Beyond the margins of metanarrativity: an inquiry on prejudice, decoloniality and cross-cultural discourse

This paper sets upon the elaboration of two inter-related enquiries: What do being and otherness look like beyond the margins of metanarrativity? What would the crossing of such margins entail? It takes as its basic assumption that prejudice arises from out of the historicity of being. A thesis of prejudice as a pre-reflexive operation or heuristic of the understanding a subject employs in order to arrive upon the conscious inclination to intuit that p is presented. Furthermore, it is posited that human understanding and rational inquiry are a fortiori grounded upon antecedent onto-phenomenological, hermeneutic and epistemic projects of being disclosed in metanarrativity. Metanarrativity, it is here maintained, constrains the horizon of intelligibility and truth in the discursive encounter of being with the “other” of alterity. It precludes the conditions of possibility for a non-prejudiced and value-neutral view in cross-cultural discourse. As such, it may be argued that an understanding of being and otherness cannot ascend the horizon of intelligibility without the sublating operation of prejudice. Prejudice, it is here argued, is sublating in the sense that it prefigures the possibilities for signification, subverting our interrogations from what is the state of affairs to mere intuitends of the form what it is like. Given that metanarrative discourses are invested in prejudice, it is therefore the task of decoloniality, set upon the cross-cultural discursive encounter between being and alterity, to take the physical appearance of an eschatology of liberation enacted in the everyday, performative praxis of non-domination.


Introduction
What do being and otherness look like beyond the margins of metanarrativity?What would the crossing of such margins entail?These two enquiries are the subject matter of this paper.Both will be contemplated within the context of cross-cultural discourse and take the response which anticipates them to be interrelated in some vein.Where the response to the former enquiry, to be dealt with in section III of this paper, appropriates the notion of prejudice as a prereflexive operation or heuristic of the understanding in order to arrive upon the conscious inclination to intuit or formulate the intuitends that p 1 and the response to the latter enquiry, to be dealt with in section IV of this paper, assumes the form of a movement or emancipatory philosophy of the subjugated; the practices of which labour toward inaugurating an originary self and articulating an eschatology of liberation apprehended here as the decolonial imaginary that is enacted in the everyday, performative praxis of non-domination.
In this paper, I take as a basic assumption that prejudice arises from out of the historicity of being and endeavour to sketch a thesis of prejudice as described above.Metanarrativity, it is here maintained, constrains the horizon of intelligibility and truth in the discursive encounter of being with alterity.The facticity of being a historical subject entails that human understanding and rational inquiry are, in virtue of this, a fortiori grounded upon antecedent ontophenomenological, hermeneutic and epistemic projects.This precludes the conditions of possibility for a non-prejudiced and value-neutral view in cross-cultural discourse.Such that it may be asserted that metanarrative discourses are intransigent and, by extension, are value-impregnating.Metanarrative discourses are invested in prejudice.It is the task of decoloniality, set upon the cross-cultural discursive encounter between being and alterity, to take the physical appearance of an eschatology of liberation enacted in the everyday, performative praxis of non-domination.
Section II of this paper outlines the problem of intransigence and predominance concerning the authority of metannaratives.In section III, I investigate the various conceptions of prejudice, namely, the standard view, cognitive or salience-structure view and propose a notion of prejudice as a pre-reflexive praxis.And in the last section, IV, I interrogate the task of decolonisation in regard to cross-cultural discourse.

Being and otherness beyond the margins of metanarrativity
I should perhaps make plain herein that the expression, "beyond the margins", presupposes a demarcation between a somethingness that can be named, indeed one that can be grasped, in virtue of it residing within the province of a given metanarrative, and a somethingness we cannot yet intuit or understand because it lies beyond the discursive schemata of an onto-phenomenology, hermeneutics and epistemology that is constrained by the authority of that given metanarrative.As such, the latter is misnamed and not given its proper signification but the vapid designation "alterity" or "otherness" or cognate intuition; perhaps in as much as its materiality cannot be grasped by working within the constraints of such authority.
Otherness is in fact the status taken to be the referent of that universe of possibilities for meaning not captured in the formal regularities of a metanarrative.The authority of a metanarrative delimits therefore the possibilities for meaning and identity formation.It labours only to render certain significations and interpretations of being viable and others not.
