Whitewashing Theory

I came to participate as a graduate student with the Global Past Research Initiative (GPRI) one day before the application deadline. What intrigued me about the project is its openness to critiquing disciplinarization, which aligns with my doctoral research interests. My doctoral research transcends the boundaries of my primary specialization in English and departs from my positionality within my own Arabic-Islamic tradition. While interdisciplinarity is entrenched in the programs taught in the English Department at Cairo University, the nuances of what constitutes interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and postdisciplinary theory were always left unexplained in both the undergraduate and graduate programs. The assigned readings for the GPRI’s February 2024 workshop in Cairo gave me the opportunity to research and examine the differences between the three terms.

One reading in particular, Tomas Pernecky’s, “An Unintroduction to Postdisciplinarity” lays out four broad strains of posdisciplinarity: 1) Complexity-driven approaches; 2) Critical, emancipatory, equitable and transformatory knowledge; 3) Postdisciplinarity as a form of post-existentialism; and 4) Departures from the What, Why and How of knowledge [1]. The chapter goes on to discuss these strains in more detail, and, at this juncture, I experienced a sort of epistemic unease. Specifically, I found that the claims Pernecky makes about ‘postdisciplinarity’ closely mirrored those of “decolonial theories,” which is the departure point for my doctoral studies. Furthermore, as I was reading this text against the material presence of Al Aqmar Mosque — completed around 519/1125 — in old Islamic Cairo, I felt that the conceptual vocabulary and various supposed strains of postdisciplinarity were unable to help me understand the uniqueness of this place. The only exception was the so-called “complexity-driven” strain of postdisciplinarity, but, as I discuss in more detail below, “complexity-driven approaches” far predate the birth of ‘postdisciplinarity.’ The disconnect between the material text, i.e. Al Aqmar Mosque, and the ‘theory’ reminded me of “postcolonial theories” which failed to rise up to the actual challenges of the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ and ‘coloniality of being’ present in our world.

There was a moment in the twentieth century when postcolonial theories represented hope for emancipation from the shackles of western civilization. Yet, the westernness of emancipation and the narrative of progress as a legacy of the northern enlightenment remained unquestioned in both critical and literary theories to varying degrees [2]. This persisted until the birth of decolonial theories, which shifted the focus to the larger regimes of sensing and knowing. Anibal Quijano’s “coloniality of power” introduced a world wherein the critique of the western colonial matrix of power (CMP) is systemically epistemic in some strands of decoloniality and material in some others. If we can suppose that there is white theory and brown theory, the white theory of postdisciplinarity intriguingly adopted a similar paradigmatic agenda to decolonial theory. However, unlike the decolonialists, postdisciplinarians conveniently avoid making western civilization a target for critique.

It is a marker of change that theories in the north appeal to the south, yet the prefix “post-” prioritizes the intellectual legacy of the west, which harbored a plethora of movements in the twentieth century that start with this affixation. And while postdisciplinarity scholars, such as Pernecky, recognize that all knowledge is inseparable from its underlying social structures, three of the four strains of thought that he outlines in his “Unintroduction” are teeming with western epistemic ideals that do not put indigenous or southern ideals on equal footing with those of the north. This calls into question how “postdisciplinary research can emerge as a critical, decolonising project” when its strains champion such western ideals as criticalness, emancipation, post-existentialism, and the division of knowledge into epistemology and ontology, alongside the emphasis on methodology and democracy [3]. 

As for the first strain of postdisciplinarity associated with complexity, Pernecky argues that cultural and historical phenomena need an integrative, holistic approach [4]. Indeed, many intellectual traditions in the global south have also made this claim. It is not unique to postdisciplinarity, as Pernecky would have us believe. The Moroccan philosopher Taha Abdurrahman, as an example, made a similar argument in Tajdīd al-manhaj fī Taqwīm al-Turāth [Renewing the Method in Appraising the Tradition], where he asserted the need to transcend the traditional disciplinary boundaries in studying the Arabic-Islamic tradition [5]. But, certainly this goes unnoticed by Pernecky along with the entirety of the contemporary Arabic-speaking philosophical tradition. Even in recognizing the “decolonial stance” of  Linda Tuhiway Smith, Pernecky is more eager to appropriate one of the strands of decolonial theory into one of the strains of postdisciplinarity than to commit to the decolonial option of “epistemic disobedience” and the decolonial reckoning with the pervasive CMP [6].

