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Geopolitics of Knowledge
Abstract
The chapter reflects the characteristics of neo-liberal of university, academic capitalism, geopolitics of knowledge and the forms of so-called Anglophone hegemony. The text focus is on the debate regarding the Anglophone hegemony in human/political geography and on the dominant role of English language.
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The use of English as the common language of science represents a major impediment to maximising the contribution of non-native English speakers to science. Yet few studies have quantified the consequences of language barriers on the career development of researchers who are non-native English speakers. By surveying 908 researchers in environmental sciences, this study estimates and compares the amount of effort required to conduct scientific activities in English between researchers from different countries and, thus, different linguistic and economic backgrounds. Our survey demonstrates that non-native English speakers, especially early in their careers, spend more effort than native English speakers in conducting scientific activities, from reading and writing papers and preparing presentations in English, to disseminating research in multiple languages. Language barriers can also cause them not to attend, or give oral presentations at, international conferences conducted in English. We urge scientific communities to recognise and tackle these disadvantages to release the untapped potential of non-native English speakers in science. This study also proposes potential solutions that can be implemented today by individuals, institutions, journals, funders, and conferences.
Please see the Supporting information files (S2–S6 Text) for Alternative Language Abstracts and Figs 5 and 6.
Whereas geographers have outlined the effect of neoliberalism on the discipline, we ask how neoliberalism has particularly altered what it means to be a geographer. We do this by exploring geography as a vocation. After a summary of debates about academia and vocation, we present an overview of autobiographical and biographical writing on becoming a geographer. In these accounts, we note the increased attention that has been paid to issues of race, class, gender and precarity as shaping both what geography is and who can pursue it. These accounts are then contrasted with visual timeline interviews we undertook with geographers in UK secondary and higher education. We found a strong sense that geography is not simply a job, but a calling or vocation. However, this experience of vocation is being undermined by neoliberalism marked in particular by metricization and casualization. We argue, however, that both individually and collectively geographers are finding ways to resist the deforming effects of neoliberalism and to reclaim a sense of vocation. Although we recognize that vocation is a problematic and historically situated notion, we conclude that it is a productive new way to approach contemporary debates on what it means to be a geographer under neoliberalism.
This chapter is an autobiographic reflection of author’s academic track, with a focus on the theory of the institutionalization of regions, outlined in the 1980s in the context of the ongoing socio-spatial theory debates in geography. The chapter discusses how working in a peripheral university positioned this research. The chapter also reflects the academic influences and the concept of theory behind the theory of the institutionalization of regions. It then charts the “travel” of this theory outside of Finland. By looking at the debates on the Anglophone hegemony in geography, the chapter also reflects the role of “mediators” behind the possible mobility of theories, as well the motives of scholars to contribute to theoretical debates.
In this short commentary, I discuss Olof Hallonsten's argument against science evaluation. My invitation is to place the discussion in a wider frame that takes into account the many challenges scientists and scientific institutions face today. I argue in favor of a 'start from the middle' approach that gives emphasis to the inner principle of valorization of the scientific endeavor.
Geography studies the world. Our knowledge of the world, however, comes mostly from Anglophone sources. This makes Geography in urgent need of worlding – of including multiple voices and languages from around the world. Introducing the notion of linguistic privilege, the article establishes language as an important dimension of epistemic struggle, alongside gender, race, class and others. Its analysis finds the greatest linguistic privilege in the most influential positions in knowledge production – editors of handbooks and journals and authors of progress reports. Three strategies of worlding should challenge this: making gatekeepers multilingual, promoting multiple Englishes and valorising ex-centric knowledge.
Both Web of Science and Scopus are critical components of our research ecosystem, providing the basis for university and global rankings, as well as for bibliometric research. However, both are structurally biased against research produced in non-western countries, non-English language research, and research from the arts, humanities and social sciences. This viewpoint emphasises the damage that these systematic inequities pose upon our global knowledge production systems, and the need to research funders to unite to form a more globally-representative, non-profit, community-controlled infrastructure for our global research knowledge pool.
