ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses Immanuel Wallerstein's Utopistics in light of Enrique Dussel's transmodernity. The chapter explains about Wallerstein's concept of Utopistics in light of his world-system analysis and his prediction of a forthcoming bifurcation towards a new historical system. It also discusses epistemic racism and Eurocentric fundamentalism. The chapter proposes Utopistics in light of the critique to epistemic racism and Eurocentric fundamentalism. Immanuel Wallerstein insists that the creation of a program toward a new and alternative historical-system could never be the result of the ideas of an individual, but that instead it must necessarily result from a global debate. A major consequence of the European colonial expansion and its epistemic racism is what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called "epistemicide" against non-Western epistemologies. The "Balkanization" that results from the identitarian politics ends up reproducing, in an inverted form, the same essentialism and fundamentalism of the hegemonic Eurocentric discourse.