinking’, consisting of ‘a system of visible and invisible

distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones’

(ibid., p. 45). He thus argues that whereas ‘Western modernity’ can be

deﬁned ‘as a socio-political paradigm founded on the tension between

social regulation and social emancipation’, the visible distinction is

simultaneously founded on an invisible one that establishes a division

between metropolitan societies and colonial territories. While the

‘regulation/emancipation’ dichotomy is applied to the metropolitan

side of the line, the colonial territories are ruled by the ‘appropriation/

violence’ dichotomy. Following this analysis, Santos considers ‘modern

scientiﬁc knowledge and modern law’ as ‘the most accomplished and

clear manifestation of abyssal thinking’ (ibid., p. 46). Accordingly, the

spheres of science and law produce, and are sustained by, a ‘radical denial’

that ‘eliminates whatever realities are on the other side of the line’;

although the colonial side of the line is the condition of possibility for the

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and Will-to-Ignorance 3

emergence of modern law and science, this is rendered invisible (ibid.,

p. 48). Erasing this history – what Maldonado-Torres (2004, p. 30) has

described as the ‘forgetfulness of coloniality in both Western Philosophy

and contemporary social theory’ – is, therefore, a key characteristic of

Eurocentrism. This allows for an interpretation of Modernity – of liberal

democracy, citizenship, the nation-state and human rights, among other

‘universal’ categories – as if race, racism and colonialism did not lie at

the core of this historical process, inside and outside the geographical

borders of ‘Europe’, Europeanized nation-states and/or the West. Most

importantly, race has been tenaciously produced and inscribed in the

world through ‘the idea of a neutral epistemic subject whose reﬂections

only respond to the structures of the spaceless realm of the universal’

(ibid., p. 29), an aspect crucial to the debates analyzed in this collection.

In conceiving of Eurocentrism as a paradigm for an interpretation of

reality, we insist on the need to bring the relationship between knowledge

and power to the centre of disputes on national identity, cultural

diversity and the validation of ‘other’ narratives. More speciﬁcally,

we insist on the need to interrogate and explain what Sylvia Wynter

(1992, 1995, 2003) refers to as the ‘organization/order of knowledge’

and its ‘descriptive/prescriptive statements’. We argue that what is at

stake is not that the history of Europe and the Americas is being written

without considering colonialism and racial enslavement, but rather that

the dominant approach often interprets these processes as a dark chapter

(UNESCO, 2002, p. 17) in the triumphant development of Modernity

(Wolf, 1997 [1982]), that is, an appendix to this history that is offset by

the eventual progress in rights, equality and democracy. Accordingly,

while colonialism and racism may be acknowledged in the debates on

history and memory, they are often approached, to paraphrase Aimé

Césaire (2000 [1955], p. 53), as that ‘annoying ﬂy’ that interrupts the

state’s ‘forgetting machine’ (ibid., p. 52), driven by what needs to be

remembered, celebrated or commemorated (e.g. the multicultural

empire, mestizaje, intercultural encounters, liberal revolutions).

Moreover, the legacies of colonialism are to be conventionally

understood within the liberal framework of human rights. Following the

work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, p. 96) on the formulas of silence

pervading the production of history on the Haitian Revolution, we

argue that this framework erases and banalizes the histories of collective

struggles and questions of political responsibility (for instance, the

enduring anti-enslavement and anti-colonial/liberation struggles versus

the narratives of White humanist abolitionism and independences

granted in due time – drawing on the idea of the immaturity1 of the

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4 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

colonized for immediate emancipation/liberation). For instance, as

Angela Davis (1981, p. 59) showed in the case of White anti-slavery/

abolitionist and women’s rights movements in the United States, these

initiatives towards emancipation both perpetuated racism and failed to

promote a wider anti-racist consciousness – an example of the enduring

rule of White supremacy/privilege.

We thus consider it crucial to approach the history of the formation

of modern nation-states as inextricably bound to that of colonialism

and racial enslavement (Goldberg, 2002; Santos, 2007; Nimako and

Willemsen, 2011). This conceptual approach enables the discussion

to move beyond traditional analyses that view debates on history and

memory as merely a matter of the identity politics of groups demanding

representation (Wynter, 1992; Deloria, 1995), particularly evident

in the Northern American context, or as an issue emerging from the

so-called challenges of globalization and the increasing diversity

of national societies otherwise viewed as ethnically homogeneous

in Europe (Goldberg, 2002, 2009). Hence the collection of chapters

presented here takes as its starting point the critical enquiry of taken-

for-granted assumptions underlying interpretations of the boundaries

of the colonial, the national, and Europe/Europeanness (Hesse, 2007).

In particular, this book engages with the construction of the ‘Euro-

Immigrant nation’ (Wynter, 1992) in several American contexts and the

presumed homogeneity of the nation in Europe – achieved and enforced

through violence and the purging of difference (Goldberg, 2002,

2009). Both these notions consecrate the privilege of White Europeans

and their descendants, albeit unwritten in historical accounts due to

a depoliticizing approach (Brown, 2006). If, on the contrary, we take

heterogeneity as constitutive of (post-)colonial nation-states and race

as the key governing principle behind the subjugation of populations/

nature and the distribution of moral values, the privilege of unmarked

whiteness (inscribed in institutions, laws and practices) becomes a terrain

for academic enquiry and political struggle. This is all the more relevant

with regard to historical narratives, since they constitute a crucial

site for the naturalization of privilege, as is evident in contemporary

discussions on colonialism, slavery and (anti-)racism. Accordingly,

several chapters in this collection interrogate the ways in which different

patterns of silencing articulate with, and accommodate, recognition and

representation through formulas of knowledge production, consolidation

and consumption that trivialize existing power arrangements and

enduring political struggles. As a whole, they point to the consequences

of unveiling local and regional interconnected histories opening up a

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and Will-to-Ignorance 5

tension not only with ‘other’ histories, but also with speciﬁc attempts

within Eurocentric thought to continually reshape the world in racially

hierarchical terms and to recentre the West/Europe.

