A brief overview.

1. Eurocentrism and the
European Novel – Talk by
Dr Koshy AV
9th October, Christ Nagar College, Maranalloor,
Trivandrum 10 am onwards.

2. Eurocentrism
as a semi-
definition 1
“Though it often incorporates
racial presumption, Eurocentrism
should not be confused and
equated with racism. “

3. From Eurocentrism and Orientalism by ILIA
XYPOLIA.
• “Though the term was used by various postcolonial scholars in the
1960s, it was not until 1988 and the publication of Eurocentrism, a
major work by the prominent neo-Marxist economist Samir Amin,
that the first scholarly attempt was made to provide a comprehensive
account of the notion and conceptualize the term. Amin (1988)
examines Eurocentrism as capitalism's ideological construct by
exploring the historical and social context and conditions in which it
emerged. He considers Eurocentrism to be an ideological distortion
and thus describes it as a worldview fabricated by the domination of
Western capitalism that claims European culture reflects the unique
and most progressive manifestation of the metaphysical order of
history (Amin 2009).”

4. Jean Baudrillard:
• “To see and feel America, you have to have had for at least one
moment in some downtown jungle, in the Painted Desert, or on
some bend in a freeway, the feeling that Europe had
disappeared. You have to have wondered, at least for a brief
moment, “How can anyone be European?”
• Utopia Achieved: “How Can Anyone Be European?”
• International Journal of Baudrillard Studies
• ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 3, Number 2 (July 2006)
Author: Jean Baudrillard
Translated by: Chris Turner

5. Baudrillard 2
• Baudrillard presumes two things. One, that we have been to America and
two that we have been to Europe, as ‘disappearance’ makes sense only of
something already seen before.
• This is, to put it ‘reductionistically’, what we mean by Eurocentrism. The
most radical of thinkers cannot escape its influence if coming from Europe
(France), especially, as even as he decentres Europe he cannot think of the
Orient except in absentia or as other (with a small O), meaning of people
like me who do not know what he is talking of, his centre and/or ‘Other,’
(America), by virtue of not having been to both these places physically and
only through the symbolic and the imaginary, and who also realise that a
book written by a thinker like me coming from the East who wrote of, say,
Asia as the centre, and perhaps, Africa as its “Other” or South America,
would be incomprehensible to him and many of his readers, despite his
post-modernism.

6. The filter
• The filter that works here is that 1. one is situated in a position of
desire whereby we feel we need to go to these places to understand
these texts as it is somehow privileged to understand them more and
to go ‘there’, to do so.
• 2. It is somehow less privileged to not be able to, and instead to ask
those there to come ‘here’ and compare here with some other place
they have not been to, positioning these two ‘new’ places as
desirable as the real, symbolic and imaginary, privileging them above
the earlier two, namely, Europe and America.

7. The European novel and Miguel Cervantes
• In Don Quixote’s mind, the comparison is
between the past of Europe and its
present. Romanticism is yielding to
modernity/Modernism and Quixotic means
here that the attempt to turn the wheel
‘back’ is comic.

8. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• “—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.
How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and
on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit.
His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an
acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice
holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.”

9. Andre Gide and the Immoralist
• Gide was a Nobel Prize winner.
• Gide, albeit in translation, was my style model as a writer.
• He wrote in French and I read the English translation.
• His most famous novel was the Counterfeiters.
• He had a strict Protestant upbringing which he rebelled against being
influenced by Nietzsche and people like Oscar Wilde.
• His travels persuaded him against colonialism and imperialism and he
became a staunch devotee of individual freedom, and social,
economic and political liberty. But his novel disturbs me deeply.

10. William Golding and the Lord of the Flies
• Piggy whom we sympathize with turns out to use racist metaphors to
explain what is wrong with Jack and his followers.

11. Tennyson and “Ulysses.”
• The deconstructive paradigm of on the one hand writing a beautiful
poem about how Ulysses remains a hero which is at the same time a
frightening critique of the ‘alien’ cultures like that of India, indirectly.

12. Charles Dickens and “Hard Times.”
• Where in a beautiful novel the most touching scene of the father
whose son has gone astray making him realize that he, the father, is
to blame is marred by implicit, perhaps, unitended racism.
• “Comic blackamoor.”

13. A video
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjxAArOkoA0 – a must watch
• To bring it up to date. European Union, eurozone, Capitalism, Western
powers, Islam, radical Islam, Assange, Snowden, Balkanization, the
death of communism, democracy, TTIP, (the triangle) neo-Christianity
that is an answer to Islam, refugees, terrorism, economic collapse,
high tech liberalism, Africa, South Africa, China, Shia, Sunni, IS, Al
Quaeda, Zizek etc.

14. A Select bibliography apart from the 5 works.
• EurocentrismandOrientalism_TheEncyclopediaofPostcolonialStudies_
Wiley-BlackwellEncyclopediaofLiterature.pdf
• Amin, Samir. 1988. L'Eurocentrisme: Critique d'une idéologie. Paris:
Anthropos-Economica.
• Amin, Samir. 2009. Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion, and
Democracy. New York: Monthly Review Press. Dussel, Enrique. 2000.
• “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism: The Semantic Slippage of the
Concept of Europe.” Nepatla: Views from South