Dr. Halil Ibrahim Arpa and Prof. Dr. Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni on Coloniality of Knowledge
Media records
Abstract
- Abstract
- In this latest episode of the Cluster Conversations Prof. Dr. Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni talks with associated fellow Dr. Halil Ibrahim Arpa about his research project entitled “Decolonial Hi/stories: Literary Subversion of Colonial and Post-colonial Historiographies”. In this project, Arpa scrutinizes the coloniality of knowledge against Black and Islamic communities in the Global North and alternative epistemologies to the crisis of modernity in the Global South. Arpa joins the Cluster on a scholarship funded by TÜBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye).
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- Dr. Halil Ibrahim Arpa and Prof. Dr. Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni on Coloniality of Knowledge
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
-
Cluster Conversations
- Date
- April 12, 2024
Rights & access
- Extent
- 22 minutes, 7 seconds
Identifiers & sources
Further details
- Episode number
- 18
Full text
- Transcript
-
[music]
Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the latest episode of the broadcasted Cluster Conversations. And with me here is myself, Professor Sabello James Jovocajeni, Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South. And I will proceed to introduce the fellow, Doctor Halil Ibrahim Arpa from Turkey. He works at the Çankırı Karatekin University as an assistant professor of English and Postcolonial Literature near the capital of Turkey Ankara. He is an associate fellow here with a scholarship from the Turkish Scientific Council. He stays here with us in Beirut for a year working on his book entitled Decolonising Aesthetics: Literary Subversion of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiographies. And my connection with him is that we work in the same field, a related field, decolonization, postcolonialism and epistemologies of the south. And this is the basis of our collaboration here at Beirut. And the first question to you, Halil, is tell us about your book. What is it about? What motivated you to write it?
Speaker 2: Of course. First of all, thank you to the cluster and to you. I am honored to be here and I have a chance to be here with you and thank you for this opportunity. I appreciate it. So how did I come this point? So the adventure began about around two years ago when I was preparing a book project for Turkish Scientific Council. And then it was at the beginning it was about postcolonialism. So then while doing my PhD, I was familiar with especially with Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres studies. But yeah, then after meeting with you, after reading you, then I said myself, I should do something else because in postcolonial theory, you know, we always say theory is traveling. So you cannot stand where you are. You should also learn new things to recalibrate yourself as Cluster is trying to do for some time. So just let me summarize a bit how did I come to this point for my life. You know, every child has his childhood heroes. Nowadays children have American heroes. But when I was a child, I was watching the movies, especially political movies from Africa. And there was one who was influencing me a lot and he was Nelson Mandela. And he amazed me. Then I should mention this, I was here twelve years ago as an Erasmus exchange student for English department which is called Anglistik in German. So I passed one year here. Then I returned back and began my MA thesis. And when I read Orientalism, so it changed my life. So then I found my perspective in life. Then I did a PhD on South Africa, on JM Coetzee's fiction and the neocolonial condition so-called in South Africa. And after coming here, it was the project began as decolonial stories or decolonial historicism. But what I recognized was that
Speaker 1: It was somehow related to my PhD. Then I said myself I should do something else because if you do the similar things, it would be not good scholarship. So I decided because I am always interested in arts and aesthetics. Then because it was coiling in my head and how aesthetics and art is related to coloniality, right? And so then I decided to recalibrate this project into the domain of aesthetics. So it's how it began.
Speaker 2: And what exactly is the motivation to bring decolonization into this project?
Speaker 1: Thank you for the question. As we know, decolonization is an unfinished project. And actually, decolonizing aesthetics is a fledgling field in decolonial studies. And what I am trying to say or reveal is that the ugly side of aesthetics, you know, as Mignolo does with the dark side of Renaissance and Rictusel and others, the dark side of modernity. So I'm trying to reveal, show the ugly side of aesthetics and its epistemological side of art and aesthetics and how aesthetic beauty is related to coloniality. So because I am coming from literature department, so this project is about aesthetics and art but specified on literature, not paintings or something else or music, but on literature. And the literature with capital L, you know, is an institution to manufacture consent. But generally from Marxist point of view, literature has been handled as a bourgeois institution. What I am trying to do in this project is to show how it is a colonial institution, you know. So I've, of course, I am drawing on Marxist criticism, but I am trying to show how colonial it is, how it's related to colonial power matrix. But at the same time, I see literature as a dissident force with a disobedient epistemology. This is not saying that epistemic side was not the intention, but I am trying to say imagination has always been uncontrollable by the forces of hegemony or let's say domination in colonies, right? So in this project, I see literary figures not as geniuses whose statues are raised in like in Western streets, in metropoles, but as public intellectuals who have a counter-discourse à la Rictusel against myth of modernity.
Speaker 2: And because we are bringing in decolonization, we are bringing in literature, we are bringing in all sorts of these issues together, methodologically, how are you innovating?
Speaker 1: Yeah, as I said, you know, the decolonizing aesthetic is fledgling. There are many scholars, the leading one is Walter Mignolo and Madina Tlostanova. But, you know, in a way they are interested in paintings, you know, visual art. But I am interested in verbal art which is literature. So in aesthetics first coined in eighteenth century by Baumgarten.