Organization of the book

Chapters 2–8 focus on the notion of Eurocentrism as a paradigm for

interpreting reality grounded in the project of Modernity, that is, in

colonialism, capitalism and race. In particular, these contributions

engage with the geopolitics of knowledge production in order to

understand and challenge the ways in which academic narratives and

methodologies are embedded in the naturalization and reproduction

of racism.

Chapter 2 by Ramón Grosfoguel interrogates the historical roots of

the contemporary order of knowledge (re)produced by the Westernized

university, which renders other Western and non-Western knowledges

inferior and outside the acceptable canon of thought. The author regards

the contemporary hegemonic Human Sciences as founded on epistemic

racism/sexism and locates their roots in the four genocides/epistemicides

of the long sixteenth century: against Jewish and Muslim populations

during the conquest of Al-Andalus and its aftermath; against Indigenous

peoples in the conquest of the Americas; against Africans kidnapped

and enslaved in the Americas; against women accused of witchcraft and

burned alive in Europe. The chapter unfolds in dialogue with Enrique

Dussel’s insightful critique of the ontological and epistemological

assumptions of Cartesian philosophy. The author analyzes how these

four genocides/epistemicides made it possible for ‘I conquer, therefore I

am’ to be transformed into the epistemic racism/sexism of the Cartesian

rationale ‘I think, therefore I am’. Grosfoguel’s approach reveals the

interrelation between these four processes of violence as constitutive of

the modern/colonial world’s epistemic structures and of Western man’s

epistemic privilege. The chapter concludes with a reﬂection on the need

to move beyond Eurocentred Modernity and discusses the implications

and possibilities for the decolonization of the Westernized university.

In Chapter 3, Arturo Arias focuses more closely on the nature

of violence in the modern colonial world. Proposing a decolonial

perspective, Arias explores the nature of violence exercized by hegemonic

elites over subalternized and racialized civil societies in Latin America

vis-à-vis the ‘visceral’ reaction of colonized subjects. This is illustrated

by two cases: the nineteenth-century Yucatan Caste War and the late

twentieth-century Guatemalan Civil War. Arias discusses the ways in

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6 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

which the justiﬁcation for violence has been anchored in the ontological

naturalization of racism at the centre of the everyday governance of all

kinds of domestic events or, in other words, the ways in which colonialism

has enabled Indigenous peoples and African ‘slaves’ to be conceived of

as inferior to the conquering European subjects. Regarding the Yucatan

Caste War, the author argues that the actual violence unleashed by

Indigenous subjects is a solid example of a situation in which originary

violence, enacted by Western elites convinced of their racial superiority,

signiﬁcantly contributed towards forestalling any possibility of peaceful

behaviour on the part of the Indigenous population. Arias suggests

that a similar case could be argued for the 37-year-long civil war in

Guatemala, referring in particular to the brutal military counter-

offensive against the insurrection in the Maya highlands that began

in the summer of 1982. The author therefore argues that it is necessary

to read and locate the Maya population’s visceral response outside the

disciplinary political mythologies of Western-centred revolutionary

progress and the national ideal of mestizaje. More speciﬁcally, Arias sees

the Guatemalan Maya movement’s construction of a transnational ﬁeld

of political struggle as extending beyond the repressive epistemological

frontiers of nationhood that have characterized the Marxist-oriented

Ladino left. The chapter concludes with a reﬂection on the challenges

posed by a decolonial logic: what happens when we view violence not

only as inevitable, but as ‘just’?

In Chapter 4, Sadri Khiari offers an appraisal of the context in which a

decolonial strategy emerged in anti-racist struggles in France. His starting

point is that racism can only be successfully approached by considering

the political arena as the site of a power struggle between races, thus

moving beyond the legacy of the colonial progressive/conservative or

left/right cleavage which structures politics and has implied rendering

the racial invisible. The consequence of the universal linear Eurocentric

history that unfolded with the advent of Modernity and progress

has been the relegation of other spaces, experiences and accounts

to non-history or to earlier stages of history. Khiari thus interrogates

the French conversion of a worldwide system of racial domination

established since the sixteenth century and embodied in the formation

and consolidation of the (White) Republic, which preserves the

privilege of the unmarked whiteness constitutive of the racial system.

In analyzing the challenges faced by decolonial politics in France,

he points to the need to construct a border strategy that recognizes

the dislocated sites and disjointed temporalities of emancipation and

liberation struggles beyond the White Eurocentric political imaginary.

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and Will-to-Ignorance 7

Khiari argues that while liberation struggles developed an international-

ist character (for example, the resistance of Africans deported to America

and the Caribbean, the anti-colonial wars and the converging struggles

of the ‘Third World’ following independence or the anti-apartheid

struggles in South Africa), they should be interpreted as racial struggles

against White power. Within this approach, struggles for emancipation

and liberation within the French Hexagon ought to be understood as

resistance to the racial order challenging the continuing renewal of

the coloniality of power relations. The author illustrates this with the

articulation of class and race struggles, integrationist anti-racism and

contemporary academic explanations of racism, which have established

race as external to any historical power relationship, thus looking to

the state for the possibility of its regeneration – in harmony with the

republican ideal – whilst preventing anti-racism from being regarded as

a political strategy outside particularism.

