National unity is important in Kenya, since ethnic divisions have sometimes become deadly. The imposed Coalition government and the recent new Constitution in 2010 were attempts to overcome division. But cultural divisions among the generations are just as much of a challenge as ethnic divisions, as the youth sometimes sideline the practices and worldviews of their elders, leaving people to wonder what binds people to each other as Kenyans? The idea of “national culture” has its pitfalls, bit seems necessary nevertheless, (...) as explained by Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Okot ‘Bitek, and H. Odera Oruka. This article explores how ideas of “Kenyanness” have developed since Kenyan independence and the rejection of colonized mentality and education. Odera Oruka’s advocacy of “Sage Philosophy” as a project to pull Kenyans together, and more recent academics’ attempts to encourage civic education by articulating core Kenyan values are explored in depth. These scholarly and artistic efforts at describing or encouraging common identity are contrasted to efforts by the Ministry of Culture to construct (and “sell”) Kenya culture to tourists as a commodity. (shrink)

France and New Caledonia are currently involved in an ongoing debate surrounding the independence of the latter from the former that will lead to referenda in 2018–2022. The main stakeholders in the negotiation process are France, the Caldoche population of the island agglomeration and its Kanak inhabitants. Most critical discourse studies analyse texts as expressions of power entrenched in monologues. In this paper, however, the debate between the social actors is seen as a plurilogue. The study argues that the dominant (...) interactants propagate a rhetoric of unity and homogeneity, aiming to further marginalise the Kanak people and other minority groups in New Caledonian society by rendering them invisible. It further argues that the French political power aims to persuade the other groups to accept the reality of a common destiny as a given truth. The paper combines Systemic Functional Linguistics and Pragma-dialectics, and incorporates postcolonial and poststructuralist perspectives into a critical study of discourse samples, taken from a larger corpus of French data, across various genres and registers. The analysis reveals that the French rhetoric of unity is built upon Republican principles inherent to neo-colonialist ideology. It also shows that the French rhetoric is being reproduced by local settler interactants, based on values that pertain to Caldoche nationalist ideology. Both French and Caldoche ideologies are in discord with Kanak socialist ideology. By exposing the existing power inequalities the study does not only contribute to defending the Kanak minority discourse, but also emphasises the rights for recognition and self-determination of the Kanak indigenous people of New Caledonia. (shrink)

Popular protest is occurring on a remarkable scale in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is a significant degree to which it tends to be organized and articulated through the local. This contribution argues that while the political limitations of purely local modes of organization are clear, it should not be assumed that local struggles are some sort of misguided distraction from building a broader progressive movement. It is suggested that, on the contrary, the best prospects for the emergence of a broader (...) popular struggle lie in building, sustaining and linking local struggles. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the way in which proximity and distance have been made relevant to cosmopolitanism and I discuss the significance contemporary theory attributes to border crossing. By employing colonial border crossing and its rationalization as an example, and by drawing from Alain Badiou's critique of political philosophy, I expose some of the problems of facile and faddish approaches to planetary movement. I argue that the real borders to be crossed by true cosmopolitans are internal and, regrettably, traversible, (...) raised at an early age, preserved through education and carried along wherever one goes. Then, I show how this thesis relativizes the drastic choice between cosmopolitanism and patriotism that is imposed by many current theories. By elaborating on Heraclitus's dictum that ‘the citizens must defend the law, as they would defend the wall of the city’, I sketch an account of patriotism that is (a) compatible with, and conducive to, cosmopolitanism as well as (b) mindful of the duplicity of the interplay of proximity and distance. (shrink)

Constructions of the animal and animality are often pivotal to religious discourses. Such constructions create the possibility of identifying and valuing what is "human" as opposed to the "animal" and also of distinguishing human beliefs and behaviors that can be characterized as being animal from those that are "truly human." Some discourses also employ the concept of savagery as a bridge between the human and the animal, where the form of humanity but not its ideal beliefs and practices can be (...) displayed. This paper explores the work of the influential scientist, philosopher, and theologian A. N. Whitehead in this context. His ideas of what constitutes "the animal," the "primitive" and the "civilized" are laid out explicitly in his now little-used history of religions text, Religion in the Making. This paper explores these ideas in this history and then considers how the same ideas permeate his currently more popular philosophical and theological writing Process and Reality. Drawing on some work in post-colonial theory, the paper offers a critique of this understanding of animality, savagery, and civilization and suggests that using Whitehead to underpin modern theological work requires considerable caution. (shrink)