To give an example, for Mbembe (2017), discourses on meaning and self in regard to the black subject have always worked within the predominance of the metanarrative of slavery, colonisation and apartheid which, en passant, happens to be its provenance.The category "black", I argue, also functions as an intuition of otherness.He writes, [in] African writings of the self, the colony appears as a primal scene.But it occupies more than just the space of memory, functioning in the manner of a mirror.The colony is also represented as one of the signifying matrices of the language on past and present, identity and death.The colony is the body that gives substance and weight to subjectivity…Blacks bestow on the colony the attributes of a founding power in possession of a psyche… (Mbembe, 2017, p.104)And similarly, Wiredu makes the following reproach: Much less, of course, should there be an over-valuation of what comes from the West.In fact, however, exactly such an over-valuation , at an apparently semiconscious level, is the hallmark of that infelicity of the mind called colonial mentality that still afflicts us in African philosophy and other areas of African intellectual life.(2002, p.54)The metanarratives mentioned above have resulted in what Mbembe calls a "separation from oneself" (2001, p.78), manifesting an otherness entangled within the self.And I place the word otherness within the prudence of quotation marks for in this sense it represents an identity which inheres in the self but has been repudiated, repressed and denied intelligibility.Wherein the "authentic self has been substituted for the real self, turning the Black into a carrier, despite himself, of secret significations" (Mbembe, 2017, p.105).This separation from oneself, therefore, Mbembe explains, "leads to a loss of familiarity with the self to the point that the subject, estranged, is relegated to an alienated, almost lifeless identity.In place of being-connected-to-itself…that might have shaped experience, one is constituted out of an alterity in which the self becomes unrecognisable to itself" (Mbembe, 2017, p.78).
The estrangement and unfamiliarity to which Mbembe refers in the passage above seem counterposed with an assumption that the self existed, before the event of subjugation, in an authentic state of energy, freedom, panache, fulfilment, legitimacy, flourishing and jouissance.It is perhaps in this sense that the word "beyond" in the title of this paper is used, to appeal to the possibility of transcendence which is nigh inevitable.To wit, the possibility of being connected to itself, being becoming intelligible to itself or of coming to its own consciousness that it may be constituted out of an originary self once again.
But what are these margins for which the possibility to transcend exists?I want to understand the idea of a margin in cross-cultural discourse not as a distinguishing linearity, a site or a semiotic enclosure whose function is only to draw the contours of a metannarative of being and condemn whatever lies outside it to alienation, abjection or otherness.I am indeed inclined to understand a margin in cross-cultural discourse as a dialectical expanse of aporias and heterotopia.
In comprehending this composite expanse, I appropriate from Derrida's intimation of "not knowing where to go" (1993, p.12)."Not knowing where to go" is an originary state of the self wherein it is no longer possible for the subject to constitute the exigent onto-phenomenological, hermeneutic and epistemic project of being and contemporaneity with the agency of a given metannarative.It is a scene we enter without ready-to-hand tools, of even identerian "push and pull", of contestation and accord, of emancipation and simultaneous repression, affirmation and denial, of precariousness and creativity marked by intentionality and accident.
[W]here the very project or the problematic task becomes impossible and where we are exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem, and without prosthesis, without possible substitution, singularly exposed in our absolute and absolutely naked uniqueness, that is to say, disarmed, delivered to the other, incapable even of sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect the interiority of a secret.There, in sum, in this place of aporia, there is no longer any problem.Not that, alas or fortunately, the solutions have been given, but because one could no longer even find a problem that would constitute itself and that one would keep in front of oneself, as a presentable object or project, as a protective representative or a prosthetic substitute, as some kind of border still to cross or behind which to protect oneself.(Derrida, 1993, p.12)In this composite expanse, the rationality of metanarrativity together with its regularities become recumbent carcasses, unable to elide onto or respond to the exigencies of contemporaneity.The only option is for the self to assume its will to meaning and constitute itself out of its own creativity.

The problem of legitimate prejudices and cross-cultural discourse
This section enquires into the nature of legitimate prejudices.Prejudice refers, in this instance, to a class of doxastic statements or judgements about which we maintain the sense that they are, as a matter of fact, true because they are legitimate even despite interrogation with evidence demonstrating that their epistemic structure is contrarily unsound.A simple criterion by which it may be determined whether a prejudice is legitimate or not is to ask if indeed its belief content is internally justified.For a belief-content to be internally justified requires that the subject holding a prejudice have access to its basis (belief-justifier henceforward) either through reflection or direct awareness of her mental states, upon which the construction of a set of epistemic principles that will enable the subject to appraise her holding of a particular prejudice is contingent (Chisholm, 1988;Pappas, 2017).Belief-justifiers may take the form of other beliefs, experiences or "facts about the production of the belief" (Pappas, 2017).In a word, for a prejudice to be internally justifiable, it requires only the consideration of the subjects's inner world as sufficient constraint without recourse to external conditions (Chisholm, 1988).
