scholarly journals Orientalisms and Occidentalisms: Evolution of Concepts and Divergence of Connotations

2020 ◽  
pp. 30-45
Author(s):  
Ingrīda Kleinhofa ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Science And Politics

During the most part of its long history, the term ‘Orientalism’ has had several interrelated meanings with neutral or positive connotations, some of which are still preserved, for instance, in art, architecture, design, and music, where it refers to Oriental influences and works inspired by Oriental themes and sounds rather attractive and romantic. As an academic term, it was used to denote the European tradition of Asian studies, suggesting a thorough exploration of Eastern cultural heritage, in particular, languages, literature, and artifacts. After the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, the term gained new negative meanings, related to postcolonial theory where it denotes mainly the biased, haughty attitude of the West towards an essentialized East and manifestations of Western colonial discourse in literature, science, and politics, such as the justification of Western imperialism, colonialism, and racial discrimination. The redefinition of the term by postcolonial theorists raised a debate about the about the so-called Western approach to history, sociology, and Asian studies as well as about the permissibility of division of the world into binary opposites, “the Orient” and “the Occident”. By the end of the 20th century, the term ‘Orientalism’ was adapted for the use by anthropologists, and its counterpart, ‘Occidentalism’ emerged, referring to the essentialized, dehumanized image of the West created by non-Western societies. Currently, most of the mentioned meanings have survived, each to some extent, and interfere in various fields of knowledge, creating complex sets of contradictory connotations.

scholarly journals THE EASTERN PHILOSOPHER AND THE WESTERNIZED PROPHET

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2 (24)) ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Vicky Tchaparian
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Gospel Of Matthew ◽  
Golden Rule ◽  
Ethical Principle ◽  
The West ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Unique Structure ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Sense

Gibran Khalil Gibran is one of the few Lebanese authors who has bridged the East and the West and is justifiably considered a citizen of the world. His book of highly estimated prose poems, The Prophet is one of the most widely read books of the 20th century. It reveals Gibran’s philosophy about different aspects of life, mainly the precept in the Gospel of Matthew about the importance of the human sense of mutuality which summarizes a Christian’s duty towards his/her neighbor and states a fundamental ethical principle. In addition to this golden rule, The Prophet reflects Gibran’s beliefs in Christianity. Being a true mirror of the Sufi mysticism of Islam, it also shows his idealistic opinion on pantheism. From this perspective, the research will focus on the combination of his beliefs in Christianity, Islam, and pantheism in The Prophet, as well as his firm conviction in creating the united and unique structure of a Christian-Muslim synthesis which he deeply adhered to.

East-West/North-South – or Imperial-Subimperial? The BRICS, Global Governance and Capital Accumulation

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Bond
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Dependency Theory ◽  
The West ◽  
Accumulation By Dispossession ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
World Environment ◽  
East West

Two leading critics of imperialism — John Smith and David Harvey — have engaged in a bitter dispute over how to interpret geographically-shifting processes of super-exploitation and power. Missing, though, is consideration of ‘subimperialism,’ a category drawn from Ruy Mauro Marini's 1960s-70s dependency theory, with its focus on Brazil's relationship with the West: a fusion of imperial and semi-peripheral agendas of power and accumulation with internal processes of super-exploitation. The risk is that by splitting hairs on geographically-generalized categories, Smith and Harvey obscure crucial features of their joint wrath, which is the unjust accumulation processes and geopolitics that enrich the wealthy and despoil the world environment. The concept of subimperialism can resolve some of the Smith-Harvey disputes, but only if read through Marini and Harvey in a more generous way than does Smith. One of the best examples of the phenomenon is the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc, which for a decade from 2009–18 has increasingly asserted an ‘alternative’ strategy to key features of Western imperialism, while in reality fitting tightly within it. This fit works through amplified neoliberal multilateralism serving both the BRICS and the West, the regional displacement of overaccumulated capital, financialization, and persistent super-exploitative social relations: the spatio-temporal fixes and accumulation by dispossession that amplify global crisis tendencies.

scholarly journals The Cul-de-Sac of Postcolonial Theory: Negotiation or Negation?