In Chapter 5, S. Sayyid casts a critical gaze upon certain readings

of the post-colonial and calls for an engagement not simply with the

critique of media representations and cultural prejudice, but also with

the profound ways in which Eurocentrism is constitutive of Western

knowledge. In his view, this is a necessary endeavour to grasp the ways

in which cultural, philosophical and geopolitical forces and processes

were organized in the service of the Eurocentred (colonial and racial)

world order. Accordingly, he proposes to move beyond essentialism in

the critique of Eurocentrism, laying down the horizons of a decolonial

Philosophy. Sayyid calls for a non-essentialist reading of Wittgenstein’s

work and proposes that his contribution, particularly his later work,

implies a critique of Eurocentrism that is relevant for an understanding

of its relationship with epistemology, culture and racism. Following

Wittgenstein’s performative view of language and the relevance of the

context in which language games are played, Eurocentrism is hence

understood as a learned epistemology and ontology, rather than just

in geopolitical terms. The chapter closes with the author distinguishing

the difference between being European and the project of Eurocentrism,

emphasizing that neither Eurocentrism nor its critique is exclusive

to Europeans. Considering the logic of Eurocentrism a relationship

of domination, Sayyid argues that the search for epistemological

alternatives towards decolonial ends, including the decolonizaton of

post-colonial studies, cannot reproduce the hierarchy of the West over

the non-West.

In Chapter 6, Montserrat Galcerán Huguet poses crucial questions

about the interrelationship between contemporary European politics

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8 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

and established scholarship, which points towards the enduring

centrality of an idea of Europe that continues to claim universal

validity whilst remaining blind to the colonial difference that sustains

the Enlightenment concept of reason. Galcerán Huguet starts by

considering the effects of post-colonial and decolonial theories on the

idea of Europe and by raising the fundamental epistemological question

that these conceptual approaches imply: how to think beyond the colonial

framework? Her analysis interrogates the resistance among European

academics and intellectuals to post-colonial and decolonial theories,

taking as an example the French context and the work by Africanist

scholar Jean-François Bayart, namely his critical position regarding the

theoretical, historical and political claims of the Party of the Indigenous

of the Republic. Galcerán Huguet focuses on the ways in which

post-colonial theories developed within Anglo-American academia

have merged with the European trend known as post-structuralism,

most notably the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and

how post-colonial writers place themselves in a highly contentious area

in which worldwide Westernization is taken as a given. She stresses

that this literature locates the discussion of ‘European identity’ in the

recognition that the European project of Modernity was founded on the

enslavement of other peoples and cultures, whose lives and experiences

have been marked by these processes. Yet, as she argues, there is also a

reluctance to acknowledge coloniality except in a sanitized way that

reﬂects the supposed European self-critical tradition, as illustrated by

the 2003 European Manifesto signed by Jürgen Habermas and Jacques

Derrida. Finally, the author discusses the speciﬁc place of Latin America

and Spain within this constellation of political and academic debates,

theories and interventions, pointing to the differences between

post-colonial and decolonial studies in the use of critical categories for

dominant thought. The chapter concludes by questioning the epistemic

privilege of dominant European culture in worldwide academia.

In Chapter 7, Branwen Gruffydd Jones focuses on the power/

knowledge relationship, exposing the pervasiveness of Eurocentrism at

the heart of the rise and consolidation of Africanist scholarship. Her

analysis centres on nineteenth-century British and European colonial

enterprises and the post-war establishment of ‘area studies’ in the US.

Jones sees knowledge production as a crucial element of European

colonial rule and as becoming institutionalized in research programmes

via funding from large American philanthropic foundations since

World War II (for instance, Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford), particularly

in the face of growing anti-colonial protest and organization. Her

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and Will-to-Ignorance 9

analysis thus helps to unravel how hegemonic Africanist scholarship

has conformed to this geopolitics and to the epistemological context

of modernization theory, behaviouralism and positivist comparative

politics. Jones questions the predominant academic debates within this

framework, which range from issues concerning political transition

and instability, nationalism, political parties, leadership and the role of

elites, to the more speciﬁc analysis of neo-patrimonialism. Accordingly,

she considers it paramount to draw attention to the Philosophy of

History within which these vocabularies and theoretical frameworks

have been constructed as one which positions African societies in a time

separate from, and prior to, that of Europe or the West – also prevalent

in other studies in areas which analyze politics in so-called ‘new’ and

‘developing’ states. Jones concludes by warning of the pervasiveness

of a historicist consciousness in the conventional vocabularies of ‘state

failure’, which echoes a lament for the passing of colonial rule.

In Chapter 8, Sandew Hira proposes that mainstream academic and

popular approaches to colonialism and slavery in the Netherlands are

ideologically grounded in the legacies of European White Enlightenment

thinking. He argues that colonialism had a deep impact on the

development of science, deﬁning the way in which the relationship

between European and non-European societies was addressed and

studied and codifying racism within the rise and consolidation of

Western social thought. Scientiﬁc colonialism does not consider the view

from the (codiﬁed as) ‘other’ and fails to situate its own narrative as

enunciated within the logic of the oppressor and exploiter. Moreover,

as illustrated by Hira’s analysis, this Eurocentric approach also fails to

meet the test of its claims for factuality and logical rationality. This is

often overlooked in academic endeavours due to unchecked implicit

assumptions and propositions, the production of knowledge of a

descriptive nature, the deployment of statistical data to confer scientiﬁc

authority on a particular ideological positioning, and partial accounts

of colonialism and slavery. Hira thus engages with a Decolonizing the

Mind approach which aims to make such assumptions and concepts

explicit, in addition to checking their factual and logical basis.

Chapters 9–13 critically engage with dominant contemporary

conceptual frameworks and ofﬁcial narratives on the (post-)colonial

nation, race and history. In particular, the authors engage with accounts

of colonialism, slavery and the colonized in terms of their relation to

customary national histories and enduring struggles against racism.

The marginalization of critical narratives by/on the colonized and

their relegation to scientiﬁc, political and pedagogical irrelevance in

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10 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

Europe and the Westernized world are some of the ideas discussed. One

implication of these Eurocentric academic and political approaches is

that they reﬂect on the dissemination and sedimentation of knowledge,

namely in museums, state-sanctioned curricula and textbooks, which

are analyzed in several chapters in this collection.

