In order to prevent and to encourage philosophizing

Notes on institutional racialization, colonization and decolonization

Abstract

Since tertiary philosophy institutions are concerned with traditions of thought and educate people who benefit from and are affected by the racial contract, it seems appropriate to assume that when colonial or dependent modernization policies structure the discipline of philosophy in universities, knowledge is legitimized and valued by asymmetrical relations that reaffirms and rearranges inequalities. This paper investigates the establishment of modes of valuing and devaluing types of thinking, implicating in possibilities and impossibilities of doing philosophy in institutions of knowledge. The analysis developed aims to demonstrate that the dispositions to make it possible to do philosophy in European territories and in a historicity in accord with modernity produce expectations of success and divisions of intellectual work and the dispositions to make it impossible to do philosophy outside the West or in a historicity in disaccord with modernity promise failure and the suppression of theoretical creation. In concrete terms, this means that educational practices under racialization and colonization preserve well-known economic geopolitics: Theory, as high value-added thought, must be imported from the center. In line with this order, if nothing changes, universities will continue hiring specialists in authors like Rousseau and reject potential thinkers like Fanon to teach political philosophy.