Building on the insight that all knowledge is situated and embodied, we analyze the gender of gatekeepers in the production of geographical knowledge in the current Anglophone publication landscape. Our results show that the share of women gatekeepers throughout the three selected sites—handbooks, progress reports, as well as editors and editorial boards of twenty-two geography journals—is consistently between 36 and 42 percent. These averages, however, disguise widely varying figures between different handbooks and journals. Comparing data for journal editors and editorial boards between 1999 and 2017, we find considerable growth in the presence of women. We also show that a higher share of female editors is associated with a higher share of women in editorial boards and in commissioned contributions. Editors and journals therefore need to put gender equity (but also racial and language equality) among the board and among contributors squarely on the agenda to create more space for new theoretical approaches, issues, and methodologies that center the lives and experiences of those living in spaces outside of the white Anglosphere—in the Global South and the Global East but also in the Global North.
As English is advancing to become the world’s academic lingua franca, English-language journals increasingly need to reflect knowledge production on a global scale. Our graphic shows how the majority of geography journals still remain strongly anchored in Anglophone countries. A few journals, however, lead the way in the decolonial imperative to decentre knowledge production.
Zusammenfassung
Der Zusammenhang zwischen Rankings und Konkurrenz wird häufig unterstellt, aber selten genauer untersucht. Der vorliegende Aufsatz geht ihm am Beispiel globaler Universitätsrankings nach. Ausgehend von einem soziologischen Verständnis von Konkurrenz bestimmen wir „Ranken“ als eine soziale Operation, die vier Teiloperationen miteinander kombiniert: Vergleich von Leistungen, Quantifizierung, Visualisierung, und wiederholte Publikation. Visualisierung und Publikation stehen für die in der Literatur bisher kaum berücksichtigte performative Dimension von Rankings, die für die Analyse des Zusammenhangs zwischen Rankings und Konkurrenz von zentraler Bedeutung ist. Auf dieser Grundlage zeigen wir, wie globale Universitätsrankings zur Konstruktion von Konkurrenz beitragen: durch (a) Globalisierung eines spezifischen Exzellenzdiskurses; (b) Verknappung von Reputation; (c) Transformation einer stabilen in eine dynamische Statusordnung. Wir schließen mit einer Diskussion von Implikationen dieser Analyse für die soziologische Erforschung von Konkurrenz und ihrer gesellschaftlichen Effekte.
As a contribution to debates about the predominance of English as a global lingua franca, this paper presents a study of worldwide publishing rates in the natural and social sciences. Bibliometric data from Scimago's index of Elsevier's Scopus database show: (1) a general increase in indexed documents from 1996–2015 that has outpaced increases in world population and gross world product (GWP); (2) stark disparities between nations of the center and periphery (whether defined in economic or linguistic terms); and (3) steady reductions in these disparities. It can be inferred from these data that indexed journals are becoming more nationally diverse in their contents, though the appearance of high rates of change for a small subset of countries should be attributed to indexing factors rather than real progress.
This forum contribution discusses the increasing trend toward academic capitalism and profit-oriented entrepreneurial practices in the fields of education and research. This occurs as universities, in different ways and subject to greater or lesser financial, administrative, and ideological pressures, act less like centers of disinterested education and research and more like economic enterprises that aim to maximize their revenues and/or advance the economic competitiveness of the spaces in which they operate. This development has become more global thanks to intensifying competition among relevant institutions (reflected, inter alia, in international accreditation for teaching and international rankings for research), intensified competition between the wider economic and political spaces in which they are embedded, and the ‘me-too-ism’ that leads social actors to jump on the latest bandwagon. I also consider the expansion of predatory academic capitalism and, because this is the least familiar type, I use my limited space to illustrate this rather than the more widely discussed examples of academic capitalism and entrepreneurialism (further examples of all case are presented in Jessop 2017).
Journal ranking systems are increasingly used to measure research performance of academics and universities. A growing number of academic commentators have voiced concerns of possible undesirable outcomes such as increased publication anxiety and an increase in safe and conforming research, but there have been few empirical studies on the possible effects. To address this gap, we surveyed Information Systems (IS) academics who published in one of three key IS conferences in 2013, to gather their views of the effects of journal ranking systems. Overall, we found that the concerns in the literature were strongly reflected in the views of those surveyed. Academics believe the system has greatly increased their publication anxiety. While most believed that the quality of published research had improved, researchers believe the ranking systems inhibit innovative, risky research, and encourages safe, conforming, mainstream research.
