Amy Allen, “The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory” (Columbia UP, 2016)
New Books in Critical Theory
00:00
The Conceptual Challenge to Progress in the Post-Colonial Literature
I see two different kinds of challenges to the notion of progress one of which is more let's say conceptual and the other is more political. The worry is that absent some kind of super historical perspective or point of view from which we could look at different kind of historical epochs then the notion ofprogress really doesn't make any sense. So that's a kind of conceptual worry about progress that I think can be articulated independently of and has been articulated in the literature of post and decolonial theory. And so there the worry is that the notion of progression has this history, it does have this history of having been thoroughly implicated in an imperialist logic by means of which Europeans justified their colonizing mission
Play episode from 30:52
Transcript