In Chapter 9, Maria Paula Meneses and Margarida Gomes interrogate

the exclusion of the view codiﬁed as ‘other’, exploring the silences on

African involvement in World War I by looking at the case of the theatres

of war in territories colonized by Portugal (which maintained a state

of ‘neutrality’). The chapter illustrates the interrelationship between

the methods applied to compel Africans to serve on the Mozambique

front in World War I to prevent a German invasion – with a focus on

the role of the Niassa Company and the carriers – and the legal system

that imposed forced labour and extended the existing structure of racial

hierarchy. The authors thus unravel the ways in which World War I and

its aftermath were crucial to the enforcement of modern Portuguese

colonial policies. Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ sociology of

absences and his critical theory on ‘modern abyssal thinking’, Meneses

and Gomes highlight the ways in which the dominant Western

narrative on World War I has failed to consider ‘other’ involvements

(their reasons, trajectories and implications) precisely because it favours

a Eurocentric and linear approach to the history of this conﬂict,

primarily recognizing the (mostly White) expeditionary forces that

fought on the European front as lawful combatants. Thus, the silence

surrounding the African troops in Mozambique during World War I

is exemplary of the re-enactment of an abyssal line that tenaciously

splits the metropolitan from the colonial side of the line. The chapter

shows that an approach to the conﬂict as restricted to the geographical

limits of Europe is closely related to the long-standing tendency to

treat African social phenomena as atypical, local processes outside

global rational explanations, assuming linear temporality as the neutral

medium within which history unfolds.

The scholarly production of knowledge is also a central question

in Chapter 10 by Kwame Nimako. This author calls for conceptual

clarity within academic and political approaches and discourses on

the transatlantic slave trade and slavery (including ‘modern slavery’),

in the light of the weak empirical grounding for these concepts and

their nineteenth- and twentieth-century reinventions (after the legal

abolition of slavery and the end of the Cold War). Nimako questions the

current conceptual inﬂation, academic institutionalization and univer-

salization of these notions among career historians. He thus challenges

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and Will-to-Ignorance 11

the practice of calling on archival material to validate certain scientiﬁc

claims – which broadly overlooks the fact that such evidence was

obtained and preserved for speciﬁc purposes, including maintaining

the racial hierarchy. In considering that this material can be used to

study social formation and the production of knowledge, Nimako thus

suggests we engage with, rather than ignore, the historical fraud that

allows for the perpetual naturalization of slavery and shifts the burden of

responsibility for slavery away from Europe and European descendants.

This conceptual shift is crucial to discussing the legacies of European

slavery, speciﬁcally with regard to the formation of the nation-state,

national identities and cultural traditions, and the continuing (though

changing) racisms that shape international and domestic relations. The

chapter concludes with the suggestion that the abuse of the concept of

slavery is partly a consequence of parallel lives and intertwined belonging:

people sharing the same spaces but having different experiences and

memories, giving rise to different understandings and notions of

freedom and emancipation, with consequences for the production of

knowledge.

In Chapter 11, Nilma Lino Gomes addresses the historical demands

of the Black movement during the last century in Brazil, particularly

in terms of education. In 2003, under the Lula da Silva government,

these demands culminated in the legal requirement for the mandatory

teaching of the history of African-Brazilian and African history and

culture in compulsory education. By linking this ofﬁcial initiative to

other related debates – such as anti-racist teaching and afﬁrmative

action – Gomes explores the challenges, tensions and contradictions

that have emerged with the implementation of this law. Although the

background context to its approval is the emerging consensus on the

lack of representation and misrepresentation of ethno-racial diversity in

Brazil, resulting from enduring grassroots struggles, the implementation

of the law has revealed the difﬁculties in achieving anti-racist teaching

throughout the Brazilian educational system. Despite the alliances

that have been formed between the state, international organizations

and grassroots movements, the broader context of political ambiguity

in the commitment to ﬁght racism and the legacies of a Eurocentric

knowledge system have hampered meaningful change. Ten years

after its implementation, this legislation has not been sufﬁciently

consolidated in public policies, thus curtailing the efforts made by

grassroots movements to achieve structural change in education.

Nonetheless, such collective demands have been crucial to launching a

broader political debate across the country on institutionalized racism.

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12 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

Chapter 12 explores the limited changes to history teaching in

Mexico brought about by state reforms to education which were, at

least partially, a reaction to the grassroots struggles of the Zapatista

movement. Dolores Ballesteros Páez focuses on discourses on race and

racism in secondary education history teaching following the 1993

and 2006 educational reforms in Mexico, which were meant to contest

the assimilationist approach that pervaded the education system

during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the uprising of

the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994 and the adoption

of international recommendations on the multicultural curriculum,

the defence of a pluricultural identity has emerged in schoolbooks.

However, as Ballesteros Páez suggests, despite the increasing

representation of certain populations (especially Indigenous and

African enslaved populations), these remain a silent presence: although

the 2006 education reform introduced a multi/intercultural approach

(mostly adding new content to textbooks), by continuing to silence

the racist and nationalist ideas behind the political construction of the

Mexican nation, these populations remain on the margins of the main

narrative. Mexican national identity, drawing on ideas such as mestizaje

and, more recently, multiculturalism and interculturality, is nowadays

constructed as homogeneous (supposedly a blend of Indigenous,

African and Spanish elements), whilst erasing certain populations

from national history, restricting their presence to small sections or

viewing them as limiting the modernization of the country. Through

the illusion of inclusion, the privileged position of the descendants of

Spanish colonial settlers is both consecrated and rendered invisible,

whilst a systematic and historically informed reﬂection on racism and

its changing dynamics in Mexican society is evaded. This can be seen

in the erasure of the idea of race as a crucial factor in contemporary

inequalities and as a key mobilizing force within grassroots struggles.