To investigate the epistemic and ethical soundness of a subject's prejudice, I argue, one must perforce presuppose a logical connexion between justification and truth.Because it is possible that prejudices may be internally justified at the same time false or base, it follows, there ought to be a standard external to the subject's inner world upon which we can ground our assessments concerning its epistemic and ethical status.To be sure, the internalist criterion proposed above is silent on the matter concerning justification and truth.I shall not however enter into this discussion in this paper.It is mentioned here perfunctorily.Instead, it will suffice in its present formulation so far as it offers a descriptive account in regard why prejudices exhibit an incredulity toward counterevidence and what it is that makes them indiscernible to deliberate self-scrutiny.
It is the putative view held of prejudice which takes the form of a negatively valenced, evidentially false stereotype in reference to a social group and its constituent individuals (Begby, 2013).I shall denote this the standard view of prejudice henceforward.Prejudice understood according with the standard view, it is here argued, always arises from some specifiable "mishandling of evidence" or "failure to respond to evidence in the appropriate way" (Begby, 2013, p.90).It manifests an incredulity toward any counter-evidence external to the resources of the subject holding the prejudice.According to Fricker (2007), [p]rejudices are judgements, which may have a positive or a negative valence, and which display some (typically, epistemically culpable) resistance to counter-evidence owing to some affective investment on the part of the subject (p.35).
And adds to this the concept of a negative identity-prejudicial stereotype, as defined below: A widely held disparaging association between a social group and one or more attributes, where this association embodies a generalization that displays some (typically, epistemically culpable) resistance to counter-evidence owing to an ethically bad affective investment (Fricker, 2007, p.35).
Although the standard view succeeds in accounting for flagrant cases of prejudice, it cannot however be said to be generic of this class of statements.It cannot be an adequate generalisation for all doxastic statements or judgements we encounter in the world which instantiate prejudice.For it fails to adjudicate between some important cases of prejudice.To give a hypothetical example, A machine learning software is tasked with predicting the likeliness of a candidate, chosen at random, to secure an employment post at a hotly contested corporate firm located at an affluent area.It appears in the end that the candidates selected are all white males.And upon close evaluation, the algorithm used as one of its datasets was the demographic information of pre-vious candidates and the predicted risk for committing a criminal offense based on locality.It excluded nonwhite candidates, candidates not in close proximity to the firm, and those with a high likelihood to commit a criminal offense qua algorithm.What later transpired in a meeting announcing the candidates was that the attendants were all of the belief that 'only white men are good enough for the post' given what has historically been the case and their meeting the criterial standards.
It would stand to reason that the judgement made by the attendees appears prima facie to be of good evidential standing.While there may be nothing epistemically culpable with the conclusion they arrived upon, there is still something to be said that is prejudicial about this statement.On the part of the algorithm, it is plain that the software reproduced historical inequalities by using a dataset and predictive metric that are both clearly less favourable to non-white candidates.The pertinent point I want to bring to bear with this example is that it would appear non-paradigmatic cases are either not interpreted as prejudiced or seriously considered to warrant our appraisal in the standard view.
For this reason, Munton (2021) argues, contra standard view, that prejudices need not manifest in a negative emotion or behaviour, endorse a particular proposition, manifest poor evidential standing or connote a negative association between a social group and an attribute.Prejudice is rather enacted from the physiognomy of problematic salience structures, that is, the organisation or ordering of information in a subject's mind by way of differential accessibility, where the very belief content itself may not of necessity entail a falsity (p.1).She writes, [P]rejudice can arise purely through the organisation of information.Information is organised both by an individual's mind and their broader social context into what I shall call a salience structure, understood as an ordering of information by accessibility (Munton, 2021, p.1).