This paper considers the perceived hegemonic status of Anglo-American geography and the role of the English-language as the lingua franca of academia. The first half of the paper outlines in brief the hegemonic status of Anglo-American geography, the structures and practices of the global knowledge economy and Anglo-American geography itself that help sustain and reproduce its hegemony, and the disciplining effects of this hegemonic status on Geography practised elsewhere. The second half, examines how Anglo-American norms and the hegemonic status of English as a global lingua franca are being, and might be further, challenged, resisted, subverted and re-shaped through discursive and practical interventions aimed at disrupting and destabilising them. By focusing on how the history of the discipline is constructed, and the protocols of publishing and organising conferences, how Geography can be transformed to open it up to a plurality of (non-Anglo-American) voices, different ways of «doing» geography and alternative ways of valuing forms of geographical enterprise, are considered.
Key Messages
This article investigates processes of neoliberalization of the academy.
It argues that neoliberalism entails shifts from exchange to competition, from equality to inequality, and turns academics into human capital.
It suggests that auditing systems are key mechanisms of neoliberalization that produce unhealthy levels of anxiety and stress in the academy.
The role of post-secondary educational institutions in our ecology of knowledge production is shifting rapidly. Our Association must pay close attention to these shifts in its upcoming long-range planning process, given its 110 year commitment to representing the interests of academic/professional geographers. These changes, currently dominated by neoliberalization, will challenge Geography's ability to maintain its distinctive diversity of intellectual traditions, will challenge the ability of new generations of geographers to enter the profession in traditional ways, and may challenge universities themselves as the locus of critical reflection on the world.
Writing regional narratives of the sort envisaged in this article is much more fraught with difficulties than acknowledged by its author. Four conditions are identified for avoiding the glib story telling that afflicts the genre: reflecting on the limits of previous narratives, particularly the foundational myth of the disinterested observer of timeless truths; being clear about the metanarratives that unavoidably inform meaningful descriptive narratives; avoiding the call of elite and popular appeal at the expense of scholarly integrity; and cultivating an outsider status that speaks to the epistemological fragility of all regional narratives including those we might write, particularly when the emphasis in academia, for good philosophical as well as practical reasons, is on more analytic endeavors. The barriers set by these conditions suggest reasons why the genre is so little practiced.
This chapter problematizes the globalization of academia, research cultures and the related existing forms of hegemony. The key focus is on the debates on the Anglo-American/Anglophone hegemony in human and political geography and on the dominance of English language that arose some 15 years ago. This debate is evaluated to shape both the roles of broader material/ideological/political processes, geopolitics of knowledge, and the forms of symbolic capital in shaping such politics. Special emphasis is on the making and internationalization of political geographic knowledge.
Keywords: Academic capitalism, Anglophone hegemony, power-knowledge, scientific communication
Bio
Universities and academic publishing cultures are transforming in developed
societies around the world. This is related to the changing relations between the
state and universities and to the increasingly common approval of neoliberal
new public management doctrines. This has led to the adoption of diverse evaluation
and ranking systems in science policies that in the last resort have an
impact on how resources are delivered to universities, faculties and individual
departments. New imperatives that researchers have faced seem to emphasize
articles written in the English language that are published in so-called international
quality journals. This paper scrutinizes at first the changing institutional
basis and pressures that characterize current international academic publishing
cultures; secondly, how such tendencies reflect the rise of academic capitalism;
and thirdly, the shifting position of the well-established Finnish geographical
journal Fennia in the international publishing space. A major dividing line between
contemporary journals seems to exist between those that are included in
the Web of Science/ISI-system of Thomson Reuters and those that are not. This
paper shows by using the ISI data that Fennia has been, despite the fact that it is
not an ISI-listed journal, a widely used and circulated forum for a long time. A
major challenge for the future reputation of the journal will be attracting more
high-quality international submissions and articles, regardless of whether the
journal will be included in the ISI system.
Keywords: geography, academic publishing cultures, Web of Science, academic
capitalism
The international community of social scientists has become increasingly sensitive not only to the fact that language and context are crucially related in the construction of scientific accounts, but also to the forms of power (or geopolitics) involved in such relations. The role of language and the links between knowledge and power have also become significant issues in human geography, where many scholars have challenged so-called Anglophonic hegemony. This article will scrutinize how human geography, a context-bound social science, has become understood as international, what internationality means in this new constellation, and how power relations and hegemony are structuring (and are structured in) practices and discourses related to internationality. The paper shows how many institutions—national governments and ministries included—are struggling to transform the operation of the global scientific community according to one format, which increases the importance of the English language as an almost self-evident lingua franca.
