Abstract
This article examines how the Moroccan historian and intellectual Abdallah Laroui (born in 1933) develops a critique of centrist modes of representing difference. I argue that Laroui himself is situated within hegemonic, hierarchical, and centrist practices of comparison that treat the difference between “Europe” on one hand and “Islam” and “Arab culture” on the other as foundational. Despite being situated in this context, the article argues that Laroui's practice of comparison can be read differently and may open the possibility of the unsettling of such centrist practices. Whereas centrist practices of comparison fixate the relationship between universal and the particular, Laroui points out that any comparative observation stages a historically situated account of the relationship between the particular and the universal. In this way, he reveals that the grounds of comparison are never as flat and homogeneous as centrist practices of comparison imply, and draws attention to the historical-epistemological and political conditions under which difference is relationally produced. Through studying Laroui's discussion of the logic of the concept of history and the concept of modernization in contemporary debates among Arab intellectuals, I analyze the conceptual form of Laroui's version of historicism (Arabic tārīkhāniyya, French historicisme) as a particular form of historicist Marxism. This historicist method challenges what I call centrist architectures of difference produced by centrist modes of representation. It leads Laroui to develop a critical method that I characterize as a situated universalism, steering between relativism and abstract universalism.
Highlights
A Critique of CentrismIn this article, I discuss how the works of the Moroccan historian and intellectual Abdallah Laroui provide a critique of the logic of centrism
I maintain that Laroui’s critique of the centrist mode of representing difference is predicated on his particular practice of comparison
I will analyze how Laroui reads different positions within Arab debates on modernization as practices of comparison that produce dissimilar accounts of difference based on their respective ways of historicizing and their particular accounts of the universal
Summary
A Critique of CentrismIn this article, I discuss how the works of the Moroccan historian and intellectual Abdallah Laroui (born in 1933) provide a critique of the logic of centrism. I aim to show that Laroui’s practice of comparison and his relational understanding of difference work against three major elements of centrist modes of representing difference: first, the representation of the relationship between the universal and the particular as stable; second, the temporal flattening of history; and, third, the securing of what appears as a transcendental ground for all possible histories.
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