Unlearning History: Europe in the Wake of African Political Thought

Siba Grovogui’s Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy is a text that recuperates a modality of critical thought about an emergent object of modern governmentality generally ignored by the discipline and discourse of international relations. International relations, according to Grovogui, has downplayed some of the most critical and innovative moral and political thinking of the anticolonial world in the twentieth century, to its detriment. In its asymmetrical rendering as a form of reason distilled through nineteenth-century moral precepts and, later, empire, international relations seems unduly burdened by its historicist fictions and unable to keep its object in sight as it morphs into ever more complex developments in international politics. As Lalu argues, in Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy Grovogui does more than simply record the birth of a discipline or merely provide reasons for its dispersal. He also asks us to ponder the prospects of occupying the space of thought of those who found themselves intricately invested in both home and the world after being flung into the moral and political aporia of empire and nation.