Introduction

Unthinking Eurocentrism focuses on Eurocentrism and multiculturalism in popular culture. It is written in the passionate belief that an awareness of the intellectually debilitating effects of the Eurocentric legacy is indispensable for comprehending not only contemporary media representations but even contemporary subjectivities. Endemic in present-day thought and education, Eurocentrism is naturalized as 'common sense'. Philosophy and literature are assumed to be European philosophy and literature. The residual traces of centuries of axiomatic European domination inform the general culture, the everyday language, and the media, engendering a fictitious sense of the innate superiority of European-derived cultures and peoples. Both in the media and in the academy, recent years have witnessed energetic debates about the interrelated issues of Eurocentrism, racism, and multiculturalism. Eurocentric thinking attributes to the 'West' an almost providential sense of historical destiny. Eurocentrism, like Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged point.