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (Winter) ◽  
pp. 168-181
Author(s):  
Shereen Abuelnaga
Keyword(s):  
Contact Zone ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
The West ◽  
Immigrants And Refugees ◽  
Cultural Negotiation ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status

The escalating wave of migration and its discontents that the world is witnessing now challenges some aspects that form the backbone of postcolonial theory through revealing the inefficiency and invalidity of all the previous givens. Policed borders render the concept of hybridity and the horizon invalid. The attempt at eluding the politics of polarity could not survive the discursive and physical practices of several dislocated localities. Consequently, the “contact zone” that has always been the pride of the West, upon the assumption of hybridity, is shrinking now, if not fading. What should have been cultural negotiation came down to be cultural negation. This paper reads the status of the women asylum seekers who are locked in Yarl’s Wood Center in the U.K. as an example of the stark violations practiced against immigrants and refugees in general, and in the case of women, as an example of turning the female body into an arena onto which conflicting power relations are inscribed. However, the main goal of this reading is to prove the failure of postcolonial theory to cope with the fierce return of borders, material and symbolic. To do this, the paper assumes that the life stories of the women stand as a text/narrative that yields itself to analysis.

scholarly journals The World Order Crisis and the Threats for Russia and the World

2013 ◽  
pp. 70-75
Author(s):  
D. B. Ryurikov
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Actual World ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Global Finance ◽  
The West ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
The World

Crises in global finance and economy, the threat of wars and tension in world relations, the degradation of the non-material bases of civilization, i.e. morality, law, politics, and culture, do not bother a group of influential financial and political figures of the West : they believe that after a sequence of crises and wars, a "new world order", the NWO, will be established. Projected globally once by the "hard", once by the "soft" power, the ideology and practice of the NWO negates the foundations of civilization gained by ordeals and sufferings of mankind, and means the departure from the principles and norms of the actual world order valid until the end of the 20th century. Essentially, the NWO is an anticivilizacion. If the project is allowed to be implemented, the lives of humans will change beyond recognition. Thus, the key challenge of our time : do not let the project to be realized, consolidate the forces opposing the NWO.

Postcolonial Theory

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
J Daniel Elam
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
The Way

Postcolonial theory is a body of thought primarily concerned with accounting for the political, aesthetic, economic, historical, and social impact of European colonial rule around the world in the 18th through the 20th century. Postcolonial theory takes many different shapes and interventions, but all share a fundamental claim: that the world we inhabit is impossible to understand except in relationship to the history of imperialism and colonial rule. This means that it is impossible to conceive of “European philosophy,” “European literature,” or “European history” as existing in the absence of Europe’s colonial encounters and oppression around the world. It also suggests that colonized world stands at the forgotten center of global modernity. The prefix “post” of “postcolonial theory” has been rigorously debated, but it has never implied that colonialism has ended; indeed, much of postcolonial theory is concerned with the lingering forms of colonial authority after the formal end of Empire. Other forms of postcolonial theory are openly endeavoring to imagine a world after colonialism, but one which has yet to come into existence. Postcolonial theory emerged in the US and UK academies in the 1980s as part of a larger wave of new and politicized fields of humanistic inquiry, most notably feminism and critical race theory. As it is generally constituted, postcolonial theory emerges from and is deeply indebted to anticolonial thought from South Asia and Africa in the first half of the 20th century. In the US and UK academies, this has historically meant that its focus has been these regions, often at the expense of theory emerging from Latin and South America. Over the course of the past thirty years, it has remained simultaneously tethered to the fact of colonial rule in the first half of the 20th century and committed to politics and justice in the contemporary moment. This has meant that it has taken multiple forms: it has been concerned with forms of political and aesthetic representation; it has been committed to accounting for globalization and global modernity; it has been invested in reimagining politics and ethics from underneath imperial power, an effort that remains committed to those who continue to suffer its effects; and it has been interested in perpetually discovering and theorizing new forms of human injustice, from environmentalism to human rights. Postcolonial theory has influenced the way we read texts, the way we understand national and transnational histories, and the way we understand the political implications of our own knowledge as scholars. Despite frequent critiques from outside the field (as well as from within it), postcolonial theory remains one of the key forms of critical humanistic interrogation in both academia and in the world.

scholarly journals The Philosophy of Davos

Philosophy ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-308
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
World Order ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Global Integration ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Imperialism