If I am correct in my understanding of salience structures, then prejudice thus entails an array of disparate mechanisms for belief formulation which the standard view may not comprehend.In generality, these are mechanisms in the charge of directing our attention and determining what information attends the court of belief formulation.Where salience structures are concerned, these mechanisms are responsible for our placing undue or even inappropriate attention to certain pieces of information as opposed to others.Prejudice on this latter account is then the missatribution of salience structures.And formally, a prejudicial salience structure is a "[a] prejudicial attitude towards a demographic group" which "can be constituted by a salience structure which is unduly organised around that demographic category" (Munton, 2021, p.13).This account runs akin to Fricker's (2007) understanding of identity-prejudicial stereotypes above.
In the case of the machine learning software cited above, the mechanism of selectivity seems to be at play when referring to the prejudicial algorithm used.This systematic exclusion by the method of stipulated criteria gives precedence to the salience of white men in the attendees' belief formulation in regard who will likely be the next candidate for the post.It is in this sense that "salience plays a role in determining what new beliefs an individual acquires" (Mounton, 2021, p.7).
The problem of legitimate prejudices refers to those prejudices that are not an outcome of "irrational contrivances of bias, motivated believing or similar mechanisms"; those prejudices that seem "epistemically insidious" and sound and may on occasion be true (Begby, 2013).These sorts of prejudices I believe are the sort that is incredulous to counter-evidence.The problem of legitimate prejudices cannot be fully comprehended from a unimodal treatment of the concept of prejudice as consisting only in thesis or hypothesis.
In what follows, it will be shown how a concept of prejudice as synthesis or heuristic of the understanding yields new insights into the problem that have never been anticipated.To comprehend prejudice as synthesis posits a relation, as it has already been intimated in section I of this paper, between prejudice, metanarrativity, being and otherness.
I want to draw attention now to a pre-reflexive understanding of prejudice within the schemata of cross-cultural discourse.I want to advance the idea that prejudice functions in the same mode as a non-thematic performative praxis.One that can only work from a starting point located within the delimitations of an assumption about the nature of knowledge.Having its foregrounding on a historical reference and ontology of being, predicated upon the historicity and generic generalisations or intuitions of a given metanarrative.
The concept of prejudice pertains, as it is originally understood, to an antecedent judgement one makes about a thing.This antecedence denotes an equiprimordial position and state in the non-thematic exercise of formulating an understanding of concrete encounters with alterity or otherness in cross-cultural discourse.It is an exact historical reference and moment in the ontology of being that is always anterior to the level of phenomenal experience and ontic understanding of the nature of a thing.On this account, prejudice is the fore-projection of meaning.It is the prereflective praxis of fore-projecting possibilities of meaning onto otherness, predicated upon the historicity of our hermeneutic and epistemological projects and coterminous value commitments.And shares synonymity with the exercise of taking a guess on what it is like to know that p.

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However, I must hasten to qualify herein that prejudice is not to be taken plainly as the vocation of taking a guess in arbitrary hermeneutic and epistemological vacuity.It is indeed the pre-reflective exercise if intuiting in an attempt to form distinct knowledge about a thing by the method of foreprojecting possibilities of meaning in regard knowing that p. Prejudice is non-factive.It is informed by the resources of our historicity, in an attempt to satisfy the pre-reflective desire to know that p which presents itself on the surface of cross-cultural discourse as an inclination to believe or intuit that p.Although prejudice presupposes to us foreprojections of meaning that are not borne out of the concrete instance of alterity itself, it remains an indispensable intermediary between our historicity and coming toward an understanding of otherness in cross-cultural discourse.Such that any critical inquiry into cross-cultural discourse must perforce take into consideration the problem of prejudice as its necessary starting point.
The facticity that prejudice is a pre-reflective vocation of synthesis and that it is non-factive evinces the observation that it can sometimes prove itself inaccessible to critical self-interrogation or self-reflection and thus may go entirely unchecked by reason notwithstanding the prudentiality and sobriety of our wits (Gadamer, 1989, p.268).And in consequence, its predicates are often taken as self-evident truths or generic generalisation-which function as intuitions-within a given metanarrative discourse and hence often exhibit an incredulity toward counter-evidence.
