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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Another result of Mr Wantchekon’s political past is a preference for empiricism over ideology. A trip to Albania ended his blind affection for socialism. His school is not part of efforts to “decolonise” the African academy. Any student of politics must read Rousseau and Madison, he argues. The aim is to add to the sum of human knowledge, not subtract from it. “Be angry but also be thoughtful,” he says.

This is something that should be impressed upon all the Americans who throw around the term “decolonization.” What would “decolonizing” say Bangladesh (where I am from) mean? Should we abandon the use of English? Dismantle our Supreme Court, an institution we inherited from the British? Dismantle our legal system built on British common law, or our constitution built on the American constitution and the Magna Carta? Abandon capitalism and free markets (which 80%+ of the population support because it has revolutionized the country)? Abandon western ideas like religious freedom, secularism, feminism, individualism, etc? What would we replace those things with?

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Have you had conversations with academics who are interested in decolonizing their fields? People are interested in decolonizing history aren't saying that we should throw away all study of european history. They are saying that we should add more voices. This has been a project for decades, with more voices of women and poc being represented in historical analysis.

Necessarily, this means reducing the amount of time spent on "traditional western civilization" in the classroom, since there is only so much time. But go check out a renaissance history course taught by a young faculty member. White men continue to dominate the discourse. We've just added some more voices alongside them.

Brazilian here. Around here, it usually means adding low quality voices to the discussion.

Although there are a few pushing for recognition of good local work, those few tends to be attacked from both sides of the discussion.

If your opinion is that female and poc voices are "low quality" then I don't know what to say...

This isn't adding voices for the sake of it. This is adding voices because those voices are an essential part of historical understanding and history suffers if you exclude them.

Bad authors are bad, and good authors are good whatever sex and skin color they have. Individual author qualities are much more relevant than the social context they are immersed; if somebody doesn't understand they society they are talking about, reading them is worthless, it doesn't matter if it has an incredibly different and interesting culture.

Around here there is plenty (but trending down) of pushing for authors on the basis that they are local, or non-white, or not male, or poor. There is also a lot (and trending up) of pushing for authors on the basis that they are from some "world-class" place/culture. Both approaches are classist/racist/sexist and plain stupid. Labels like "decolonizing" usually come from the first group, and anybody trying to judge local authors based on their own merits is quickly outed from that group with the argument that judging works done by such class/race/sex is classist/racist/sexist, so people using that label are almost never on the actually unprejudiced group.

Besides, forcefully changing authors based on prejudice has the double effect of teaching locals that they aren't expected to create high quality work and delegating competent locals to a life of obscurity, because if you can't judge their work, you can't discover that it's any good either.

But anyway, that says nothing about the subjects of study. It is always worthy to study the cultures that helped forming one's own.

> Bad authors are bad, and good authors are good whatever sex and skin color they have.

Again, "voices" not "authors".

And this is the whole point! People aren't elevating worthless voices for diversity sake. People are resolving a problem where valuable voices were excluded because of their identity. We are getting closer to a fair analysis, not further from it.

By "voices" you mean diversity on the subject being studied? If so, I completely agree.

Could you give an example?

The Renaissance happened in Europe. What non-white voices are you adding to that? The Turks?

There definitely was history happening in other places at that time, some of it very noteworthy, but it wasn't the Renaissance.

> The Renaissance happened in Europe. What non-white voices are you adding to that?

This is a perfect example. People respond to even basic expansion of viewpoints with incredulity.

First, I mentioned women. Gender analysis in mainstream history academia has developed a lot over the last 30 years. "There weren't any women" doesn't pass even a casual glance like "there weren't any poc" does for a renaissance course.

Second, although white voices are obviously the dominant voices of the renaissance, it is important to understand that cross-national communication networks existed during the early-modern era. The story of the introduction of coffee to europe is a classic one where analysis has traditionally focused on the europeans involved but this failed to consider that both sides of the trade were essential to the story. Since it is the renaissance, obviously art and architecture play a huge role. But art and architecture travel between nations and you can't tell the full story of european renaissance art without considering the turks (and others).

