SOURCE: “Is There History after Eurocentrism: Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the Disavowal of History,” Cultural Critique, Vol. 42, Spring, 1999, pp. 1-34.

In the following essay, Dirlik discusses Eurocentrism as a modern historical phenomenon that has influenced many postmodern movements, including postcolonialism.

Ours would seem to be another age of paradoxes. Localization accompanies globalization, cultural homogenization is challenged by insistence on cultural heterogeneity, denationalization is more than matched by ethnicization. Capitalism at its moment of victory over socialism finds itself wondering about different cultures of capitalism at odds with one another. There is a preoccupation with history when history seems to be increasingly irrelevant to understanding the present. Worked over by postmodernism, among other things, the past itself seems to be up for grabs, and will say anything we want it to say.

It is another one of these paradoxes that I take up in this essay: the paradox of Eurocentrism...