This chapter thus illustrates the limited horizons of policy reform in

challenging Eurocentrism in education.

In Chapter 13, the ﬁnal chapter, Stephen Small analyzes the

processes of knowledge production and dissemination that have made

‘other’ experiences and narrations visible, although still consigned to

marginality in public history. Speciﬁcally, he focuses on the public

memory of slavery and on representations of the struggles of African-

Americans in museums and on plantation sites. Small argues that while

there is an impressive amount of research and knowledge about slavery

and its legacies in the US and extensive information is available in a wide

range of museums, mainstream accounts continue to provide narrow

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and Will-to-Ignorance 13

coverage and a particular discursive orientation – presenting a grand

narrative of American history that emphasizes freedom, equality and

fairness. Despite improvements, these accounts do not fully escape the

US nationalist ideology of progress and the legacy of Southern gentility,

disavowing public discussion of race and slavery. Plantation museums

incorporate or marginalize slavery in relative terms, or simply annihilate

it from their narratives. Specialist museums managed by African-

Americans, on the other hand, tend to offer a more complete account

of the extent and depth of slavery and its legacies, which is crucial

to challenging dominant views and assumptions and to highlighting

their contributions to labour, technology, medicine, knowledge and

culture in the US. Small thus argues that the contemporary museum

infrastructure continues to constitute a ‘separation of knowledge’ that

is the outcome of the ‘segregation of knowledge’ – itself a legacy of

slavery and legal segregation. His chapter reminds us that knowledge

production is inseparable from racialized ideologies, and that these

ideologies continue to be shaped by a combination of factors, including

economic proﬁt, political gain, nostalgia and the evasion of guilt, as

well as hostility to Black people. Small concludes that only continued

social mobilization will prevent the marginalization of knowledge of

the Black experience in US history.

* * *

Dominant debates on colonialism and racial enslavement exemplify the

workings of Eurocentrism as a paradigm of knowledge production and

interpretation. Despite occupying a marginal position within modern

historiography (Trouillot, 1995; Vergès, 2008), in recent decades there

has been a re-emergence of political and academic interest in the

history and in memorialization of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic.

International efforts have been crucial in fostering public debate,

namely: (a) the International UNESCO Slave Route programme focusing

on disseminating knowledge on slavery, which was launched in Benin

in 1994 following a proposal by Haiti and several African countries; (b)

the 2001 United Nations-sponsored Durban World Conference against

Racism and the declaration that the transatlantic slave trade and slavery

were inextricably associated with racism; (c) the UNESCO initiatives

launched during the International Year for the Commemoration of the

Struggle against Slavery and its Abolition (2004) to encourage research

into the links between the slave trade, slavery and contemporary racism.

Despite their relevance in launching a debate that in many contexts

had been dormant, three questions are particularly problematic

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14 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

within the approach and initiatives proposed. Rooted in Eurocentric

thinking, such endeavours depoliticize Atlantic slavery and regenerate

the historical cover-up of its close links with colonialism and racism

(Goldberg, 1993; Hesse, 2002). First, through the persistence of the

approach to the ‘transatlantic slave trade’ as a ‘tragedy’ (for example,

UNESCO, 2001, p. 14; 2002, p. 6), an exceptional process, or an appendix

to the history of Europe. The 2001 Durban Declaration (UNESCO,

2002), whilst acknowledging the negative impact of slavery on Africa,

broadly omits its beneﬁts to Europe: Atlantic slavery is approached as a

process happening over there – in the colonies – with little relevance to

European history. Consigning slavery to a dark chapter (ibid., p. 17) of

this history paves the way for the centrality of contemporary narratives

that depoliticize colonialism and enslavement – and, consequently,

racism – within the semantics of mestizaje, multiculturalism and inter-

culturality (Araújo and Maeso, 2012a; see also Ballesteros Páez, Chapter

12 in this volume).

Second, with the increasingly widespread idea of the universality of

slavery – at the heart of the Slave Route project (for example, Diène, 1998;

UNESCO, 2013). This is the revival of a colonial narrative that prevented

racial enslavement from being considered a European ‘discovery’,

generally blaming it on Arabs and Muslims and calling for European

moral outrage alongside continuing colonial exploitation (Hochschild,

2006 [1988]; Gopal, 2006; Nimako, Chapter 10 in this volume). The idea

of the ubiquity of enslavement is also being reformulated within the

currently expanding study of ‘modern slavery’, assuming ‘that research

work on the Atlantic “slave” trade and slavery is exhausted’ (Nimako

and Willemsen, 2011, p. 190). This again turns race into a coincidental

factor in the history of Atlantic slavery, a non-constitutive element of

this system of exploitation. As such, the relationship between slavery

and race becomes relevant – an obsession? – for the scholars and activists

of (anti-)racism but optional or, at most, a parenthesis in academic and

pedagogical accounts of colonialism and slavery.

Third, via an approach to education and scientiﬁc knowledge as

antidotes to racism (Henriques, 1984), consolidated in the post-war

context in which UNESCO emerged and eventually becoming

hegemonic. In contemporary times, international debates on slavery

and history teaching continue to enshrine the role of scientiﬁc

knowledge in combating racism via the production of accounts that

‘give [this phenomenon] a rigorous scientiﬁc character’ (UNESCO, 2001,

p. 15) and thus eradicate ‘ignorance and prejudice’ (ibid., p. 6; see also

pp. 5–12). The relative insigniﬁcance of the ‘transatlantic slave trade’

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and Will-to-Ignorance 15

in European/Western history and historiography (and its contemporary

containment within accommodating narratives) cannot be reduced to a

matter of academic ignorance. Such an approach derives, as Trouillot

(1995, p. 6) suggests, from a positivist view of science that masks the

conﬁgurations of power through a naive epistemology. We therefore

need to consider the ‘strange’ silence (UNESCO, 2001, p. 14) on racial

enslavement as the consequence of crucial intellectual choices and

engagements that foster the absence of knowledge but are not reducible

to it (Trouillot, 1995).