This eventuality gives rise to misunderstanding in crosscultural discourse.Misunderstandings occur when, for example, the research field worker discriminates a datum of otherness by drawing similarities and distinctions from the authority of her metanarrative of being in order to organise her encounter with the other into distinct articles of knowledge.And I take Heidegger to intimate something of even likeness when he writes, [t]he tendencies of understanding arise from out of the living present, which are then merely formed out in science in "exact" methodology; the "exactness of method" offers in itself no guarantee for correct understanding.The methodical scientific apparatuscritique of sources according to exact philological methods, etc.-can be fully intact, and still the guiding foreconception can miss the genuine object.(Heidegger, 2010, p.54)In consequence, being and otherness become disclosed and enclosed within the regularities and semiotics of the metanarrative.The field worker's metanarrativite constrains the horizon of intelligibility in the discursive encounter of being and the other of alterity.It precludes the conditions of possibility for a non-prejudiced and value-neutral view.As such, it may be argued that being and otherness cannot ascend the horizon of intelligibility without the sublating operation of prejudice.Prejudice, it is here argued, is sublating in the sense that it prefigures the possibilities for signification, subverting our interrogations from what is the state of affairs to mere anticipatory approximations of what it is like.It is in this sense that metanarrative discourses become value-impregnating, redolent of colonial domination.
The problem becomes plain when the prejudices an interlocutor asserts are taken as evidence for otherness in cross-cultural discourse.This would seem to be the case particularly, albeit not exclusively, in qualitative research methodologies (Bhattacharya & Kim, 2018).However, this should not be understood as saying that everytime an interlocutor makes an attempt at asserting a knowledge claim, she employs her prejudice as evidence in asserting the knowledge that p. Rather, a more modest claim is presented.Prejudice is used as a standard for evidence in making a distinct knowledge claim about otherness in cross-cultural discourse.Separate perhaps from the enquiry whether prejudices are indeed, as a matter of fact, evidence proper.And the more complicated problem of whether interlocutors holding a legitimate prejudice, conceived as both hypothesis and synthesis, should be said to have committed a doxastic wrong for holding that prejudice.The argument presented here is similar in vein to that which Climenhaga (2018) and Conte (2022) make where they defend the claim that philosophers do in fact use intuitions as evidence proper.
Taking this view, it is not difficult to conceive how one may be disposed to hold that prejudice is grounded upon the assumption that to come to an understanding of otherness, one must accept the presupposition that the distinct knowledge of the thing itself must lie in some relation within a shared metanarrative schemata already established within the mind of the interlocutor in cross-cultural discourse.Most interlocutors would tend to be in agreement in their belief that p as a datum of concrete evidence if they share the same metanarrative interpretation in regard p.However, it is important to note that the "guiding foreconception can miss the genuine object" despite interlocutors being in agreement about its evidential truth (Heidegger, 2010, p.54).

Coloniality, eschatology of liberation and the task of decolonisation
Which forms of being or discursive spaces can vindicate and properly fulfil the decolonial imaginary (Serequeberhan, 2012, p.88)?I will take the pertinence of this question as the precinct and very essence of what I have denoted as the decolonial imaginary.But foremost, I must outline what is meant by decolonisation or rather what I surely do not intend when I employ the utility of its concept in this paper.For the purport of this paper, I shall bracket the preliminary opprobium regarding questions on the grounds and possibility of decolonisation.Instead, I shall focus on how the decolonial imaginary ought to look like in what I have called the praxis (or practices) of non-dominationa concept that names the nexus of the totality of actions which enact freedom.Perhaps I should start by stating that a great many examples of such enactments of freedom have already occurred in the past-which have all taken the physical complexion of violent eventuations of the African liberation struggle.To thematically locate these in their generality, I shall appropriate Amilcar Cabral's formulation of a "return to the source" which in a manner of speaking decoloniality as a "cultural renaissance" that is a slow process toward reclaiming the precolonial historicity of African existence (Cabral, 1973, p.59).
If by a "return to the source" it is meant the movement toward or search in pursuit of something autochthonous and an original experience of the self left unsullied by the world, or that which is redolent of the ontology of meanings inherent in precolonial times, then I would like us to be a little cautious in our endeavour for decolonialisation.The first rejoinder being that meaning is a historical concept.We are not coherent subjectivities encountering the world without effect to the constitutive ontology of being.We are produced by our world encounters, and in turn, we change it and we are changed by it.Meaning is co-constructed upon a discursive horizon.This co-construction of meaning is indeed a struggle for intelligibility and is contingent upon our historicity counterposed with contemporaneity and the emergent vagaries of our encounters with the world.And as an exercise in contradistinction, so-called ornamental or inauthentic meaning is thrusted upon the individual by domination.
