Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Abhijit Naskar

Quote by Abhijit Naskar

“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.”

Quote by Abhijit Naskar

Book:With Love From A Blue Rock
Create image

Work

With Love From A Blue Rock

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Abhijit Naskar

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Abhijit Naskar. more

You May Also Like

“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.”

PhilosophyColonialismDecolonizationEurocentrismWhitewashDecolonizingWestern ImperialismDecolonialEurocentric Education
Book:With Love From A Blue Rock
Create image

“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.”

WorldHistoryEuropeEurocentrismHistoriansEuropeansFernand Braudel
Book:ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age
Create image

“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.”

EnlightenmentEurocentrism
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Create image

“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.”

HistoryTechnologyEuropeAsiaEurocentrismHistoriography
Book:The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
Create image

“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.”

HistoryTechnologyEuropeChinaAsiaEurocentrismHistoriography
Book:The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
Create image

“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.”

HistoryEuropeChinaAsiaEurocentrismHistoriographyThe West
Book:Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
Create image

“Racial categories were invented to enshrine the idea of white supremacy. They are the product of Eurocentrism and colonialism. To act in ways that reinforce their fixedness rather than undermine them is to continue to operate in the terrain mapped out by white supremacy.”

RaceRacismColonialismWhite SupremacyAntiracismEurocentrism
Book:What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – An Empowering Guide to Interrogating Whiteness and Creating Justice
Create image