Toward Theoretical Liberation: Challenging the Intellectual Imperialism of the Western Race Paradigm

Donald A Clelland,Wilma A Dunaway

doi:10.1163/24714607-bja10042

Donald A Clelland, Wilma A Dunaway

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1163/24714607-bja10042

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Abstract

Abstract We hope to encourage the development of decentered, decolonized, ground-breaking theory about ethnic and racial exploitation in the 21st century world-system. To accomplish that, we contend that academics and activists need to liberate themselves from the historical and ideological confines of the western race paradigm. Consequently, we have shaped this essay around that goal. In Section 2, we explore the dangers of universalizing the western race paradigm to the entire world. Section 3 investigates 21st century trends that challenge the western race paradigm, with particular focus on the significance of semiperipheries, transnational capitalist classes and nonwestern states. In Section 4, we argue that western race theory dominates scholarship globally through strategies of intellectual imperialism that need to be acknowledged, dismantled and overcome. In the Conclusion, we offer strategies for decentering and decolonizing knowledge production.

Highlights

Since the late 1990s, western scholars and activists have “steamrollered historical, social and geographical differences into a single discourse” (Malik, 2000: 158) to conceptualize the modern world-system as a “troubled relationship between the white European world and the world of those defined by whites as the ‘dark others’” (Vera and Feagin, 2007: 1)
There is a growing body of western and nonwestern critical thinking and about theoretical shortcomings of the concepts of race and racialization and about universalization of the western race paradigm
The western race paradigm is a product of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller, 2003; Chernilo, 2011), but it has been mythologized to be methodologically cosmopolitan (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999; Goldberg, 2005)

Summary

Introduction

Since the late 1990s, western scholars and activists have “steamrollered historical, social and geographical differences into a single discourse” (Malik, 2000: 158) to conceptualize the modern world-system as a “troubled relationship between the white European world and the world of those defined by whites as the ‘dark others’” (Vera and Feagin, 2007: 1). Many of the actors who codify and structure themselves into superior racial/ethnic positions and use military force to exploit and repress ethnic minorities are nonwestern state elites (Fanon, 1965; Rodney, 1973; Goldberg, 2001) who are arbitrarily defined to be oppressed victims by the western race paradigm. Ethnic and indigenous minorities are aggregated into a commodity-producing work force that is situated in semiproletarianized households that subsidize capitalism through unpaid or underpaid labors (Dunaway, 2001) Through their capitalist development projects, state elites incorporate (more often than not, forcibly) ethnic and indigenous communities into these global dark value chains in order to extract from them lowpaid labors and/or ecological resources and to externalize to them costs and risks associated with export production, like ecological degradation and new health dangers (Clelland, 2013, 2014, 2015)

The Missing World Majority

Why Are the World-Economy and the Transnational Capitalist Classes Ignored?

Findings

Conclusion