I was mostly picking on your example -- the Renaissance happened in Europe, and it was specifically a time when there was relatively little trade between Europe and the east -- a big part of the reason Columbus's journey was funded was to find a way to access eastern trade routes that they'd been cut off from by the Ottomans.

There were a whole bunch of interesting things happening around the world at this time, the peak of the Ming dynasty, ascendance of the Ottomans, the Malian Empire's displacement by Songhai.. they just aren't the Renaissance.

An actual "expansion of viewpoints" would be reading more world history. College-pamphletizing the renaissance is lazy and inaccurate.

The Renaissance lasted for hundreds of years. Communication with people outside europe was a nontrivial thing and excluding it (as has been done deliberately in the past) does history a disservice.

Like I said, this isn't a change for the sake of it. Professionals believe that these analysis methods produce better scholarship and pedagogy than the alternative.

Of course expanding the range of topics offered is a key element of this as well. Unfortunately, universities are truly awful at hiring people who are experts outside european or modern history. My grad school (I did a degree in CS but know a lot of historians) is arguably the strongest program in the country and has one person doing all of China forever. Academics have less flexibility here whereas somebody who is teaching classic "western civ" style courses can expand viewpoints to meet modern scholarship.

I can get on board with most of what you're saying here but I get the impression that a lot of people want to change history as part of a present-day political battle, rather than pursuing a better understanding of history.

Those same people often have a really shallow europe-centric historical understanding (the standard greece->rome->skip 1k years->renaissance->napoleon), so I don't trust them.

Like, Mansa Musa was the richest man on the planet at one point during the time period we're talking. Dude collapsed several economies on his pilgrimage to Mecca by giving away too much gold. Give me that, don't give me Morgan Freeman shoehorned into Robin Hood.

Where do you get that impression? Social media? Blog posts?

I know an unusual number of history academics and I've literally never seen anything other than "pursuing a better understanding of history". I have seen Sean Hannity (literally yes) call out an acquaintances' history class as "unamerican" on national television despite obviously not reading past the class title. This makes me immensely skeptical of people who worry about academia suffering due to injected ideological battles.

Go read some history manuscripts from the 50s if you want to see scholarship suffering due to ideology. Some analysis will be moving along nicely and just swerve hard into idiocy because the author was blinded by their own racism or sexism.

I find this to be an interesting broader problem. For whatever reason people seem to feel like they understand the state of modern humanities or social sciences academia even if they haven't interfaced with faculty but they don't tend to feel these same things about something like math or computer science. This leads to people forming really strong opinions about what it is like inside the ivory tower without actually talking to people.

If that is what you're saying, then I think it's supportable and also that "decolonization" is an unfortunate choice of terminology because it is loaded with connotation and non-neutrality. Language matters, and choosing non-alienating language makes it more inclusive to more participants (including western civ folks).

More rigor, better scholarship, incorporation of more diverse views are all things people can get behind. If the system is open to disputation, feedback, analysis, etc. while pursuing the widest possible range of views out there from under-represented voices, then great. I also want to add that this is also the default mode in academia especially at freer places like the University of Chicago.

If it means preventing disputation on the basis of a person's identity/affiliations, disavowing empiricism and heavily favoring narrative untethered to basic standards of evidence, inserting overt agenda into what ought to be neutral arms-length investigations, then I find myself opposing the approach in the strongest possible terms and will actively work to decenter and dismantle such efforts. This latter approach debases scholarship and amplifies poorly-defended ideas as the norm.

I've seen both approaches but in the academy right now, I see the latter approach being centered, to the detriment of the mission of academia.

> I also want to add that this is also the default mode in academia especially at freer places like the University of Chicago.

My wife is a historian. Her PhD is from arguably the best program in the country. It is not the case that administrations have this as a default option. Look at how hiring works in history departments. Americanists out the wazoo. In both hiring and tenure review, even the best programs still struggle to include analysis beyond traditional western civ style work.