This article investigates a significant problem in contemporary critical theory, namely its failure to address effectively the possibility that a campaign of political violence may be a legitimate means of fighting grave injustice. Having offered a working definition of 'political violence', I argue that critical theory should be focused on experiences of in justice rather than on ideals of justice. I then explore the reasons as to why, save for some intriguing remarks on retrospective legitimation, J rgen Habermas has not (...) addressed this issue directly. While Axel Honneth's recognition theory may have greater potential here, the absence of explicit consideration of the matter by him leaves considerable work to do. I introduce five questions in the concluding section that provide a starting point in setting out an appropriately stringent, normative test for claims that support violent action against injustice. (shrink)

In the coming months and years, the left faces a historic juncture. On the one hand, racist violence is on the rise across the West, and the political class seems intent on mobilising both overt and subtle racism. On the other hand, strategies of anti-racist organising, which have developed on both sides of the Atlantic, have reached a theoretical impasse. I argue that now, more than ever, a serious project of historical and intellectual retrieval is necessary. This article interrogates the (...) theoretical limitations of ‘anti-blackness’ as an analysis of racialised oppression. Through the thought of Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, among others, I argue that theories of ‘anti-blackness’, specifically those rooted in Afro-pessimism, are predicated on a theoretical shift away from relational social theory to identitarian essentialism which obscures, rather than illuminates, the processes of racialisation which undergird racial oppression. (shrink)

This paper attempts a response to two suggestions regarding the roots of and solutions to Africa’s social, economic and political concerns. Rather than trying to provide answers to the question “who should be blamed for the quagmires of Africa?”, the paper tries to provide further explanations of the problems using a specific case study of two pan-African scholars, Henry Kam Kah and Okori Uneke. Although their suggestions about the situation of Africa have received popular acceptance among scholars, this paper disputes (...) the viability of their assumptions and conclusions. Even if it is true that Africa is an innocent victim of colonial or post-colonial causes, their arguments fall short of providing a foundation for future, positive development. Instead, this paper attempts to go beneath superficial first layer investigations to identify a more meaning way forward for the people of post-colonial Africa. (shrink)

This article extends analyses of environmental influences on social action by examining the emotions experienced by Karuk Tribal members in the face of environmental decline. Using interviews, public testimonies, and survey data we make two claims, one specific, the other general. We find that, for Karuk people, the natural environment is part of the stage of social interactions and a central influence on emotional experiences, including individuals’ internalization of identity, social roles, and power structures, and their resistance to racism and (...) ongoing colonialism. We describe a unique approach to understanding the production of inequality through disruptions to relationships among nature, emotions, and society. Grief, anger, shame, and hopelessness associated with environmental decline serve as signal functions confirming structures of power. The moral battery of fear and hope underpins environmental activism and resistance. More generally, we expand this concern to argue that neglecting the natural world as a causal force for “generic” social processes has limited not only work on Native Americans, but also work sociology of emotions and theories of race and ethnicity, and has masked the theoretical significance of environmental justice. Taking seriously the experiences of Native people and the importance of the natural environment offers an opportunity to extend sociological analyses of power and to move sociology toward a more decolonized discipline. (shrink)

This article explores objections made against ideal theorizing in political philosophy by two prominent contemporary critical theorists: Axel Honneth and Charles Mills. In Freedom’s Right, Honneth...