In the fourth strain that Pernecky examines — “Departures from the What, Why, and How of knowledge” — he coopts the notion of ‘play’ from the decolonial feminist scholar Maria Lugones, famous for the “coloniality of gender,” offering us the eerily similar concept of ‘knowledge-as-play’ without openly acknowledging its decolonial undertones [7]. Postdisciplinarity, decolonially-speaking, contains echoes of postcolonial theory, which was/is still partially entrenched in western conceptual vocabulary. Not only do some of these strains resemble ‘theory’ originating from the south, but also they challenge the direction of ‘theory’ traveling from the south to the north, across the geopolitical divide that has actively separated the two regions since the onset of modernity [8]. In the case of Pernecky’s postdisciplinarity, it seems that theories of decoloniality cannot be absorbed without encasing them within the conceptual vocabulary of western modernity.

One additional feature of Pernecky’s “Unintroduction,” and the edited volume it is embedded in, is its absolute reliance on — and uncritical stance regarding — the use of the vernacular European languages that belong to the CMP, namely, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and English [9]. As Walter D. Mignolo observes in The Politics of Decolonial Investigations, it is these six European languages that exert control over the production and dissemination of knowledge [10]. Interestingly, the project of postdisciplinarity further reduces this pool of languages to only English and French. The absence of non-western languages such as Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, or Russian (to name just a few) suggests that the continuous stream of knowledge produced into English, from all ethnicities, is enough for postdisciplinary research. Such a choice reiterates the outdated logic of “the west vs. the rest,” a mindset incapable of adapting to today’s changing world.

After reading Pernecky’s take on postdisciplinarity, I arrived at the preliminary conclusion that ‘postdisciplinarity’ is postcolonialism 2.0 or, more accurately, an attempt to whitewash ‘theory’ by emptying it of its critique of the western regimes of sensing and knowing. Al Aqmar Mosque did not need postdisciplinarity to be appreciated. As a site intrinsically linked to the moon both in Arabic and in its physical form, the Al Aqmar Mosque remains unnoticed within the framework of the solar Gregorian calendar, which underpins the ideals driving postdisciplinary research. This seemingly arbitrary disconnect between the political neutrality of postdisciplinarity and the rich materiality of the pre-1500 Al Aqmar exemplifies the inadequacy of postdisciplinarity to engage with the nuanced, politically-charged layers of signification specific to non-western monuments, artifacts, and traditions. For the non-west, the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ and the ‘coloniality of being’ are two premises that are embedded in the material presence of non-western objects.

NOTES

[1] Pernecky, T. (2020). An unintroduction to postdisciplinarity. In Postdisciplinary Knowledge (1st ed., pp. 1–21). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429058561-1

[2] For more on the ‘coloniality’ of critical theory, see Allen, A. (2016). The end of progress: Decolonizing the normative foundations of critical theory. Columbia University Press. On the ethnocentrism of theory and the failure of contemporary theory to address Arabic-Islamic theory, see Abdelmageed, M. (2022) (De-)linking Arabic-Islamic poetics in contemporary literary theory, Cairo Studies in English, 2022(1) 99-128. https://doi.org/10.21608/cse.2022.139987.1119

[3] Pernecky, 2020, p. 10.

[4] Ibid, pp. 7-9.

[5] Abdurrahman, T. (1994). Tajdīd al-manhaj fī Taqwīm al-Turāth, Centre Culturel Arabe, pp. 125–126; 237–242.

[6] Pernecky, 2020, p. 10.

[7] Ibid, pp. 14-15. Note that Chapter 6 by Tomas Pernecky and Lois Holzman is dedicated to “knowledge as play” but avoids any mention of decoloniality.

[8] See Walsh, C. E., Mignolo, W. D., & Segato, R. L. (2024). Introduction. In A. Quijano, W. D. Mignolo, R. L. Segato, & C. E. Walsh (Eds.; 1st edition), Aníbal Quijano: Foundational essays on the coloniality of power. Duke University Press.

[9] Pernecky, T. (2020). Postdisciplinary Knowledge. Routledge.

[10] Mignolo, W. D. (2021). The politics of decolonial investigations. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478002574, p. 47.