Volume: 1  Number: 1  Page: 27–34

Discourses of (non)Western Subjectivity and Philosophical Recovery

Sharon Harvey Faculty of Applied Humanities, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

This commentary addresses the lead paper by Narcisa Paredes-Canilao, an intriguing account of discussions in the University of the Philippines over differing knowledge claims. This is a local debate that has global ramifications for the status of indigenous knowledges and discourses and their levels of interactivity with theoretical positions emanating from the West. The argument put forward here by Narcisa Paredes-Canilao is that certain strains of postcolonial theory are at best irrelevant and at worst destructive to the work of postcolonial resistance in the Philippines and other previously colonised countries. She proposes that it is the recovery of indigenous/traditional non-Western discourses that will support and facilitate a decolonisation of the subject. This paper argues that the two positions need not constitute a differend. Both can work towards productive resistance. While there is an urgent need to remember and reconfigure the past through non-Western lenses, there are also current contemporary forms of colonisation that must be deconstructed and talked back to. Postcolonial theory offers rich philosophical resources with which to think, talk and write outside the story of the West, as do indigenous and other non-Western knowledge forms. The paper ends with a brief consideration of indigenous research discourses in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Keywords: postcolonialism, indigenous discourses, Philippines, Aotearoa/New Zealand, resistance, neoliberalism

© 2006 S. Harvey

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