The paper offers a critical interrogation of the politics of hope in relation to suffering in the world. It begins with a critique of the assumptions and aspirations of ‘philosophies of hope’ that assume a Levinasian responsibility for the suffering-Other. Such approaches to thinking hope reveal an underlying coloniality of ontology, of totality/exteriority, which defines Being and Non-Being, presence and absence, in totality. Consistent with past colonial rationalities, the logics of salvation and rescue define, still, these contemporary envisionings of the (...) ‘white man’s burden’ in relation to the suffering Other. A decolonial ontology of Exteriority, of an incommensurable radical Other-Being against Totality, is instead presented. The focus here shifts from the passive suffering-Other that is the object of rescue, to the Radical Other that is the author of encounter. By returning Exteriority to theory and by opening up theory’s locations of enunciation, the implications of responsibility, in thinking hope, become open also to interrogation and vulnerable to unsatisfactory conclusions. (shrink)

While friend/enemy are commonly perceived to be mutually constitutive opposites, it is not so evident that hatred is the opposite of love. Hatred is oriented by two ideologies specific to European thought—‘nature’ as an illusory universal, and the ‘ego’, distinct from the ‘I’, as an irreducible expression of identity. The origins of racial hatred in naturalised hierarchical classification at the time of European colonial expansion demonstrates how naturalism and egoism combined to produce an over-valuation of one’s own self or group (...) as authentic or pure. Drawing on Pascal, Fanon and Derrida, this essay challenges the autonomous, self-loving and naturalised sense of self. It calls for education as a form of action against racial hatred, including hate-speech. It suggests that the dignity or absoluteness of each individual or group should be thought as a ‘sense’ which cannot be reduced to a meaning. This is in contrast to hatred which presupposes closed or solidified meanings. (shrink)

European encounters fostered in the early modern period with West Africa have provided us with interesting frameworks from which to engage in the construction of difference, race within Western European space and with terms for rethinking European identity that transcend the cosmopolitan and colonial pretensions. Drawing on early historical records, especically the Portuguese experience in West Africa, this article seeks to contest standard historical sociological tropes of European identity. First, creolization and hybridity are to challenge the essentialism which has been (...) deployed by Hegel to defend colonial interests. Second, it engages with the critiques levelled at Hegel’s eurocentrism, universalism and teleology. Particular use is made of Susan Buck-Morss’s work on Hegel, Sybelle Fischer’s critique of Buck-Morss’ work. Third, it interrogates the principle of the dialectic with Hegel’s Europe engagement with its Others; using Levinas’ work as a critique of Hegel’s dialectic, which represents alternative, that is less violent and non-dominant. (shrink)

: Events surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States raise compelling moral questions about the effects of war and globalization on children in many parts of the world. This paper adopts Sartre's notion of freedom, particularly its connection with materiality and intersubjectivity, to assess the moral responsibility that we have as a global community toward our most vulnerable members. We conclude by examining important first steps that should be taken to address the plight of children.

In this paper I establish an alliance between the thought of Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference. In light of Fanon's critique of Sartre's characterization of the place of the Negritude movement in terms of dialectic, I point to the inherent limitations of modern humanism's dialectical accounts for enabling genuine historical change. Alternatively, I appeal to Deleuze's distinction between history and becoming, and his concomitant idea of intensive becoming-revolutionary. I conclude that such an alliance with Deleuzian metaphysics holds (...) far greater promises for effecting Fanon's revolutionary project of the creation of a new humanity (and therefore, of a new ethics and a new politics) than his traditional assimilation to Phenomenology and Existentialism. (shrink)

Education has two distinct but interconnected layers. There is an outer layer concerned with knowledge transfer and skills and an inner layer concerned with the development of character and relationships with others, both individually and socially. This inner layer provides the individual with the capacity to influence and to change society. In that sense, such an inner layer is ‘political’. In this article we argue that the ‘political’ in education can take two distinct forms: either that of dialogue or of (...) defiance. We claim that the former is epitomised by the philosophy of Martin Buber and the latter by the philosophy of Frantz Fanon. Our analysis contrasting these two philosophies clarifies the implications for education, and thereby for the individual and for society. (shrink)

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is known for his principled criticism of colonialism, advocacy of the importance of indigenous languages, and concern with the role of culture and literature in forming the foundation of a truly national sensibility.Globalecticsadds interpretations of Fanon, Hegel, and the Marxian legacy. It provides an opportunity to assess Ngũgĩ’s analysis of colonialism and national liberation.