> If it means preventing disputation on the basis of a person's identity/affiliations, disavowing empiricism and heavily favoring narrative untethered to basic standards of evidence, inserting overt agenda into what ought to be neutral arms-length investigations

It doesn't. And spending any amount of time around academics would make it really clear that these concerns are just BS peddled by people who make a living complaining about pinkos in the academy.

Hiring is a fair point. It is one of many factors that affect diversity of views in an institution, and the reasons behind a monoculture in a department are myriad. It is peripheral to the idea of "decolonization" as a methodology or technique though.

I don't think it's BS. I left academia 10 years ago (after a slightly more than a decade in it) but I still have enough connections to it to understand context. I've also studied history from a western civ perspective (academically, through courses at UChicago -- the "Great Books" approach is kind of its thing) and a non-western civ perspective (personally). So I bring those perspectives to the table when I say I support expansion of viewpoints.

At the same time, I have witnessed the sort of thing I mentioned in my 3rd paragraph above some 10 years ago, albeit in a more nascent state. To be fair, these actions are not prevalent among faculty (and it's not pinkos, but amorphous critical theorist types that defy easy categorization), but definitely increasing in prevalence among undergraduate and graduate students. It also depends on the department. This is why something like the Heterodox Academy [1], which is made up of mostly academics, even exists. Whatever misgivings one might have about it, that something like this exists and has a relatively robust membership speaks to a phenomenon that is not isolated.

I do accept your point that not all of academia is like that. I believe we can both be simultaneously correct, but about different facets of academia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_Academy

Without the math, science, and art imported from the rest of the world to Europe, there would have been no Renaissance. Understanding the rest of the world (Levant, India, Africa, China) during this period is key.

For example, during the Renaissance (200 years or so), the primary math textbook in elite European schools were direct translations of an Arabic math textbook brought and taught to Europe by the Moors (Muslim North & Sub-Saharan Africans).

Major historical works were inspired by their presence and contributions, like Shakespeare's Othello (based on 'In Capitano Moro' aka 'A Moorish Captain' which is a work derived from Arabic folktales).

In practice this usually turns into affirmative action for ideas, where marginal scholarship is promoted for no reason other than the color of the author. Is it too much to simply ask that ideas stand on their own and be judged on their own merits, divorced from the identity of the author? I do not think humanity will be better off going down this path. It seems like in a lot of cases just a cynical way to needlessly inject politics into some arena.

History isn't the study of secondary sources. Decolonizing history doesn't mean reading secondary sources written by poc historians. It means considering non cishet white men as primary sources.

Nobody is kicking Braudel off bookshelves.

Your final sentence is an oddly specific claim, but nonetheless, I must admit I was surprised how uniformly people seem to like Braudel. And yet,

https://twitter.com/aamandascottt/status/1266765438136049667 https://twitter.com/aamandascottt/status/1266768148063236097 https://twitter.com/aamandascottt/status/1257807522712432641 https://twitter.com/HinchyJessica/status/1164796620879220736 https://twitter.com/arjun_jayadev/status/959596380137447424

> Your final sentence is an oddly specific claim

Only among people unfamiliar with history. The Mediterranean is among the most famous works of all time and was written from memory while he was in a concentration camp. Historians love him, though his later work on economic history garners mixed opinions. He is the archetype of "famous white historian from the 1st half of the 20th century". His geographic history and macrohistory approach is no longer in vogue but that doesn't destroy the work.

One tweet suggests an alternative for undergrad work (not removing Braudel from the field). One is outright critical (though not incorrect - geographical determinism is a huge part of his work and it merits criticism). Your last tweet is lamenting that people don't know Braudel anymore... which is just whinging. Go look at a qualifying exam booklist for anybody working in a remotely adjacent field. It's there.

So across all of twitter we've got one historian with harsh words. Not exactly evidence that the field is throwing out great scholarship foolishly.

It really depends on which field, and who you ask.

