into a new post-hegemony
The geopolitical order is currently suffering a profound restructuration. With the end of petrodollar system or Bretton-Woods collapse, what is likely to happen with the humanities as we know them?
The prestigious American universities contributed to the system of global hegemony launching the ideological premises, dictating approaches, and even more importantly, processing the global cultural contents. They controlled visibility and impact on the global scale. Literary works or ideological views shared by millions could remain in the margin, invisible and local, if they lacked the complience, recognition and the critical hype of the dominant centre.
The geopolitical collapse may -- I should say: probably will -- trigger the collapse of humanities centred on the American system of symbolical prestige distribution, leading to the emergence of post-American, just as we once had the post-colonial.
It is thus extremely timely to ask what those post-ww3 humanities may look like. There are some things that seem almost certain. Those new humanities will be polycentric and oriented toward the Global South. The relative weight of East Asia will keep increasing. The post-hegemonic world will inherit American idiom just like many countries inherited colonial languages. Yet this idiom will be decontructed, destabilised, and transformed.
The rest depends on the answer for a basic question we will chose to formulate. What American humanities used to look like? I would say they were exagerated, fantasist, like Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto. Overblown, characterised by an inflation of ever-more-daring, radical approaches. Highly idiomatic, hard to grasp when you are an African, since their idiomatism was deliberate, programmed to build a difference, leaving a greater part of the world outside. On the other hand, once the idiom was grasped, it could easily become an unstopable discours-producing device, a machine of endless academic proliferation, capable of formulating a successful analysis of almost anything, following smoothly the adopted, paradigmatic lines and subscribing the admitted points of view. An appearence of the thing radical, really strong, hiding a conformist core.
American humanities were eternally in haste to formulate conclusions on global scale like Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations. In reality, just like petrodollar empire, they were fragile constructs, skipping careful examination in their rush for glory. The new humanities may be much more humble, ad-hoc, less grandiose as constructs. Based in much more careful examination of whatever contradicts the pattern.
As much the American humanities relied on the their transcription of the "continental" postmodern philosophy, the post-hegemonic world will soon exclaim loudly: We have never been postmodern. And we will laboriously work our way up from this essential deficiency, from our deeply pre-modern mentalities.
The prestigious American universities contributed to the system of global hegemony launching the ideological premises, dictating approaches, and even more importantly, processing the global cultural contents. They controlled visibility and impact on the global scale. Literary works or ideological views shared by millions could remain in the margin, invisible and local, if they lacked the complience, recognition and the critical hype of the dominant centre.
The geopolitical collapse may -- I should say: probably will -- trigger the collapse of humanities centred on the American system of symbolical prestige distribution, leading to the emergence of post-American, just as we once had the post-colonial.
It is thus extremely timely to ask what those post-ww3 humanities may look like. There are some things that seem almost certain. Those new humanities will be polycentric and oriented toward the Global South. The relative weight of East Asia will keep increasing. The post-hegemonic world will inherit American idiom just like many countries inherited colonial languages. Yet this idiom will be decontructed, destabilised, and transformed.
The rest depends on the answer for a basic question we will chose to formulate. What American humanities used to look like? I would say they were exagerated, fantasist, like Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto. Overblown, characterised by an inflation of ever-more-daring, radical approaches. Highly idiomatic, hard to grasp when you are an African, since their idiomatism was deliberate, programmed to build a difference, leaving a greater part of the world outside. On the other hand, once the idiom was grasped, it could easily become an unstopable discours-producing device, a machine of endless academic proliferation, capable of formulating a successful analysis of almost anything, following smoothly the adopted, paradigmatic lines and subscribing the admitted points of view. An appearence of the thing radical, really strong, hiding a conformist core.
American humanities were eternally in haste to formulate conclusions on global scale like Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations. In reality, just like petrodollar empire, they were fragile constructs, skipping careful examination in their rush for glory. The new humanities may be much more humble, ad-hoc, less grandiose as constructs. Based in much more careful examination of whatever contradicts the pattern.
As much the American humanities relied on the their transcription of the "continental" postmodern philosophy, the post-hegemonic world will soon exclaim loudly: We have never been postmodern. And we will laboriously work our way up from this essential deficiency, from our deeply pre-modern mentalities.
