(De)-coloniality/Contemporaneity: An Ideographic Journey towards Nomothetics.

Page No.10
To know the other or more specifically the European Other
To disengage oneself.
The primary stage to disentangle contemporaneity is to realize the differences and the similarities.
Every nation in the world is blessed with different states of histories and genealogies which have
been disintegrated through colonialism. But the histories, supposed of India and Africa, has always
been a part of European imagination. If we steer back to the works of Herodotus and his
contemporaries we find evidences of the names of India and Africa under different nomenclatures.
India and Africa where never colonized in the same fashion. Thus, while working on the perspectives
of decolonization, the theological structure of India can never match with the humanistic struggle in
Africa and this where post-colonialism fails to function.
As we speak about decolonization or delinking of contemporariness in contemporaneity,
humanism and humanistic issues automatically falls into the frontline. The question of humanities
has always been a problematic one. Colonial Humanities invented the human beings as the non-
humans or in other words those who didn’t confirm to the Eurocentric notion of humanism. When
we engage discussions about India, Africa or may be Latin America most of the times we are unaware
about their originalities and continue to discuss. The Zapatistas, a revolutionary leftist political and
militant group based in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico declares, ‘Because we are equal
we have to different.’ It is difference in equality and the equalities in difference which must be
harnessed in order reclaim and reorder the layers of our existence or what I favour to term as the
Layer Theory. The tension of ideas that exists between individuals or may be within the different
consciences of the same individual is a crucial element to understand the prospects of the present.
Thus in order to recreate or reform the concept of contemporaneity the journey must embark
through self-assertion of the self by the self not by the other or the other of the self. To simplify, the
west has been defining not only its own self but has also mysteriously taken the responsibility on its
own shoulders to define the others as well or may be doing the same in a differently manipulative
way.
Professor Gerald Taiaiake Alfred of Victoria University in one of his speeches about the
Mohawks strongly voices that:
These are my words. These are my thoughts. I am a Mohawk person. I am come from the community of
Mohawks. But here I am not representing my community but I am speaking of myself…I am not talking
about the Indians. But I am talking as an Indian who belongs to the Indian community.
And yes! This is the very first step towards decolonization, asserting the self through establishing a
sepulchre of oral discourse which needs to be re-enlivened enlivened and practiced. The system of oralism will
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2016)
Issue- March
ISSN 2347-6869 (E) & ISSN 2347-2146 (P)
(De)-coloniality/Contemporaneity: An Ideographic Journey towards Nomothetics by Sayan Dey page no. 1-22