A serious problem confronting discourses on recognition is that of showing equal respect for citizens’ diverse cultural identities whilst at the same time attending to feminist concerns. This article focuses on the complex issues emerging from the recent legislation prohibiting the Muslim veil in French state schools. I respond to these problems by defending two conditions of a postcolonial and feminist approach to the politics of recognition. This approach should be, first, transformative, in the sense of widening its conception of (...) core values through an engagement with cultural difference. Second, it should be critical in its orientation to practices affecting women adversely within any social group. An integration of these concerns is proposed in terms of ‘affective citizenship’. This approach supports the different components of women’s autonomous functioning, through a universalistic commitment to the creative expression of their hybrid identities. (shrink)

This paper explores the important role of critical science, and in particular of post-colonial and decolonial theories, in understanding and shaping the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is viewed as amongst the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. While the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt holds the promise of far-reaching positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable peoples. Values and power are central to this discussion. Decolonial theories (...) use historical hindsight to explain patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social world. By embedding a decolonial critical approach within its technical practice, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles, centring vulnerable peoples who continue to bear the brunt of negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. We highlight problematic applications that are instances of coloniality, and using a decolonial lens, submit three tactics that can form a decolonial field of artificial intelligence: creating a critical technical practice of AI, seeking reverse tutelage and reverse pedagogies, and the renewal of affective and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight and the multiplicity of intellectual perspectives available to us, ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of beneficence and justice for all. (shrink)

A key aspect of teaching ‘development’ is understanding the conundrums and tensions between balance and imbalance with constructs of global and...

As a full-time foreign faculty member in the Chinese Normal university system for the past five years, I analyze the contested terrain of being a critical, Freirean educator/researcher as an insider and outsider of Chinese and Western academic systems and societies overall. This autobiographical analysis is within the contexts of China’s academic focus on raising their global higher education rankings, along with self-reflectivity of my own multiple, often-conflicting identities and Western-centric Orientalism, theorized by Edward Said, in my legitimization of academic (...) work. The following themes are analyzed through critical and Freirean frameworks: pursuit for top rankings coinciding and conflicting with scholarship breadth and depth, academic freedom, and politics of education; constructs of “harmony” that grounds teaching and research; and select pedagogical commonalities and differences between the East, the Global South, and the West. The article delves into preconceptions, including my own,... (shrink)

What are the differences between cosmopolitanism and globalization? Are they “natural” historical processes or are they designed for specific purposes? Was Kant cosmopolitanism good for the entire population of the globe or did it respond to a particular Eurocentered view of what a cosmo-polis should be? The article argues that, while the term “globalization” in the most common usage refers and correspond to neo-liberal globalization projects and ambitions, and the Kantian concept of “cosmopolitanism” responded to the second wave, “de-colonial cosmopolitanism” (...) refers to global processes and conceptualizations delinking from both neo-liberal globalization and liberal cosmopolitan ideals. But it delinks also from theological and Marxist visions of a homogenous world center around religious ideals or state socialist regulations. De-colonial cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism of multiple trajectories aiming at a trans-modern world based on pluriversality rather than on a new and good universal for all. (shrink)

Martin Luther King Jr. claimed that “the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted”. I elaborate on King’s claim by focusing on the way in which we treat and understand ‘maladjustment’ that is responsive to severe trauma (e.g. PTSD that is a result of military combat or rape). Mental healthcare and our social attitudes about mental illness and disorder will prevent us from recognizing real injustice that symptoms of mental illness can be appropriately responding to, unless (...) we recognize that many emotional states (and not just beliefs!) that constitute those symptoms are warranted by the circumstances they are responsive to. I argue that there is a failure to distinguish between PTSD symptoms that are warranted emotional responses to trauma and those that are not. This results in us focusing our attention on “fixing” the agent internally, but not on fixing the world. It is only by centering questions of warrant that we will be able to understand and expose the relationship between agents’ internal mental states and their oppression. But we also need to ask when someone’s emotional response is unwarranted by their experience (as in the case of someone who develops PTSD after a non-traumatic event). If we fail to do this—as, I claim, both our mental healthcare and the broader social world fail to do—we treat warranted and unwarranted emotions as on a par. This undermines the epistemic judgment of the agent who has warranted PTSD symptoms, resulting in her failing to trust her evaluation of whether her emotional response to her own trauma is warranted by that trauma, and thus failing to recognize her own oppression. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore the influences, processes and environments that shaped the practice of European nurses for indigenous New Zealand (NZ) Māori communities who were being overwhelmed by introduced infectious diseases. Historical data were accessed from multiple archival sources and analysed through the lens of colonial theory. Through their work early last century, NZ nurses actively gained professional status and territory through their work with Māori. By living and working alongside Māori, they learned to practise in (...) new ways that influenced Māori health. By developing a new role in new professional territory, nurses extended their practice to include health promotion as well as disease prevention. Māori survival from epidemics improved, and the population grew over that period. For Māori, however, Eurocentric care alleviated their immediate health problems, but the detrimental impact of the mechanisms of colonisation overall has continued to the present day. (shrink)