The growing tendency to evaluate – sometimes even ''measure'' – the
''productivity'' of
academics is seriously affecting what we consider to be relevant
geographical output.
This tendency is also significantly reshaping the actual geographies of the
disciplinary debate, by introducing important debates about the relationship
between one English speaking mainstream international literature and the different
national schools. However, the related discussion on the Anglo-American
hegemony in geography seems to be strongly influenced by the growing request
on the part of university management to identify ways of ''ranking'' good
research and how to respond to the increasing internationalization of academic
work. This paper will discuss the effects of neoliberal agendas on how
geographical work is promoted, produced and circulated in Europe, with
different results in different contexts; in some cases originating perverse
impacts on the quality of geographical work; in others, creating the
opportunity for innovative agendas and for more transparent ways of managing
academic careers.
Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopolitics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.
The emergence of increasingly transnational geographies of governance presents a challenge to geographers. Geographical work on policy transfer, which links this process with the extension of the hegemonic ‘regimes of truth’ that define policy norms, has much to offer conceptions of emerging geographies of governance, particularly when linked to the production of governance structures, such as global policy networks. The paper argues that increased use of ethnographic methods in policy transfer studies enables a focus on how global policy networks are produced through the actors driving the transfers. This is illustrated through a discussion of policy consultants.
The chapter focuses on scientific communication by addressing the question: how international was the eighteenth International Geographical Congress (IGC) held in Rio de Janeiro in August 1956. The question is addressed, firstly, considering the location politics of the unique case of an international geographical congress of the International Geographical Union (IGU) held in South America, focusing on some practical, theoretical, and political impacts. Secondly, the focus is on language aspects, once the Rio IGC can be seen as a turning point in language diversity in IGU toward the consolidation of English as the main, and almost exclusive, language of international scientific communication. Considering the present challenge of critically discussing the crescent hegemony of English as the only possible language of scientific communication, the chapter concludes stressing how the study of some experiences of multilingualism in past can help us in proposing other possibilities of scientific communication in a more symmetric power position and condition.
This paper shows how academics from the postsocialist countries of the Global East are increasingly claiming a voice in the publishing space of international geography journals. Based on a longitudinal database of editors, board members and authors of 22 leading English-language geography journals since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it demonstrates how the number of authors from postsocialist countries , notably from the new EU member states, has risen almost seven-fold since the 1990 s, exhibiting the strongest growth rate among all world regions. Yet, their roles as gate-keepers of academic knowledge (editors, board members) are much weaker. With its analysis, the paper intervenes in epistemological debates about the marginal role of the post-socialist Global East in the geopolitics of knowledge. It suggests that despite constant challenges, academics from the postsocialist Global East are becoming more and more visible internationally. It is, therefore, an opportune time to articulate a collective epistemological project, pushing for a greater role in redefining its conditions and modalities-all the while being mindful that no amount of conceptual innovation expected from scholars of the region can make up for a critical reflection of inherently difficult political issues in increasingly neoliberalized academic knowledge production.
In 1945, the United States was not only the strongest economic and military power in the world; it was also the world's leader in science and technology. In American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, John Krige describes the efforts of influential figures in the United States to model postwar scientific practices and institutions in Western Europe on those in America. They mobilized political and financial support to promote not just America's scientific and technological agendas in Western Europe but its Cold War political and ideological agendas as well.
Drawing on the work of diplomatic and cultural historians, Krige argues that this attempt at scientific dominance by the United States can be seen as a form of "consensual hegemony," involving the collaboration of influential local elites who shared American values. He uses this notion to analyze a series of case studies that describe how the U.S. administration, senior officers in the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the NATO Science Committee, and influential members of the scientific establishment—notably Isidor I. Rabi of Columbia University and Vannevar Bush of MIT—tried to Americanize scientific practices in such fields as physics, molecular biology, and operations research. He details U.S. support for institutions including CERN, the Niels Bohr Institute, the French CNRS and its laboratories at Gif near Paris, and the never-established "European MIT." Krige's study shows how consensual hegemony in science not only served the interests of postwar European reconstruction but became another way of maintaining American leadership and "making the world safe for democracy."
