Metropolitan anxieties: a critical appraisal of Sartre’s theory of colonialism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within postcolonial studies there is now a well‐established wariness of the Eurocentric or metrocentric tendencies of postcolonial theory itself. For some the charge that postcolonial theory continues to interpret the history and culture of non‐European societies through European frames of reference can be traced to the provocative theory of colonisation developed by French philosopher, novelist and political activist Jean‐Paul Sartre. We subject Sartre’s theory of colonialism to critical scrutiny and question this claim. We locate Sartre’s philosophical works and political activism against the backdrop of a twentieth‐century Parisian intellectual life marked by fierce struggles over the future of Marxism. Sartre’s metrocentricism was tempered by his tortuous efforts to write existentialism into the Marxist canon, a theoretical endeavour that led him to replace Marxism’s eschatology and linear teleology with a series of circular histories based on the complex ways in which separate anti‐colonial movements spiral off following their own contingent, creolised and anarchic trajectories. Sartre’s desire to contest and rethink rather than submit to and seal metrocentric framings of colonialism and anti‐colonialism derived from his weddedness to a historicised phenomenology of existence as spatial. Critical interrogation of the complicity of postcolonial theory in the global march of metrocentric ontology affords both geography and postcolonial studies a new impetus for dialogue. Any project that aspires to a transcendence of metropolitan modes of knowing must first better understand the situated production and complexities of such modes of knowing. Before scrutinising how the colonising tendencies of postcolonial theory might best be handled, there is a need to map historical geographies of the different theoretical projects and practices that have emerged in different metropolitan locations and at different times.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".