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Quote by Abhijit Naskar

“Separatism is the hallmark of eurocentric thought, whether it's separation between the mortal and divine, or the separation between reason and theology, or between science and philosophy, or prose and poetry. Every single aspect of human consciousness touched by eurocentrism ends up divided and desecrated, losing its health-giving wholeness.”

Quote by Abhijit Naskar

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Sonnets From The Mountaintop

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Abhijit Naskar

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“9 Billion Shades of Brown (Black History Month Sonnet) Nothing is black and white in this world, everything is a shade of black, even white is just a pale shade of black, or we should say, brown - nothing is black, nothing is white, everything is a shade of brown, everyone is a shade of brown. Ethnicity is a commodity of fear, prejudice is a commodity of power - Mother Africa is the cradle of humanity, Global South is the cradle of civilization. Everything that white people have ever written consists of only 1 percent of the human condition, yet you confuse it as the entire human condition. There is no black history month, the entire human race calendar is black.”

“Outside the Gutters of West (Sonnet 2679) If you grew up with western media, you get brainwashed into asking, why are most terrorists muslim! But grow up and study actual history of the human race, then you start asking, why is every terrorist white! To look at Islam through western lens is like looking at the sky through a woodworm's eyes, the same is with Sindh, the same is with China, the same is with Africa, and Latin America. Objectivity is an impediment to understanding - if you yourself are not right smack in the middle of the experience, you have zero grasp of the truth, even if your head is full with facts and figures. But then again, this is not something a stubborn eurocentric mule can fathom, even to entertain the possibility that the prized imperial commodity of objectivity could be a fallacy, you have to have a decolonized mind.”

“Most white scholars eventually turn out to be just another colonial twit, no matter how brilliant, how learned they are, because animal conditioning doesn't wear off with mere education of the intellect - your soul must be disinfected of colonial filth, which is not possible until you intrinsically embody the pain, indignity, and humiliations of the oppressed, subjected through generations.”

“Modern history, both early and late, was made by Europeans, who "built a world around Europe", as historians "know", according to Braudel. That is indeed the "knowledge" of the European historians who themselves "invented" history and then put it to good use. There is not even an inkling of suspicion that it may have been the other way around, that maybe it was the world that made Europe.”

“Of course, this isn’t usually the way historians of ideas tell this story. Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.”

“Technology has become the West’s main prop to its claims of inherent superiority over the non-West, and the reason why the non-West should adopt Western culture. If advanced technology is particular to Western culture, then it is only by Westernizing that the non-West can obtain it. This argument collapses if Western technology can be adopted in isolation from the broader culture, or if other cultures can generate significant technology independently.”

“China failed to maintain its technological lead, and a similar failure throughout Asia to take advantage of the early exposure to that head start transformed precocity into a false dawn. Perversely, Asian improvements and adaptations of current (twentieth- to twenty-first-century) Western-developed technology are taken as further signs of lack of creativity.”

“It is a truism, easily forgotten, that the West, in its modern phase, has not stood still. Also easily forgotten is the fact that "the West" is a relative concept only. Without an "East" or a "non-West" to compare it with, it would quite simply not exist; there would be no word for it in our vocabulary. If the concept of the West did not exist, of course, the spatial variations within the geographical area now subsumed under "the West" would loom larger in our minds. The difference between France and America might seem just as great as those between China and the West.”