Are Soas students right to ‘decolonise’ their minds from western philosophers?

>Why is this being spun as outrageous anti-white or SJW demands?

Because there are stupid right-wingers

Enlightenment philosophy is genuinely beyond terrible, so really anything is an improvement.

Oh boy, here's an idea:

Teach multiple courses on BOTH because you're a fucking university in Britain, and even a university in a non-colonized country like Japan will teach European philosophy.

Why are you writing as if this is a proposal to get rid of all European philosophy from SOAS courses?

The proposal will lead to that.

Do you really need to ask the obvious?

Here an idea, if blacks and muslims think that they are being discriminated against they can go back to the shithole that they came from.

>is the Guardian spinning things in a right-wing direction?
Yes. Seems unusual tbph

...

>>The School of Oriental and African Studies was founded in 1916 “to secure the running of the British Empire”

So why is it still around? Unless the Brits are planning on getting their empire back any time soon, it seems to have outlived its usefulness.

How?

>He really believes that the guardian is a true leftist newspaper and not a capitalist propaganda tool meme
brainlet

>Why outrageous

The university is located in the west.
Thus it is unusual to exclude western philosophers from it to be too western.
I dont get the craze, do african universities dont teach whatever thought has occured in their general cultural sphere before the western ones?

I didn't imply the Guardian was truly leftist, merely that I wouldn't expect it to be full of right-wing anti-immigrant British nationalism.

'Decolonisation' is ironically based on a modern western notion of authenticity. You can't restore the 'pure' native understanding of things because all viewpoints are historically conditioned. Such attempts rely on a dichotomy in which the east is seen as organic and irrational and the west is rational and artificial. It precludes any real understanding of chinese/indian/islamic thought in its own right, it becomes merely a mystical foil to the west. Yoga as we know it, for example, is not an ancient mystical exercise but a product of early 20th century health fads and middle class nationalism, much like the indian equivalent of the czech Sokol movement or Nazi mass gymnastics.

Which postcolonial writers adopt that very naive stance, user?

>Muh spooky right wing!!!!
Because the entire idea of 'decolonizing' your mind by avoiding white writers is retarded. Nothing wrong with exploring non-white philosophy, though these philosophies tend to be all about 'non-white identity' after a certain point in history, and it even makes sense given the type of study they are doing but their attitude and rhetoric makes them look retarded and they're clearly trying to establish themselves as what they believe is the resistance/counterculture but what is actually just the trend atm.

Vivek Chibber has criticized postcolonial theory from a marxist perspective. It can easily turn into a tool for local bourgeoisie, as in contemporary india where right wing nationalists have started using 'postcolonial' arguments for blatantly reactionary ends.

pop postcolonialism has even impacted the way islamic indian and chinese thought is taught in mainstream western philosophy departments. ie. medieval islamic thinkers removed from their theological context and greek philosophy, constituted instead as 'marginalized voices' which bring 'fresh perspectives' on issues such as 'race and gender'

Thanks, but I was thinking more of which serious advocates of decolonisation are that naive. Sounds to me like it could be a straw man, to be honest- you'd have to be pretty dumb to believe you could recover a 'true' pre-colonial Indian philosophy. I'm sure it's useful to nationalists, of course, but from the little I've seen of postcolonial scholarship it's hard to believe that serious academics could be so naive.

My experience is with american pop identity academics, which are very much fixated on authenticity. The self conception mexicans have of themselves is actually very different from the 'mexican' identity which is promoted by institutions on the other side of the rio grande, which is often nothing more than americanised oprah sentimentalism and unreconstructed new age gibberish, like this book for example