Though written several years earlier, Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has had quite a vogue since September 11th. Philosophers of history, however, will recognize its themes as a re-hash, albeit a timely re-hash, of the eighteenth century dispute between the universalism and optimism of the enlightenment and the cultural relativism and pessimism of Herder.Instead of Voltaire and Diderot in the eighteenth century, in 2002 we have what Huntington calls Davos people, after the annual World Economic Forum meeting in that place. Those who go to Davos include many of the top businessmen, bankers, government officials and opinion formers in the world. They and their kind control most international institutions, most of the world's finances and many governments. They believe in individualism, market economies and political democracy.There is nothing wrong with these beliefs or with holding them. Problems arise when, in enlightenment fashion, Davos people think of these beliefs not just as universal in content but as universally believed in. For though Davos people control much of the world and form political elites in many countries inside and outside the West, outside the West they and their ideas find favour with probably less than one per cent of the world's population. As Huntington puts it this provokes a typically Herderian reaction: ‘The non-Wests see as Western what the West sees as universal. What Westerners herald as benign global integration, such as the proliferation of worldwide media, non-Westerners denounce as nefarious Western imperialism. To the extent that non-Westerners see the world as one, they see it as a threat.’And not only non-Westerners. Much of the success of so-called far right and nationalist movements in Western Europe is undoubtedly due to a Herderian reaction within the West to globalization and federalism, and much of the anger implicit in that reaction is stoked by the complacency of the Davos people.There is indeed nothing wrong with Davos beliefs in themselves, at least nothing that would convict those who hold them of any nefarious or sinister motives. Nor is there anything wrong with the more general enlightenment belief in a universal human nature and a universal standard of morality. The difficulty is to hold this and cognate beliefs, while recognizing that they may not be universally shared, and understanding and even respecting the sensibilities of those who might not share them. In the minds of those who disagree, failure on this point will transform what is supposed to be a liberating faith in universal human rights into an instrument of oppression. But how can one respect what one believes is wrong and even harmful, while not acceding to the very relativism one's commitment to universal truth would strenuously contest—and for the best of philosophical reasons?We are no nearer to solving this problem on a philosophical level than were our predecessors two hundred years ago. But if Huntington and other observers of the world scene are right, its solution is more urgent now than it has ever been.

Althusser and Structuralism in Communication Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew S. May ◽  
Kate Siegfried
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Back Door ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
The Way

Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) is widely recognized as one of the most significant and influential Marxist philosophers associated with the structuralist turn in the middle of the 20th century. The ongoing publication of scholarly monographs that develop his conceptual legacy, the depth of his impact in disciplinary debates in fields across the humanities and social sciences, and the continued translation of his work from French into multiple languages, to offer only a few examples, testify to the consensus regarding the enduring importance of his theoretical innovations and often controversial interventions. He devoted tremendous intellectual energy toward a critique of humanism and phenomenological-based Marxism even as he eschewed traditional positivist economic explanations of history and exploitation—engaging in what amounts to nothing less than an effort to fundamentally shift the way the West reads and interprets Marx. Despite the controversial aspects of his interventions, there is little disagreement that the concepts produced by Althusser irreversibly affected and continue to affect the trajectory of Marxist and post-Marxist thought throughout the world, albeit often through the back door, smuggled in and unrecognized—in his lexicon: as an embedded but nevertheless absent cause.

The Future of the World. The World Futures Studies Federation and the Future as Counter Expertise

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
World Order ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
Peace Activist ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 8 explores the making of futures studies as a counter reaction to futurology and protest against the Cold War world order. Taking as its focus the World Futures Studies Federation, created by the West German journalist and peace activist Robert Jungk and the philosopher and international relations theorist Johan Galtung, the chapter returns to futurism as an interrogation into the nature of humanity, and to the future as a fundamental utopian category. Futures studies were an example of a kind of neo-utopianism, which not only claimed that alternative worlds were possible but also tried to construct new ways of envisioning and realizing such worlds. Futures studies were constructed as a kind of militancy that straddled the boundaries of social science and politics, and mixed in religious and eschatological notions too. Crucial to this enterprise was the willingness to transcend the Cold War world order and create a united Mankind.

scholarly journals The World of Wars: Risky Systems – A second-order observation of future wars

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gorm Harste
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Second Order ◽  
The West ◽  
Worst Case ◽  
Path Dependencies ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future War ◽  
The Many

The world of the future will not be one without wars. The many hopes we have about a future peace governed by a more or less confederal state will not make wars obsolete. Regular wars and irregular wars will continue and probably on different subjects than we are used to. The article proposes that the form of war will be more about temporalities, i.e. fast interchanges or, rather, more risky protracted wars of attrition and exhaustion and less on tactical well defined territories. The West can neither dominate such wars nor establish one world that is ruled or even governed. The risk is that we have the systems we have. They have their own path dependencies, their temporal bindings and their own stories to tell. In the worst case, the West sticks to an imaginary of almighty power – and then it will lose. We tend to forget that our present past will be experienced and told differently in the future. The “extreme 20th century” will have another history and another impact. Its extremes will be narrated as more extreme, and its temporal bindings become easier to observe. The much celebrated “revolutions in military affairs” will not dominate future war systems. Unipolarity is fading away. Kantian convergences may appear.

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