These global debates have acquired speciﬁc relevance and contours in

different contexts – with race being variously considered as if it could

be temporarily hidden from view, or added in as an extra explanatory

element. Throughout the last century, initiatives to reconsider national

imaginaries of colonialism, race and slavery have emerged in Europe

and in the Americas,2 with education becoming a battleground for

important struggles for knowledge/power. For instance, since the 1960s

in the US,3 the Civil Rights movement has pushed for a reorganization of

the system of knowledge, albeit accompanied by institutional reaction

(Wynter, 1992, p. 11; see also Davis, 1981; Deloria, 1995). As Frank

Füredi (1998) argued, UNESCO’s rejection of race as a scientiﬁcally and

politically consensual concept since the 1950s led to the rise of ideas of

cultural difference and pluralism – rather than equality – in international

political and academic debate, which would have an impact on debates in

education. The Cold War and national liberation struggles in Africa and

Asia – endangering the privilege of the West in the world order – further

created a context in which mobilization around racial consciousness

was politically and diplomatically deﬂected (ibid.). Accordingly, most

debates on history teaching and textbooks have been narrowly framed

by the need to represent the (colonized/enslaved) ‘other’ in multicultural

societies. Ofﬁcial initiatives to broaden the curriculum, as well as much

scholarly work, have failed to move beyond an understanding of racism

as ‘ignorance and prejudice’ and of Eurocentrism as misrepresenting

or lacking the ‘other’ side of history, which is dominant in UNESCO

interventions. They have favoured a rectiﬁcation and/or compensatory

approach that reduces ‘aggressive nationalism’ (UNESCO, 2001, p. 11)

and adds in limited amounts of the ‘version of the losers’, whilst failing

to challenge existing descriptive and prescriptive rules that determine

in/exclusion:

Multiculturalism can seem to be an attractive answer to the

particularism of the Euro-Immigrant perspective from which the

present textbooks are written … Rather than seeking to reinvent our

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16 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

present cultural native model, the multi-culturalism alternative seeks

to ‘save’ the nation model by multiculturalizing it. It does not move

outside the conceptual ﬁeld of our present EuroAmerican cultural

model. (Wynter, 1992, p. 16)

Thus, on both sides of the Atlantic, the master script on slavery

(Swartz, 1992), colonialism, race and the nation has broadly remained

unchanged – by design and by implementation. Debates on the

multicultural curriculum and multiperspectivity have failed to unsettle

Eurocentrism and to produce a profound critique of the construction

of the core idea of the national/European/Western ‘we’ in which the

‘other’ is to be included. Cornel West’s assertion remains relevant:

We need to tell a story about ways in which ‘Eurocentrism’ as

a category for the debate is hiding and obscuring something,

obfuscating a debate, prepackaging a debate that thereby never really

takes place and becomes, instead, this battle between bureaucrats

over slots and curriculum … the only way we get beyond a paralyzing

either/or perspective is to take a look at this idea of Europe, the very

idea of Europe as an ideological construct. (West, 1993, pp. 120–1)

What is therefore required is an approach that considers not merely

the (mis)representation of the ‘other’ but shows the theoretical and

analytical relevance of the notion of Eurocentrism to understanding

the ways in which race and racism are rendered (in)visible in the debate

on nationhood, citizenship, democracy and human rights (Araújo and

Maeso, 2012b). Whilst education is a crucial site for the analysis of the

naturalization both of Eurocentric thinking and of related political

and cultural contestation, these struggles have never been about mere

symbolic representation, but about access to resources (Wynter, 1992;

Deloria, 1995). This is particularly evident in Nilma Gomes’ Chapter

11 in this volume: demands for inclusion in the canon of knowledge

have been linked to a wider struggle against the institutionalization of

racism. Afﬁrmative action in higher education and the debate this has

unleashed in Brazilian universities bears witness to this.

Beyond academic historiography and formal education systems,

the increasing relevance of multisited productions of history should

also be noted, particularly with regard to their role in shaping

collective memories of colonialism, enslavement and racism. Public

commemorations, museums and exhibitions, media productions

and pedagogical materials are crucial sites for the construction and

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and Will-to-Ignorance 17

sedimentation of historical narratives. They usually reveal the ‘institu-

tionalized practice of social forgetting’ (Nimako and Small, 2012) and

are particularly relevant to understanding the problematic status of

any political discussion on (anti-)racism (Eichstedt and Small, 2003).

While the state has had an advantage in ensuring its citizens acquire

ofﬁcial history through compulsory schooling, museums, public

events and commemorative commissions (Wertsch, 2002), signiﬁcant

ruptures with ofﬁcial knowledge have often been the result of the

enduring struggles of grassroots movements, political activists and

intellectuals. Local initiatives have been crucial to the development of

collective memories, frequently building on national and international

partnerships. Many of these initiatives and cultural productions aim to

promote alternative, critical forms of memorializing colonialism and

enslavement through intellectual collaboration and communitarian

knowledge production and dissemination (for example, community-

based libraries, digital resources, guided tours). In Europe, for instance,

in cities such as London or Amsterdam, Black History/Heritage tours

have emerged to challenge ofﬁcial discourses that consign colonialism

and enslavement to a distant and thus irrelevant (irreparable) past. In

the US, as Stephen Small argues in Chapter 13 of this volume, despite

the impressive amount of knowledge produced on slavery, most

initiatives designed to memorialize it – in museums and plantation sites

– continue to disseminate a hegemonic narrative on the relationship

between colonialism and nation-state formation; those that do not are

mostly the result of Black mobilization.