The biggest problem is that a lot of the "decolonize" crowd intersects with post-modernists - and the latter, rather than providing more perspectives on facts, seek to push the idea that perspectives should replace facts (since facts are "not really a thing"). From there, it quickly descends into "mathematx" [1], "feminist glaciology" [2] etc.

[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7fe5/558eff8e24f1b3824df5c3...

[2] https://aquadoc.typepad.com/files/prog_hum_geogr-2016_.pdf

This is both an incredibly uncharitable representation of postmodernism and also using it as a whipping boy for no reason. Postmodernism is not the same thing as gender or racial analysis and it very much does not declare that facts are "not really a thing".

So you say it depends on who you ask. Who have you asked?

I didn't say it's the same thing. I said that they intersect a lot (in terms of people involved in both), and thus postmodernist rejection of positivism is widespread in those fields, which directly leads to bad science.

And yeah, it's not a charitable representation of postmodernism. That's because I don't have anything charitable to say about it - it's epistemological cancer, simple as that.

It's a plain false representation of postmodernism.

I'll ask again, who have you asked? Popular criticism of the ivory tower is filled with complete and utter misinformation.

> What would we replace those things with?

Religious freedom is also an Indian idea, not just a Western one. And Indians are also exporting new progressive ideas to the West, such as the animal rights activism struggle of India's cow protection movement.

Pretty sure PETA already has that covered pretty well.

Ah yes, the Hindu model of caring more about cows than untouchables. Definitely ideology worth emulating.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/08/13/4898834...

> Ah yes, the Hindu model of caring more about cows than untouchables.

Ah, yes, "the Hindu model". Meanwhile, plenty of high-status Westerners will happily donate and volunteer towards their local animal shelters, seemingly caring more about them than about Indian untouchables and other millions of people in extreme poverty, that they could donate to instead. Why do you assume it's only Hindus who sometimes push their charitable concerns too far?

Yes, "Hindu model".

Cows being sacred is a facet of Hinduism. It's not some general feeling of good-will towards cows / animals by Indian nationals. It is literally based on the idea that the cow represents one of the deities in the Hindu pantheon.

The caste system was (is?) inextricably linked with Hinduism.

There is a clear difference between literally valuing animals over people in a direct way (as shown in the article I linked) vs. putting effort to help animals and less into helping humans. The former is zero-sum, in that you are directly disadvantaging humans for the sake of animals. The latter is not, in that you can help both animals and the destitute. Volunteering at an animal shelter does not disadvantage others, even if holier-than-thou types would like to say that world hunger should be solved before helping animals. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Please do not take HN threads further into flamewar, especially not nationalistic or religious flamewar.

This comment breaks the site guidelines in many ways. For starters:

"Don't be snarky."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Escaping (neo)colonialism generally means focusing on domestic ownership of domestic infrastructure, labor, markets, and supply chains, and untangling oneself from debt traps like the IMF.

It's not some crazy, scary ideological idea, unlike what elite Western propagandists have been saying.

Just don't advocate it too strongly or you might get got by paid goons, like Sankara and many other victims of foreign-influenced regime change.

> untangling oneself from debt traps like the IMF.

If the IMF is involved with your country, you were in a debt trap already and they're working on untangling you from it. See e.g. Greece, which is now working on their debt problem after the late-2000s economic crisis. "Domestic ownership of supply chains" has also been a disaster historically, because it involves closing down your economy to foreign trade and restricting competitive dynamics: it's better to exploit global supply chains by specializing on the parts that you can be best on, and incrementally working your way up the value ladder.

Going from domestic ownership of domestic resources to total economic isolationism is a complete non-sequitor, and dangerous misinformation.

The IMF has been around for the better part of a century and has done exceedingly little to address global economic inequality. Maybe it has something to do with it being dominated by the representation of wealthy Western interests.

> Maybe it has something to do with it being dominated by the representation of wealthy Western interests.

The IMF has its biases and is far from perfectly equitable (and this was quite clear already in their response - or sometimes lack thereof - to the 1990s crises) but expecting it to single-handedly do enough to "address global economic inequality" is just not very fair.