Hence, decolonisation as liberation, and liberation defined as a movement toward that preserved state of autochthony, ought to be treated with certain precautions and constraint as this may inevitably presuppose the hypothesis that there exists a certain state or predestination in the ontology of being that, "as a conquence of certain historical, economic, and social processes, has been concealed, alienated, or imprisoned in and by the mechanisms of repression.According to this hypothesis, all that is required is to break these repressive deadlocks and man will be reconciled with himself" (Rainbow, 1997, pp.282-283).
We have observed in the past instances of such an understanding of decolonisation as predestination, as characterised in the failures of Leopold Sengor's Negritute and continue to observe in some current trends assuming the selfsame stance of a romanticised return to the source.These constructions often come together with a general, ill-developed eschatology of liberation that comprehends the end of struggle as the fulfilment of a promise which invests itself in the satisfaction of a desire for intelligibility or hope for an authentic self that would be free from the incursions of privation, a self that would be defined by the sclerotic semiotics of a precolonial historicity.Such that.
the "return to the source" is of no historical importance unless it brings not only real involvement in the struggle for independence, but also complete and absolute identification with the hopes of the mass of the people, who contest not only the foreign culture but also the foreign domination as a whole (Cabral, 1973, p.63).
This pursuit of a decolonial predestination-respecting an eschatology of liberation-whose materiality is enacted as a series of negations or renunciation of the self, that is, a kind of negative ontology of being that moves in the mode of negation ad absurdum eventuates the form of a hegemonic vapidity that imposes its fantasies, appetites and desires by the force of native domination.The anxieties which lead us to believe in the possibility of such predestination, I argue, arise from the existential ruptures between individual subjectivity and the metanarrative ontology of an identity that is forcibly given rather than co-constructed from the dialectical expanse of aporias and heterotopia.Wherefrom the Other of alterity becomes intelligible in the account of her own subjectivity and creativity.
The dialectical character of identity lies in the fact that an individual (or a group) is only similar to certain individuals (or groups) if it is also different to other individuals (or groups).The definition of an identity, individual or collective, is at the same time the affirmation and denial of a certain number of characteristics which define the individuals or groups, through historical (biological and sociological) factors at a moment of their development (Cabral, 1973, p.64)There inheres in each society what we may denote a general metanarrative which sets out the parameters for our understanding of being and alterity-preserved, repeated and redistributed over history wherein the subject is produced and operates within its performative constraints.
The materiality of such metanarratives constitutes our social reality, truth games and through discursive rules, categories and practices; constrains our subjectivity and will to mean such that it becomes impossible to think outside its prejudices, delimiting the realm of reason and madness.To arise to the horizon of intelligibility, as it would appear, is to be constituted in this metanarrative.This is what I was signifying in the forgoing by the notion of ornamental or inauthentic meaning.
The de-of decolonisation is therefore a universal praxis for any emancipatory philosophy of the subjugated whose purpose is to secure the individual conditions of possibility for non-domination.The corollary to this, I maintain, is the achievement of certain physical and performative transformations toward the attainment of a rehumanised mode of being or subjectivity.If such praxis is to serve its practitioners faithfully, I argue, then it must be an activity that turns into itself, that is, its vigilance must also tend to the preoccupations of its own internal mechanisms.And to state it plainly, it must therefore be a critical work of decolonisation onto decolonisation, or the practice of non-domination onto the structures of native domination.A kind of simultaneous decentering that also decenters itself.And more aptly, a double movement of concurrent self-affirmation and undoing.
In a sense, the practice of non-domination is complex in it holds to some strand of Heidegger's Destruktion the purpose of which is to exhibit an originary ontology of self wherein at last "we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being" (Heidegger, 2001, p.44).

Decolonisation and Destruktion
In the context of decolonisation, Heidegger's Destruktion entails a movement toward a precolonial moment before the moment of subjugation.This is the referent form of authenticity and autochthony that often bespeaks of the current trends in decoloniality thought.Although I am greatly sympathetic to this manner of thinking, I must be clear in my departure with it by forewarning that it hazards taking on the appearance of an uncritical romanticism with Africa's precolonial past.And as intimated in the forgoing, because of its insistence with a concrete predestination and brief moment in the existentiality of the African subjectivity, it fails to open up the originative ground for the emergence and intelligibility of a contemporary subjectivity whose meaning arises from the temporal horizon of complex relations immanent within the context of the historicity of coloniality and the contemporaneity of the struggle for non-domination.