The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales

Interventions International Journal of Postcolonial Studies ISSN: 1369-801X (Print) 1469-929X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20 The end of the west and other cautionary tales Carine M. Mardorossian To cite this article: Carine M. Mardorossian (2017) The end of the west and other cautionary tales, Interventions, 19:8, 1210-1211, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2017.1421033 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1421033 Published online: 04 Jan 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 23 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=riij20 review BOOKS Review ........... The end of the west and other cautionary tales. Sean Meighoo. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 272 pages. ISBN 9780231176729. £27.95 (hbk) ......... According to Meighoo, both continental philosophy and postcolonial theory have been too quick to proclaim the end of the West in the process of exposing the Eurocentrism that hid behind and grounded the celebration of the West as a site of historical and technological progress. What he identifies in the midst of this shared counterdiscourse that defines these two divergent fields of study is another, more subtle form of Eurocentrism of which both fields, notwithstanding their progressive ideals, ironically partake. Indeed, Meighoo points out that they both ultimately agree, in exposing the Eurocentrism of western traditions, that there is a West to be deconstructed to begin with, or, as he puts it, “a tradition that has remained impervious to all non-western traditions” (xii). The critique of the West’s Eurocentrism posits a teleogical view of a West that never existed to begin with and as such is complicit in creating the very teleology it is supposedly condemning. Meighoo identifies this backfiring critical practice as a form of “negative teleology”. In part one, he takes on the Hellenic origins of western civilization. Using Martin Bernal’s multi-volume Black Athena as a point of departure, he engages debates about this myth of origins that was actually created by the very nineteenth-century scholarship that claimed to have identified it. Ancient Greek civilization ....................................................................................................... interventions, 2017 Vol. 19, No. 8, 1210–1211, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1421033 REVIEW was not, Bernal showed, impervious to other influences, indebted as it was to Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations. Most importantly, what the controversy surrounding his findings shows for Meighoo is our unreasonable and persistent investment in a concept of origin and “roots”. Part two traces the turn from teleology to negative teleology by examining the first articulations of the latter in key texts by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida are also tackled and exposed as the most explicit reiteration of a “negative teleology” in continental philosophy. Meighoo identifies the same ethnocentric teleology in Levinas’s ethics as he does in Husserl’s phenomenology, in Heidegger’s destruction of ontology as he does in Derrida’s deconstruction. As such, he shows how “the ethical subject of continental philosophy is none other than the historical subject of the West” (xiv). Part three turns to postcolonial theory as the more paradoxical instantiation of this negative teleology. He singles out Edward Said and Chandra Tapalde Mohanty, the influential figures in colonial discourse theory and transnational feminism, respectively, since both were instrumental in critiquing forms of 1211 ............................ representation as uniquely western. Yet, they too, Meighoo shows, repeat the assumption of a stable, uniform and self-enclosed western tradition. Bhabha and Trinh T. Minh ha’s postcolonial defence of difference as a form of resistance is similarly scrutinized and taken to task. Meighoo’s approach is Foucauldian insofar as he exposes the ways in which counterdiscourses are often busy (re)producing the very realities they claim to be undoing. Yet, unlike many contemporary renditions of this critical maneouver, Meighoo’s approach does not result in a mere turning-on-its-head, self-congratulatory, and ultimately relativizing rhetoric. He establishes a renewed postcolonial ethos in the process of undoing the opposition between these traditions of inquiry, and as such, his work remains committed to a form of humanist, scholarly and political integrity that is sometimes sacrificed in the process of exposing the implications of other people’s thoughts and assumptions in the profession. CARINE M. MARDOROSSIAN SUNY BUFFALO, USA © 2018 Carine M. Mardorossian