Speaker 1: And it was it was about sensory cognition as an independent faculty of mind, right? But what is done in eighteenth century because it's during enlightenment, it was it was it was an important period for coloniality after after renaissance. Beauty and reason was was they were equalized, you know, and the taste meant that the pleasure in law and order. So in a way our minds at that time, the minds of subjects were consolidated thanks to arts and aesthetics. In Kantian sense, as non-authoritarian totality, it created a common sense by repressing repressing the Jacobin fantasy. That means, you know, after after the French revolution and we had the Reign of Terror, to repress to take these desires, the bourgeois desires under control. Enlightenment needed a new religion, you know, because the and the church of art replaced the older religion with its new prophets who were artists, you know, and and thanks to them they they created a national pride and and consolidated a national unity. So I think for to to understand literature in in this way is is is important because, you know, the literary part of decoloniality is lacking. So I think because like postcolonialism, I believe in that, I believe that decolonizing studies is also traveling. So this is what I was I am trying to do.
Speaker 2: In your book, you seem to be doing a double move to subvert colonialism, but you also want to subvert postcolonial historiography. Why are you doing this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, because I'm coming from literary side. The man the man and woman of literature was was always disillusioned with postcolonial independence from the very beginning. Because literature is about imagination. So the literary site has has has has always a foresight. So the disillusionment was was about the what can we call the neocolonial condition in in postcolonial states. Because and postcolonial historiography created a new official history with capital H. You know, in this in this narrative, the other and women and and and the indigenous migrants were ousted from this new narrative. So somehow it looked like it did the the the colonial historiography. So and generally and when we look at colonies, it was taught that dominance was without hegemony. But in this project, I am saying no, it's it's a bit different because there was there was hegemony in colonies too, especially in in in colonial schools, you know, because structure was based on literacy. When we read Ali Mazrui and others, we see how colonial schools acculturated colonial subjects. And after independence, these colonial subjects became elites with western epistemologies taught in colonial schools. So hegemony was there, but for for only the elite class, you know, so it was not about only only about dominance. And
Speaker 1: But at the same time, literature had a decolonising function. So it didn't mean that people who were educated in colonial schools just mimic the colonial ways of knowing. No, it was the half of the story. As we know from literary figures Leopold Senghor, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Wole Soyinka among others, they were critical of Western epistemology too, right? So literature has had a colonising function from the very beginning. So it has a double edge. So it's a colonial institution, but at the same time it has a decolonising function.
Speaker 2: My last question is very simple question, straightforward. Where do you think from?
Speaker 1: Ah yeah, so there are many politics of knowledge, geopolitics, geopolitics and body politics of knowledge. It's true that I'm aware that I'm coming from postcolonial studies, but for a long time I'm not reading postcolonial studies, but I am reading just your books, Mignolo's and Sylvia Wynter and of course others. So now I'm trying to reposition myself in decoloniality to think from borderlands à la Gloria Anzaldúa. So, you know, and as we know, because I'm interested in French philosophy a lot, because you know, the crisis or let's say the dilemma between structure and agency, it was always disturbing me, you know. And as we know, hegemony from the theory of Althusser, Bourdieu, Gramsci, Eugene Weber and Pierre Nora, literature was part of that hegemony. And as we know from the early sixteenth century and seventeenth century like Académie française in France and Royal Society in England, you know, they were trying to produce a common sense in the absence of religion, right? And Western secularism, when the dominance of church ended, it doesn't mean that the West was without myths. Panthéon in Paris is par excellence for this, because it became a secular temple. Even today, if you visit Paris and see the Panthéon, you can feel that it's not like just an architecture, but you can feel how religious in a sense a temple is that. So the aesthetics while doing this in Europe, in metropole, it was creating its other. So it has the taste, but it was defining itself with the other and it was saying, Kant, Baumgarten, Hegel and among others, they were saying that there was savage pleasure, you know, in Africa. There was no art and the beauty of order in metropole was because of, so to say, the disorder in Africa. And so they were creating and African art was crafts for them and they were hierarchising high and low arts. So by this I'm trying to say race was constitutive of aesthetics which was in the matrix of colonial power. And as we know, as we see from the Venetian diplomats during...
Speaker 1: [inaudible]
Speaker 1: reconquista, so to say. A Venetian diplomat was calling it beautiful war. So from this sentence, we can see that how beauty was equalized to reason, you know, the modernist reason. So, I just want to say something on Renaissance too because my project seemed a little bit about Enlightenment, but after reading decolonial studies, it must say something about Renaissance, of course. So during Renaissance, a homo politicus man was created and it was about colonization of language, space and time. And during Renaissance, the coevalness was denied. The coevalness of other, right? So the art of Africa was nonsynchronous. So there was no art, no philosophy, as we, it's, you know, for Hegel, as we know. And by this, I am saying, in a way, this mentality colonized our senses even today. So what Mignolo and others are trying to do, they recoin the term aesthetics and they call it aesthesis, with the original name which means just sense, sense through your body, you know, not just your vision. So because the meaning is inseparable from knowing and being. So what we need today is what my project is about, is about aesthetic disobedience, as Rhodes Must Fall, Fees Must Fall movements did in South Africa and Strike MoMA. We have a group in United States and they are trying to resist the colonial institutions, museums, art galleries, you know. So the unfinished project of decolonization is continuing and I hope this project, when it's published, it's planned to be published at the end of this year, and I hope I can contribute to this movement.
Speaker 2: Thank you once again Khalid for taking your time and thanks to the audience for listening.
Speaker 1: Thank you too. It was my pleasure.
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