Changing Theory by Ed, Dilip Menon
This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere.
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“Changing Theory aims, with intelligence and energy, to engage in the remaking of our
conceptual instrumentarium by recovering, through key-word analyses in sixteen languages,
what capitalism, colonialism, and the rest sought to destroy. The contributors constitute a
galaxy of today’s most innovative and critical thinkers from the Global South, and make this
book an unprecedented—and never more needed—resource for theoretical renovation.”
— Sheldon Pollock, Arvind Raghunathan Professor Emeritus of Sanskrit and South Asian
Studies, Columbia University
“…an impressive array of essays evidencing what today is indisputable: the irreversible
shift of knowledge, understanding, and sensing away from 500 years of the consolidation
of Western knowledge, regulations of knowing, and vocabulary. The book has stellar
reconstitutions of hitherto marginalized praxes of living and knowing…a signal contribution
to the explosion of the North Atlantic Universal and the rise of the Planetary Pluriversal.”
— Walter D. Mignolo, William Hane Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance
Studies, Duke University, and author of The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021)
“…takes aim at the unconcern for linguistic difference in critical vocabularies of the global
public sphere, and introduces a rich selection of keywords…that critique colonial modes of
measurement, logical argument, and physical orientation in the world. The juxtaposition
of terms, each examined from the perspective of the specific language in which its theory
speaks, advances the project of constituting non-universalist epistemologies. A bold
experiment in critical world-building from the Global South, this volume is an indispensable
tool for reimagining concept-geography [and] cultural translation… Changing Theory changes
‘theory’ as we know it.”
— Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University
“This work is a milestone, marking the Global South both as a field and as an epistemological
revolution that is happening around the world. It is not only limited to criticism and
deconstruction of colonial knowledge, Eurocentrism, or the North as intellectual lens, as most
post-colonial theory has done, but re-discovers the contemporary nature of Southern concepts,
and in their singularities and mutually associated global context, reconstructs the world’s
picture and the universe of our knowledge…This book will be remembered as a classic.”
— Wang Hui, Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University
This book is an original, systematic, and radical attempt at decolonizing critical theory. Drawing on linguistic concepts from 16 languages from Asia, Africa, the Arab world, and South America, the essays in the volume explore the entailments of words while discussing their conceptual implications for the humanities and the social sciences everywhere. The essays engage in the work of thinking through words to generate a conceptual vocabulary that will allow for a global conversation on social theory which will be necessarily multilingual.
With essays by scholars, across generations, and from a variety of disciplines – history, anthropology, and philosophy to literature and political theory – this book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers, and students of critical theory and the social sciences.