This goes to show that the relationship between anti-racist and

political liberation struggles and scientiﬁc discourse has always

been, at least, uneasy. Universities have historically been sites for the

reproduction of White privilege, through the canonization of certain

scientiﬁc theories and explanations. More importantly, they also provide

the arsenal of categories to be deployed concerning the ‘political’,

the ‘religious’, ‘violence’, and so on, all of which revolve around the

question of Being Human. As Vine Deloria ironically remarks:

The constant drumbeat of scientiﬁc personalities who manipulate

the public’s image of Indians by describing archaeological horizons

instead of societies, speaking of hunter-gatherers instead of

communities, and attacking Indian knowledge of the past as ﬁctional

mythology, has created a situation in which the average citizen is

greatly surprised to learn that Indians are offended by racial slurs and

insults. (Deloria, 1995, p. 21)

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18 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

This modern/racist question has compelled colonized peoples ‘to deﬁne

what it means to be human because there is a deep understanding

of what it has meant to be considered not fully human, to be savage’

(Tuhiwai Smith, 2012 [1999], p. 28; original emphasis). This process

has been somehow translated by scholars into the more fashionable

question of (political) agency, although usually accompanied by the

policing of knowledge production by the colonized and minoritized.

For instance, the pervasiveness of Eurocentrism and racism lays at the

centre of the heated controversy surrounding Rigoberta Menchú Tum

and her biographical testimony on the massacres by the Guatemalan

army in 1981–82. Entitled I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian woman in

Guatemala,4 the testimony follows the publication of a book, by

American anthropologist David Stoll in 1999, questioning the veracity

and representativeness of her narrative (Arias, 2001). To these critiques,

she responded:

It is not a question of you believing in my own truth or someone

else’s; I’m simply saying that I have the right to my memory, as do my

people. (Rigoberta Menchú Tum, interviewed by Juan Jesús Aznárez,

1999, in Aznárez, 2001, p. 116)

This polemic is illustrative of the ways in which certain knowledge is

read as too subjective and suspicious – an ad hoc narrative serving more a

speciﬁc (and dubious) political agenda than an objective interpretation

of ‘events’ – as well as the common construction of Indigenous

peoples as easily ‘manipulated’ by external political forces. Although

the relationship between knowledge and power may have been

acknowledged and incorporated in scholarly reﬂections, Westernized

academia and its internal rules of reproduction remain – as Khiari argues

in Chapter 4 of this volume – anchored in a Eurocentric paradigm that

disregards race as a power struggle. Grosfoguel’s interconnected analysis

in Chapter 2 of this volume provides an understanding of the historical

roots of this epistemological order and the main challenges this poses

to the Westernized university.

More often than not, the depoliticization of race and racism prevents

established academics from thinking outside the colonial framework,

rapidly condemning some knowledge as ‘ideological’ and therefore

irrelevant, as Galcerán Huguet points out in Chapter 6 of this volume.

At the core of this issue is the ‘self’–‘other’ dichotomy, which has been

mainly interrogated by critical scholarship. Fernando Coronil (1989), in

his review of Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America, noted that the

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Eurocentrism, Political Struggles and Will-to-Ignorance 19

‘fascination with the construction of “otherness”’ leaves the colonial

self unmarked and perpetuates the imperial ‘politics of selfhood’ (p.

329). This present collection therefore considers it imperative to unravel

how the unmarked self – inscribed in legal frameworks, institutional

practices and historical archives – is reproduced through the use and

reinvention of certain vocabularies, concepts, and arguments, as

analyzed by Jones, Hira and Nimako in Chapters 7, 8 and 10 of this

volume. The politics of knowledge are also closely related to the

geopolitical borders of scholarly inquiry and their production and

organization of our ‘objects’ of analysis and interpretations. In this

sense, as already stated, it is essential to question the divide between the

colonial and the metropolitan. In Chapter 9 of this volume, Meneses

and Gomes’ interrogation of the dominant narratives of World War I,

which foreground the imaginary of a ‘European war’, represents a step

in this direction. They also highlight the problematic construction of

national cases that continues to frame the understanding of historical

processes and political struggles on the frontiers of nationhood.

What, then, are the challenges? The articles compiled in the issue of

Human Architecture edited by Boidin and colleagues point towards the

‘potential for the renewal of American and European universities’ (2012,

p. 2) brought by the different experiences and historical trajectories

of academic and grassroots movement critiques of the production of

knowledge. They also examine the multiple layers of ‘re-Westerniza-

tion’ and the containment of ‘critical inquiry’ in several topics (such

as slavery and racism) through the reproduction of hegemonic research

ﬁelds and frameworks of inquiry (for example, ‘immigration/minority

studies’). This serves as a critical warning on the shortcomings of many

critiques of Eurocentrism emerging from academia (see also Sayyid,

Chapter 5 in this volume). As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui stresses in her

critique of the establishment of ‘post-colonial’ and ‘cultural studies’

research in US universities, these institutionalized ﬁelds assemble a

‘conceptual apparatus, and forms of reference and counterreference

that have isolated academic treatises from any obligation to or dialogue

with insurgent social forces’ (2012, p. 98).

This calls for an approach to the decolonization project as a practice

that it is always engaged with profound political and cultural change

(ibid., pp. 100–1). However, it is a collective political endeavour that

the hegemonic Eurocentric paradigm is not only unwilling, but also

ill-prepared, to embrace, entrenched as it is, to paraphrase Maldonado-

Torres, in its will-to-ignorance ‘with good conscience’ (2004, p. 36).

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20 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

Notes

1. The thesis of ‘immaturity for self-determination’ was contested by intellectuals

within national liberation movements, such as Amílcar Cabral in his Political

Texts (1974, p. 47).

2. In the last decade, in Europe, debates on slavery and history teaching were

most visible in Britain, France and the Netherlands. In the Americas, Brazil,

Colombia and the US (particularly the textbooks discussion prompted by the

Texas State Board of Education) are illustrative of this.

