Culture and Eurocentrism

A postcolonialist reading of the deployment of the concept of culture in literature, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies. It argues that modernity as understood in the Anglo-US episteme is structured around eurocentrism.

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The conviction that we all have, possess or inhabit a discrete culture, and have done so for centuries, is one of the more dominant default assumptions of our contemporary politico-intellectual moment. However, the concept of culture as a signifier of subjectivity only entered the modern Anglo-U.S. episteme in the late nineteenth century. Culture and Eurocentrism seeks to account for the term’s relatively recent emergence and movement through the episteme, networked with many other concepts – nature, race, society, imagination, savage, and civilization– at the confluence of several disciplines. Culture, it contends, doesn’t describe difference but produces it, hierarchically. In so doing, it seeks to recharge postcoloniality, the critique of eurocentrism.