ABSTRACT
Euro-American theory provides our existing academic interpretations of the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change them. The impulse toward theorizing anew has always arisen within the urgency of historical conjunctures. Historically, decolonization provided an impetus within the global south to imagine new relations to the past, present, and future; free of the political and intellectual teleologies imposed by the civilizational hierarchies of a colonial epistemology. There arose the necessity to look back, neither with nostalgia, nor anger. Rather, it was the imperative to recover from the paradigm imposed by colonial rule that had allowed for an engagement with native pasts only as irrelevant, outmoded, or mired in forms of imagination unsuited to the idea of the modern. Colonialism had inculcated an amnesia toward local forms of intellection with their own long histories, an amnesia this chapter tries to address and redress.