In this paper we explore how existing, loosely geographical, English-language journals constitute Europe within their writing/publishing spaces. Focusing on two sets of journals - British/British-North American and those which are explicitly (pro) European in their orientation/content - we show how some of these journals appear to write contemporary Europe out of their spaces, casting Europe instead through the homogenizing lens of 19th-century colonialism. By contrast, others make more or less space for contemporary Europe but construe this as a transparent space; to be written about and framed by distant, dislocated commentator-viewers, whose power to comment and frame is regulated by their location within specific European geographical communities. Correspondingly, we argue that these journal spaces are both constituted through a centre-margin imaginary and constitutive of this power-geometry. This situation is argued to reflect academic working practices that are largely national or within-culture rather than cross-culture, and to reproduce dominant (Northern/Western) representations of Europe. In the final section of the paper, drawing on some of our own experiences, we consider how cross-cultural writing practices have the potential to disrupt this power geometry.
The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge is a critical inquiry into how Geography as a field of knowledge has been produced, re-produced, and re-imagined. It comprises three sections on Geographical Orientations, Geography’s Venues, and Critical Geographical Concepts and Controversies. The first provides an overview of the genealogy of ‘geography.’ The second highlights the types of spatial settings and locations in which geographical knowledge has been produced. The third focuses on venues of primary importance in the historical geography of geographical thought. © Editorial Arrangement and Editorial Introduction John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone 2011.
As geographers interested in issues of identity, we need to be concerned with the subject effects of our own positioning in the world. I argue here that we need to be especially cognizant of the impact that neoliberalization has had on our own subjectivities as critical geographers, and how the consequent subject-positions produced in a neoliberalizing geography efface our roles in the reproduction of white supremacy in geography.
Consistent with an ongoing experience of neo-liberal experimentation, tertiary sector reform in New Zealand is being driven by the ambition to re-create universities in a qualitatively new form. We argue that, through calculative practices, New Zealand universities are being positioned and are positioning themselves in the neo-liberalizing spaces of university education. In turn, these calculative practices are giving rise to new views of the university and altering the behaviours of staff and students. We draw attention not only to the constitutive power of calculative practices, but also to the political contestations that surround them. Our conclusion is that, because of these contestations, the spaces and subjectivities of the neo-liberalizing university are multiple and contradictory. The attempted reinvention of New Zealand universities will have varied effects and give rise to multiple political forms.
Many scholars question the purportedly international character of the most prestigious journals of geography, particularly those concerned with human geography. These, in their opinion, are dominated by British and American geography. The goal of this article is to assess the affiliation distribution of the authors of articles and the editorial boards of selected geographical publications and to compare the results with previous assessments of a similar kind. The analysis pertains to those geographical journals that received the highest impact rating from the Institute for Scientific Information. The results confirm those obtained by previous studies; over 70% of all articles published in highly respected geographical journals were written by authors representing British and American academic institutions. This trend carries over to the structure of the respective publications’ editorial boards and staff, also Anglo-American in their majority. It would appear, as is argued, that maintaining such a structure creates numerous threats to the development of a global discourse in the area of geography.
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The aim of this article is to research the extent to which ‘international journals’ of human geography are really international. The analysis is based on the affiliation data (work centre) of the authors of articles and of members of editorial boards of a group of international journals; the results so obtained are related to the impact factors of these journals. The indicators used show that human geography journals in general have still not attained a high degree of internationalization. This may be interpreted as a sign of fragmentation within the discipline: human geographers do not constitute a proper international scientific community or, rather, a global community that makes use of certain common media of expression (international journals) but are fragmented into national or regional (linguistic) communities.