Although there are notable exceptions, examination of nursing's participation in colonizing processes and practices has not taken hold in nursing's consciousness or political agenda. Critical analyses, based on the examination of politics and power of the structural determinants of health, continue to be marginalized in the profession. The goals of this discussion article are to underscore the urgent need to further articulate postcolonial theory in nursing and to contribute to nursing knowledge about paths to work toward decolonizing the profession. The (...) authors begin with a description of unifying themes in postcolonial theory, with an emphasis on colonized subjectivities and imperialism; the application of a critical social science perspective, including postcolonial feminist theory; and the project of working toward decolonization. Processes involved in the colonization of nursing are described in detail, including colonization of nursing's intellectual development and the white privilege and racism that sustain colonizing thinking and action in nursing. The authors conclude with strategies to increase the counter‐narrative to continued colonization, with a focus on critical social justice, human rights and the structural determinants of health. (shrink)

This paper, rather than providing a comprehensive discussion around Paulo Freire’s ideas, focuses on one aspect of his body of work: colonialism. The emphasis is on the ‘oppressor consciousness’ and cultural invasion (seen in its broadest context to include institutional colonialism with special reference to the traditional, modernizing and prophetic church. It also deals with the complex issue of language in postcolonial contexts, with special reference to education in Guinea Bissau and its implications for other colonial contexts.

The advent of an unregulated and financial form of capitalism, combined with a sharp rise in income inequalities and economic insecurity since the 1970s, appears to pose, at first glance, a significant challenge for the relevance of the works of first-generation critical theorists, which are often confined to an historically specific ‘artistic’ critique of the bureaucratic stage of capitalist development. Through an analysis of the various concerns and demands expressed by members of the alter-globalization and Occupy movements, the article nevertheless (...) aims to demonstrate that first-generation critical theory can continue to play a significant role in conceptualizing contemporary forms of resistance by: (1) capturing the social malaise engendered by neoliberal capitalism; and (2) informing the practice of resistance in contemporary capitalist societies. (shrink)

This article puts Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon into dialogue in order to explore the relationships between the constitution of subjects and the production of truth in modern Western societies as well as in colonial spaces. Firstly, it takes into account Foucault’s analysis of confessional practices and the effects of subjection, objectivation, and subjectivation generated by the injunction for the subject to tell the truth about him or herself. Secondly, it focuses on the question of interpellation that emerges in the (...) colonial context and on the colonized who, as Fanon illustrates, is always seen as a deceitful subject. Finally, it shows that, despite the difference in the relationships between the constitution of subjectivity and the production of true discourses described by Foucault and Fanon, the transformative dimension enacted by the processes of subjectivation and by the practices of resistance constitutes a shared conceptual and political ground between the two authors. (shrink)

In the context of the fairly recent Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC), I examine phenomenologically the nature of truth as the essential condition for overcoming social and political conflicts, and as an instrument for enforcing so-called “transitional justice” periods and promoting reconciliation. I also briefly approach the limits of this truth’s possibility of being recognized, if its evaluative and practical dimensions and its appeal to an “intelligence of emotions” do not prevail over its merely theoretical claims. Though not expounding Schutz’s (...) and Husserl’s contributions, and meditating on phenomena they did not deal with, I carry out this reflection inspired by their work and methodological approach. The case study used as an intuitive illustration is the recent Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (shrink)

