Diversity Reading List

Comment: This paper can be used in a class on animal ethics / rights. It argues that rituals involving harm or cruelty to animals are not justifiable. The paper can be used in a discussion on animal rights issues and multi-culturalism.

Comment: This paper can be used in a course on animal research ethics.

Comment: This is a long blog post originally published in an online forum on philosophy in the Global Majority organised by the Miami Institute of Social Sciences. It defends a place for thinking and teaching the Western philosophical canon in postcolonial educational spaces such as India, bringing together both recent discussions of decolonising philosophy in the West, as well as older discussions within India about the place of the Western canon. It concludes with a debate on these themes between Mahatma Gandhi and the poet Rabindranath Tagore. I wrote it as a reflection on my own pedagogical practice teaching philosophy in India, but it has also been used in a course on Indian philosophy taught at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. I think it would be a useful counterpoint to think with while talking about the importance of diversity in philosophy -- among other things because it points out that even the question of what constitutes 'diversity' might vary from place to place; and in that sense it might be seen as an instance of philosophical diversity in action. This is a long blog post originally published in an online forum on philosophy in the Global Majority organised by the Miami Institute of Social Sciences. It defends a place for thinking and teaching the Western philosophical canon in postcolonial educational spaces such as India, bringing together both recent discussions of decolonising philosophy in the West, as well as older discussions within India about the place of the Western canon. It concludes with a debate on these themes between Mahatma Gandhi and the poet Rabindranath Tagore. I wrote it as a reflection on my own pedagogical practice teaching philosophy in India, but it has also been used in a course on Indian philosophy taught at the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. I think it would be a useful counterpoint to think with while talking about the importance of diversity in philosophy -- among other things because it points out that even the question of what constitutes 'diversity' might vary from place to place; and in that sense it might be seen as an instance of philosophical diversity in action.

Comment (from this Blueprint): This is a brilliant introductory essay to the problem of casteism which plagues not only Indian societies in India, but also the diaspora abroad. The essay provides a nuanced perspective of how we must understand caste (both in its concept and its practice), introduces us to the 20th century debates which were ongoing alongside the freedom struggle against the Raj, and links the caste debate to the debates around it in contemporary British politics. It is a novel attempt to unearth the philosophical underpinnings of the movement against caste oppression. The timing of the essay seems apposite, given the current political situation in India and its impact in the politics of the countries where Indians constitute a sizeable population.

Comment (from this Blueprint): The book is a prescription for feminist praxis in lands and cultures which have histories different from that of the vanguards of the (‘Western’) world. It challenges both the ‘progressive’ ideals of the Enlightenment, which (according to the author) are ethnocentric in many ways, and their universalizing tendencies. It recognizes, and is apprehensive of, the fact that Enlightenment values operate as background assumptions in the works of many Northern and Western feminists, all the more when they are concerned with advancing women’s rights in ‘other’ cultures. The author rejects such tendencies and proposes a different approach to the understanding of normativity and universalism.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Chen Kuan-hsing’s book Asia as Method theorises what deimperialization efforts might look like, in order to begin imagining new possibilities and new futures that have been foreclosed by the entanglement of imperialization, colonisation, and the cold war in the Asian context. In this chapter, Chen puts forward his idea of “Asia as method”, which he sees as being able to “move forward on the tripartite problematic of decolonisation, deimperialization, and de-cold war” (p.212) by pushing back against the universalism of Western ideas. Thus, Chen suggests the need for “shifting [the] points of reference toward Asia”, thereby enabling Asian societies to learn from each other when faced with similar problems rather than engage in a dialogue mediated through Western theories and forms of knowledge production.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican novelist, playwright, and academic who draws on a huge breadth of academic literature, including amongst others anthropology, critical race theory, postcolonialism, and feminism, in her prolific academic writings that cover an equally diverse set of themes. One important strand of her work involves “unsettling” what she sees as the dominant (Western/European) understanding of “Man”, which she argues is responsible for enabling the brutal and harrowing treatment of non-whites by the European colonisers. Indeed, one of the goals of Wynter’s project is to theorise a new kind of humanism that does not collapse into violence and exclusion, as the current dominant Western paradigm has, but rather one that is truly “comprehensive and planetary” (p.121) in scope. The reading for this week is a long-form interview Wynter did with David Scott, the editor of Small Axe, and covers a huge breadth of her work. The preface of the interview offers a helpful contextualisation of Wynter’s work, while the section we will be reading offers an overview into Wynter’s thinking about the ways in which humanist discourse has functioned to exclude non-whites.

Comment (from this Blueprint): This book is a watershed in Indian history, labour theory and postcolonial theory. Chakrabarty begins by accepting the idea that history has already provincialized Europe. However, time and again we find the author acknowledging that the categories and ideals that European thought and the Enlightenment produced are both indispensable and at the same time inadequate to understand the modern political relations of non-European, ex-colonial lands. On the one hand, the familiar theories we use to understand the lives of the proletariat or bourgeois political relations were inadequate to explain their postcolonial existence in Bengal and India. Yet, on the other, these frameworks are simultaneously indispensable for theories about the proletariat in postcolonial Bengal to be accepted as knowledge. A quest, therefore, ensued to interpret the lives of the working class and bourgeoisie political relations in parts of the world that did not replicate the historical transition of Europe. This book challenges the monolithic understanding of historical progression and attempts to follow a different historiography (using Marxist insights) to understand political modernity in places with different histories.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Kwasi Wiredu’s Philosophy and an African Culture grapples with the relationship between African philosophy and African traditional folk thought in order to carve out a distinctive role for African philosophers in the present day. In the chapters for this week, Wiredu is contributing to a debate in African philosophy that seeks to answer the question: “What is African Philosophy?”. Wiredu takes issue with Europeans elevating the traditional folk beliefs of Africans to the status of philosophy, which historically has been used to justify and legitimise the racist belief in the inferiority of black Africans. Instead, Wiredu suggests that the absence of a written tradition of philosophy means that African philosophy can only exist in the present. Thus, it is up to contemporary African philosophersto create a ‘new’ tradition with distinctive insights for the problems faced by African societies.

Comment (from this Blueprint): Orientalism is a classic text in postcolonial theory which successfully brought out the politics of ‘othering’. It shows how the ‘Orient’ was constructed by delineating it from the supposedly morally, culturally and politically advanced (and superior) ‘Occident’. The book is not so much about the East as much as it is about how the Orient was ‘produced’ by the imperial masters of Europe and America and perceived as the ‘other’ to the rest of the ‘civilized’ world. The author traces and examines various literary and political sources which originated and perpetuated Orientalism. The abstract gives an overview of the argument and introduces the reader to the rest of the book.