Theory and Praxis: Reflections on the Colonization of Knowledge

This book proposes a New Enlightenment – a new way of looking at the non-Western world. Breaking new ground, the essays chart a course beyond Eurocentric discourses (which completely ignore the contributions of Asia, Africa and Latin-America) and forms of nativism (which are usually ethnocentric discourses).

The volume:

• Focuses on the historical aspects of knowledge-production and its colonization;
• Examines the genre of multilinear histories that displaces hegemonic Eurocentric discourses;
• Enlarges the scope of multilinear historicism whereby Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas are drawn in a new humanistic knowledge system;
• Studies how colonization is resisted in both the non-Western and Western world.

Lucid and engaging, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of social theory, education, politics and public policy.

Murzban Jal is Professor and Director at the Centre for Educational Studies, Indian Institute of Education, Pune, India. He was Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla and Senior Fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi, India. He is the author of ten books including The Seductions of Karl Marx (2010), Zoroastrianism: from Antiquity to the Modern Period (2012), The New Militants (2014), Why We Are Not Hindus (2015), What Ails Indian Muslims (2016), Challenges for the Indian Left (2017), In the Name of Marx (2018), Zarathushtra and the Inmates of Paradise (2018), Yusuf and Zuleika: On the Return of the Despot (2019) and The Prison House of Alienation (2019). He has published extensively in various national and international journals.

Jyoti Bawane is Associate Professor at the Centre for Educational Studies, Indian Institute of Education, Pune, India. She has a doctorate in Education and has done her master’s in education and psychology. She is the author of Ashram Schools: Teacher Context and Challenges (2012) and has published extensively in the field of education. She is a Fulbright Scholar and an Erasmus Scholar.