3. Carter G. Woodson’s (1933) The Mis-Education of the Negro is a powerful

example of an earlier challenge to the dominant canons of knowledge in

education in the US.

4. Published originally in French in 1983 and a year later in English, Menchú

Tum, a member of the Peasant Unity Committee (CUC), narrates in her

testimony the massacres by the Guatemalan army in 1981–82 in hundreds of

Mayan villages, as part of its counter-insurgency strategy in El Quiché region.

She became a spokesperson for Indigenous rights, particularly for the Mayan

peoples. Rigoberta Menchú Tum received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and

was a candidate in the 2011 presidential elections in Guatemala.

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Index

Compiled by Sue Carlton

Page numbers followed by n refer to notes

Aborigines Protection Society 186

acculturation 76, 111

activism 81–2, 102, 103, 198

Afonso I (Nzingo Mbemba ruler of

Congo) 182–3

Africa

colonial legacy 126–9

decolonization 114, 130, 187

and nationalism 124, 187

state failure 9, 129, 130–1

African Slave Trade 181, 183

African Studies Association (ASA) 119,

121

African Survey 117, 118, 121

Africanist scholarship 114–31

in Britain 120–1

and Cold War 114, 119, 123–4

in context of colonial rule 114,

115–18

in Europe 115–17

method 122–9

in US 117–20

and Western national interests

121–2, 123, 130

Africans

abduction and captivity of 25, 36,

168, 179, 180–1, 183–4, 189, 229

genocide/epistemicide 28

as people without a soul 36, 137,

180–1

aggression, and male sexuality 53

Al-Andalus, conquest of 23, 28, 29–30

Alpujarras trial 37, 44n

American Civil War, commemoration

of 230, 232, 235, 239

Americas

conquest of 23, 30–8, 109, 180

and Eurocentrism 2, 110

Indigenous view of 142

in relation to conquest of

Al-Andalus 30–8

Anderson, J. (former slave) 145

Angola 122, 154, 155, 162–3, 165

Angoulvant, G.L. 127

Anthropology 85, 116, 122, 123, 129,

140

anti-Semitism 30, 37, 44n, 82, 83, 106

Anti-Slavery Conference (Belgium

1889) 186–7

appropriation/violence dichotomy 2,

Arbenz Guzmán, Jacobo 56

Area Studies 8, 115, 118, 119, 120,

123

Arendt, H. 82, 84

Ashanti, King of 83

assimilation 76, 99, 170

Mexico 12, 209, 210, 222, 225,

226n

Association for Asian Studies 119

Association of Concerned African

Scholars (ACAS) 122

Balandier, G. 95

Basic Education National Conference

(CONEB) (Brazil) 203

Bayart, J.-F. 8, 95, 96–7, 111, 112n,

126

behaviouralism 9, 122, 124

Belgium, colonization of Congo

185–7

Benna, Ziad 95

Berardi Bifo, F. 105

Berlin Conference (1884–85) 158,

163, 173n, 186

Bernasconi, R. 83

247

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248 Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge

Bhabha, H. 98

Black Power 77, 240

Boston University, African Studies

programme 121

Bouteldja, H. 95–6

Braidotti, R. 105–6

Bratton, M. 126

Braudel, F. 43n

Brazil

anti-racist education 192–207

ethno-racial quotas in

universities/colleges 194, 199

in-service teacher training

initiatives 195, 200, 201, 202–3

Law 10.639/03 187, 192, 193–5,

198, 199, 200, 201

implementation 194, 199,

203–5, 206–7

Law 9394/96 (LDB) 193, 194,

195, 197, 200, 206, 207

National Curricular Directives

194, 199, 200, 205–6, 207n

National Plan 193–4, 203, 204,

205–6

regional dialogues 205–6

research about diversity in

schools 203–5

since 2003 199–206

Statute of Racial Equality 194

Black movement 11, 193, 194, 196,

197–8, 205

Black struggles for education 195–8

Brazilian Black Front 195

Buell, R.L. 118

bureaucratic-legal rule 125, 127–8

Cadena, M. de la 59

Callaghy, T. 126, 128

capitalist accumulation 2, 35, 36,

38–9, 44n, 123

Caracoles 41

Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 198, 199

Caribbean and Americas, and

enslaved labour 180, 183–4

Carnegie Foundation 8, 117, 118, 119

Cartesian philosophy 25–8

Carver, George Washington 233

Castellanos Guerrero, A. 210

Castro-Gomez, S. 27, 98

Catholic Action (AC) 57, 63n

Césaire, A. 3, 96–7, 110

Ceto, Pablo 57

Chabal, P. 126

Chakrabarty, D. 108, 128–9

Chan Santa Cruz 55

charisma 125

Charles V, King of Spain 136–7

child labour 187–8

Christianity 32

and Christendom 43–4n

conversion to 29–30, 34, 35–6, 173n

Cipaios 162

Cisneros, Cardinal 31

citizenship 68, 76, 78, 160

exclusion from 75, 76, 161, 173n

Clapham, C. 126

Clichy-sous-Bois, mosque incident

(2005) 95

clientelism 124, 125–6

Code of Rules of Indigenous Labour

(1899) (Portuguese colonial

policy) 160–1, 173n

códices 31

Cold War 15, 187

and Africanist scholarship 114, 119,

123–4

post-Cold War era 188–9

Coleman, J.S. 124

Colonial Development and Welfare

Acts (1940 and 1945) 117

Colonial Social Science Research

Council 117

colonialism 1, 3–4

ﬁve dimensions of 145–7

modern 155, 156, 157, 158–9

occupation of space and time 73,

public commemoration of 16–17

and slavery 13–14

and violence 50–1

Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge: Debates on History and Power in Europe and the Americas

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