In 1945, the United States was not only the strongest economic and military power in the world; it was also the world's leader in science and technology. In American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe, John Krige describes the efforts of influential figures in the United States to model postwar scientific practices and institutions in Western Europe on those in America. They mobilized political and financial support to promote not just America's scientific and technological agendas in Western Europe but its Cold War political and ideological agendas as well.Drawing on the work of diplomatic and cultural historians, Krige argues that this attempt at scientific dominance by the United States can be seen as a form of "consensual hegemony," involving the collaboration of influential local elites who shared American values. He uses this notion to analyze a series of case studies that describe how the U.S. administration, senior officers in the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the NATO Science Committee, and influential members of the scientific establishment--notably Isidor I. Rabi of Columbia University and Vannevar Bush of MIT--tried to Americanize scientific practices in such fields as physics, molecular biology, and operations research. He details U.S. support for institutions including CERN, the Niels Bohr Institute, the French CNRS and its laboratories at Gif near Paris, and the never-established "European MIT." Krige's study shows how consensual hegemony in science not only served the interests of postwar European reconstruction but became another way of maintaining American leadership and "making the world safe for democracy."
The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.1 (2002) 57-96
In December 1998 I had the good fortune to be one of the commentators in the workshop "Historical Capitalism, Coloniality of Power, and Transmodernity," featuring presentations by Immanuel Wallerstein, Anibal Quijano, and Enrique Dussel. Speakers were asked to offer updates and to elaborate on the concepts attributed to them. Reflecting on "transmodernity," Dussel made a remark that I take as a central point of my argument. According to Dussel, postmodern criticism of modernity is important and necessary, but it is not enough. The argument was developed by Dussel in his recent short but important dialogue with Gianni Vattimo's work, which he characterized as a "eurocentric critique of modernity." What else can there be, beyond a Eurocentric critique of modernity and Eurocentrism? Dussel has responded to this question with the concept of transmodernity, by which he means that modernity is not a strictly European but a planetary phenomenon, to which the "excluded barbarians" have contributed, although their contribution has not been acknowledged. Dussel's argument resembles, then, the South Asian Subaltern Studies project, although it has been made from the legacies of earlier colonialisms (Spanish and Portuguese). Transmodernity also implies—for Dussel—a "liberating reason" (razón liberadora) that is the guiding principle of his philosophy and ethic of liberation. The dialogues between Dussel and Wallerstein, between philosophy of liberation and world system analysis, and between philosophy of liberation and opening the social sciences, have two things in common. First, both are critical of capitalism, the neoliberal market, and formal democracy. Second, both (and Quijano as well) conceive of modernity as unfolding in the sixteenth century with capitalism and the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit. However, there is a break between Wallerstein, on one hand, and Dussel and Quijano, on the other: they stand at different ends of the colonial difference. To explain this intuition is the main thrust of this essay.
Dussel's remarks can also be applied to Wallerstein's conception of historical capitalism, in that it states that Historical Capitalism is a Eurocentric criticism of capitalism. By introducing the notion of colonial difference, I will be able to expand on Dussel's notion of transmodernity and Quijano's coloniality of power. I will be able also to compare the three in their approach to Eurocentrism and, toward the end of the article, to introduce Slavoj Zizek's own take on "Eurocentrism from the left." My first step, then, will be to distinguish two macronarratives, that of Western civilization and that of the modern world (from the early modern period [i.e., the European Renaissance] until today). The first is basically a philosophical narrative, whereas the second is basically the narrative of the social sciences. Both macronarratives have their positive and negative sides. While Western civilization is celebrated by some, its logocentrism is criticized by others. Similarly, modernity has its defenders as well as its critics. Dussel is located between the two macronarratives, but his criticism diverges from both the criticism internal to Western civilization and the critique internal to the modern world, as in world-system analysis. As a philosopher he is attuned to the first macronarrative, the macronarrative of Western civilization and its origins in ancient Greece. As a Latin American philosopher, he has been always attentive to the historical foundation of the modern/colonial world in the sixteenth century. He shares these interests with Wallerstein and Quijano, both of whom are sociologists. However, Quijano and Dussel share the Latin American colonial experience or, rather, a local history of the colonial difference. Wallerstein, instead, is immersed in the imperial difference that distinguishes the philosophical critique of Western civilization in Europe and the sociological critique of modernity in the United States. In essence, then, the geopolitics of knowledge is organized around the diversification, through history, of the colonial and the imperial differences. Let me specify further the distinctions I am introducing here.
The following argument is built on the assumption (which I cannot develop here) that the history of capitalism as told by Fernand Braudel, Wallerstein, and Giovanni Arrighi and the history of Western epistemology as it has been constructed since the European Renaissance run parallel to...
