Amy Allen, “The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory” (Columbia UP, 2016)
New Books in Critical Theory
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The Challenge of Progress in Post-Colonial Theory
European modernity is represented as a progressive historical development in relation to other kinds of socio cultural forms. There's ideological kind of aspect of that the way in which this particular concept of progress or idea of progress is bound up with a problematic legacy of colonialism and a kind of imperialist logic. Europe itself was built on the expropriation of resources from the colonies so that there's no way really to even think about Europe as a material entity without also thinking about how that material entity was formed through colonialism, made possible through colonialism.
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