Absolutely--my point is that the IMF is not generally interested in the economic welfare of poorer countries, and is abused as a tool for neocolonial interests. Their track record reflects that.

On the contrary, the global economy has become hugely more equal over that time. The past century has seen by far the greatest reduction of poverty in history, although that's not to say the IMF is the only one responsible for that.

Basic poverty/employment metrics and economic inequality are virtually uncorrelated, yet they get shouted from the rooftops by Western elite.

Human rights, socioeconomic liberties are far more complex than an easily manipulated number.

Increasing income of the poor by 100% means nothing if the rich simultaneously benefit from a 1000% increase. Which is largely the story of Western economics in the last century if not longer.

The poor who get to buy 100% more stuff would disagree with your theory that their good fortune means nothing.

Inflation.

The problem isn't one of not understanding comparative advantage. The relevant industry often is physical located within the country, likely due to cheap labor costs. The challenge is that this industry is likely has foreign ownership. The prevents the reinvestment of capital in moving up the value ladder. The strategies to cope with sometimes involve domestic protectionism (bad idea, for the reasons you outline); China's % foreign-ownership partnership idea (which probably doesn't scale down to smaller markets; and doubling down further in zones with economic growth, to encourage even more investment (both foreign and local).

That is not the sense in which “decolonization” is used by the gentleman quoted in the article (which is the sense in which social science uses the term).

This is a straw man with an easy answer: you've made up lots of things and called them "decolonization", but you've not actually asked what the people in the countries calling for decolonization want.

What do you think the list is then?

I believe their argument is that there is no coherent, practical position that can be described as decolonization in this modern sense. Both the dictionary and wikipedia only define decolonization in a conventional, imperial power withdrawing sense.

Are you aware of a clear, practical definition which a society or state could implement? And does it have no overlap with OP’s concerns.

Absent there being any clear definition of the concept I am not sure the onus is on OP to define it.

Here is a good paper by a Bangladeshi art historian: https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/haque....

> Decolonization, as we call it, is rather a modern phenomenon that has been bubbling up since the late twentieth century. There are calls for decolonizing everything, art history included.

> The concept of decolonization is twofold. First, it means the end of colonization—being independent politically and administratively... The more important aspect began after that point, that of countering the influences of colonization that remained in the society and culture.

> If that is so, looking for answers in past glory, or only rectifying the purity that was denounced or distorted by the imperialistic process, is not sustainable. We need to create new vocabularies and new understandings, but not running in only one direction, rejecting everything that is Eurocentric.

Then there is the question of: where do you stop decolonizing? Before the British there were the Mughals, who introduced much of the basic culture, food, etc. Before that the Sena, who introduced Islam. Before that, the Pala, who where Buddhists.)

Did you miss the part where the person you're replying to is from Bangladesh? I suspect that he knows better than most "what the people in the countries calling for decolonization want".

Because countries are monocultures, and all ex-colonies are identical?

Perhaps because his lived experience has given him relevant, if subjective, perspective? And because people tend to prioritize learning about things that have more direct relevance to their lives?

Why not look at decolonization as a step forward instead? Why not collect restitution from the colonial/imperial powers that have been extracting wealth from South Asia for centuries? Why not use natural resources for the local population?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00472336.2018.15...

https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/contemporary-bangladeshi-law...

“Decolonization” is, as the article observes, usually an attempt to eliminate the influence of western institutions, culture, and thought. That would be a huge step backward. It would be cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Restitution is a separate issue. I think it would be fair for the British to return wealth they expropriated, but I’m not holding my breath. More to the point: I wouldn’t trust anyone who advocates “decolonization” to do what’s the best thing for the country going forward. I’ll stick with the British colonial legacy rather than invite a new wave of intellectual colonization from western left-wing universities. If the developed world wants to destroy itself with those ideas, let that be their problem.

People I respect use the term decolonisation so I'm trying to keep an open mind about it, but I'm unclear what it means and suspect there may be a motte-and-bailey strategy at play around it.

Could you explain where the dividing line is between decolonisation and cultural segregationism?

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