Author ｜
Leigh Jenco
Abstract ｜
This essay offers a fresh look at the “legitimacy of Chinese philosophy” debate. Many recent assessments of the debate argue that it lacks focus and significance, and threatens to reify essentialist binaries of “China” versus “the West.” I argue, in contrast, that the debate actually raises several issues of great significance to the globalization of knowledge, and that these extend beyond the internal concerns of any particular marginalized body of thought. The debate asks how, in the very process of enabling their translation into presumably more “modern” languages of intellectual expression, the terms of a specific academic discipline shape and constrain the development of particular forms of knowledge. In doing so, the debate reveals the inequalities of power that ironically underlie attempts to include culturally marginalized bodies of thought within established disciplines, and suggests the range of alternatives that are silenced or forgotten when this “inclusion” takes place.
keywords ｜
Chinese philosophy, postcolonial theory, discipline, knowledge, power