The recent chiming of Simone de Beauvoir's legacy by French feminists for a policy of assimilation of Muslim women to Western models of self and society reduces the complexity and richness of Beauvoir's views in inacceptable ways. This article explores to what extent a politics of difference that challenges the ideals and political strategies of abstract liberalism can be extracted from and legitimized by the philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Without assuming their thought is identical, we can (...) read them as elucidating each other and as implicitly exposing weak and strong points in their respective philosophies on ethnocultural rehtions and social identities. (shrink)

Basing its understanding on the two uses of the notion of violence in Honneth’s theory of recognition, this paper aims at developing a framework for the analysis of the thesis of the moral justification of political violence, whenever forms of political violence can be defined as legitimate struggles of recognition. Its contention is that the requalification of some forms of collective violence as recognition conflicts makes it possible to establish a hierarchy of justification for forms of violence which cannot be (...) constructed through a priori criteria, but should rather be the result of a descriptive social philosophy enquiry. (shrink)

Increasingly, innovation in artificial intelligence technologies portends the re-conceptualization of human existentiality along the paradigm of posthumanism. An exposition of this through a critical culturo-historical methodology uncloaks the Eurocentric genitive basis of the philosophical anthropology that underpins this technological posthumanism, as well as its dystopian possibilities. As a contribution to obviating the latter, an Africanist civilizational humanism proclaimed by Pixley ka Isaka Seme is proffered as a plausible alternative paradigm for humanity’s technological advancement. Seme, a pan-Africanist thinker of the early (...) twentieth century, proclaimed humanistic-spirituality as the indispensable gift African Civilisation-in-its-renaissance is yet to offer global humanity. His postulation is being provided as a contribution to the archive on cross-cultural ethics of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

B. R. Ambedkar (1891Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient IndiaEssays on the Bhagavad Gita”. This essay engages with that corpus, situating Ambedkar's encounter with the Gita within a much broader twentieth-century political and philosophical concern with the question of tradition and violence. It interrogates the excessive and heterogeneous conceptual impulses that mediate Ambedkar's attempt to retrieve a counterhistory of Indian antiquity. Located as it is in the same Indic neighborhood from which a radical counterhistory of touchability might emerge, the Gita is (...) a particularly fraternal and troubling text for Ambedkar. Yet his responsibility towards the Gita comes to be hinged not upon evasion but rather upon an exaggeration of its hermeneutic power; that is, upon his painstaking inflation of the Gita's willfully modern interest in instituting the universal. Ambedkar's relentless struggle to annihilate this universality of the Gita would have to be founded upon another universality, at once destructive, excessive and counterlegislative. In this unfinished attempt to recuperate the ideality of the universal, this essay asks, does Ambedkar himself become the most thorough modern practitioner of the Gita? (shrink)

This paper examines the rhetorical dimension of arguments about global justice. It draws on postcolonial theory, an approach that has explored the relationship between knowledge and power. The global justice literature has elaborated critiques of global inequality and advanced arguments about how to overcome the legacies of domination. These concerns are also shared by critics of colonialism, yet there are also epistemological differences that separate the two scholarly communities. Despite these differences, I argue that bringing the two literatures into conversation (...) generates important benefits. Postcolonial theory draws attention to the way that abstract concepts can function as metaphors that have the unintended consequence of reinforcing power relations. Normative theory will be more effective at promoting global justice if it pays more attention to the politics of representation. (shrink)

Within political theory the concept of recognition has been generally drawn upon to develop a particular form of ethical theory. The concept has been deployed in debates over culture, feminism, multiculturalism, individual and group rights, and as a means of conceptualising colonialism. A less dominant contemporary line of inquiry is the use of the concept of recognition to think through modes of pre-capitalist and capitalist accumulation. Much of the early philosophical radicalism contained within the concept of recognition has been lost (...) via its subsumption within liberal political theory. Against such a liberal ‘flattening-out’ of recognition this chapter builds an alternative interpretation which focuses upon the relationship between recognition and accumulation. This is done by way of examining how questions of economic power and accumulation were central G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of recognition. In this light, the chapter develops an understanding of recognition as a ‘hinge concept’ – one which links economic relations, the juridical form, moral claims and political struggle. By focusing upon its antagonistic basis, as struggle, a concept of recognition gives us a useful way of thinking about both historical and contemporary modes of global capitalist accumulation. (shrink)