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Decolonizing Politics
An Introduction
Robbie Shilliam
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Robbie Shilliam 2021
The right of Robbie Shilliam to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3938-3 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3939-0 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shilliam, Robbie, 1969- author.
Title: Decolonizing politics : an introduction / Robbie Shilliam.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Series: Decolonizing the curriculum | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An ideal student primer exploring why, and how, the study of politics should be decolonized”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020037765 (print) | LCCN 2020037766 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509539383 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509539390 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509539406 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science--Philosophy. | Political participation. | Comparative government. | International relations.
Classification: LCC JA71 .S444 2021 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037765
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037766
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Dedication
For Kōkiri and Reremoana. And to all the children who must find ways over, under, around, and through wicked Babylon.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Jacob Kripp, Stephanie Najjar, Nandini Dey, and Sheharyar Imran for their help. Thanks also to Inès Boxman, Sophie Wright, and Louise Knight at Polity for all their support. And thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.
–1– Introduction
Let’s start with a figure who is conventionally known as the “father” of political science – Aristotle. You might think this strange for a book that seeks to decolonize the study of politics: isn’t Aristotle a very Eurocentric departure point? Not if you asked Aristotle. He categorized Europeans as barbarians. Paul Cartledge (1993, 5), an eminent historian of the classical world, describes the ancient Greeks as “desperately foreign” to our Western sensibilities. Or how about Derek Walcott, famous Saint Lucian poet and Nobel Prize winner, who compares the Aegean and Caribbean seas and finds much in common:
If we looked at them now, we would say that the Greeks had Puerto Rican tastes. Right? Because the stones were painted brightly. They were not these bleached stones. Time went by, and they sort of whitened and weathered, the classics began to be thought of as something bleached-out and rain-spotted, distant. (Brown and Johnson 1996, 183).
Perhaps Aristotle is not so much a strange departure point as an uncanny one. Investigating the place of aboriginal ideas of the sacred in mainstream Australian society, Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs (1995, 171) define the uncanny as “the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar – the way the one seems always to inhabit the other.” Aristotle is familiar: we are used to conceiving of him as the progenitor of a European science of politics. Yet he is also unfamiliar: