CRITIQUE Dialogue – Dialogue on James Tully’s Dialogue and Decolonization

On 26 October 2023, CRITIQUE hosted a discussion of James Tully’s new book Dialogue and Decolonization: Historical, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives (Bloomsbury). What follows is a transcript of Part I of the dialogue between Professor Tully, the book’s editor Professor Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach, and CRITIQUE Co-Director Jared Holley. It has been edited for clarity.

Please cite as Jared Holley ed., “Dialogue and Decolonization: James Tully, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach, and Jared Holley in Dialogue”. CRITIQUE, 26 October 2023, https://critique.sps.ed.ac.uk/dialogue-and-decolonization

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JARED HOLLEY: Welcome to the first of our Critique Dialogues, which is a dialogue on this wonderful new book: Dialogue and Decolonization by Professor James Tully and edited by Professor Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach.

It’s customary to say that people need no introduction, and then to give them one. And I’m going to follow that custom here, although briefly…

James Tully is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Law at the University of Victoria. He’s also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Emeritus, Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation. In 2010 he was awarded the Killam prize in the humanities for his outstanding contribution to scholarship and Canadian public life. He’s written widely, of course: in political and legal theory and philosophy, and their history; public philosophy, freedom, constitutionalism, non-violence civic engagement and indigenous-settler relations. His two-volume work, Public Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge University Press, 2008) was awarded the CB MacPherson Prize by the Canadian Political Science Association for the best book in Political Theory, written in English or French in Canada (2008-2010).

Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach is full professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She’s the editor of the Journal of World Philosophies and two series with Bloomsbury Press: Bloomsbury Introductions to World Philosophies and Bloomsbury Studies in World Philosophies. And, of course, she’s the editor of this book that we’ll be discussing, forthcoming next month with Bloomsbury: Dialogue and Decolonization: historical, philosophical and political perspectives.

Thank you both, Jim and Monika, for being here and joining us, and thank you to Bloomsbury for providing us with an advanced copy of the book. We’ve all enjoyed engaging it.

The book begins by asking us to start a dialogue with the participants saying “where they’re coming from” and “why they’re here”. I’d like to start our dialogue that way. Starting with Jim and Monika, can I invite you to tell us where you are coming from and why you are here. Perhaps, Jim first, and then Monika.

JAMES [JIM] TULLY: Okay, Jared. Thank you very much. And, Jared, I think Monika and I both want to thank you for organizing this event and the whole seminar around it. It must have taken a huge amount of organizational time, and we’re greatly appreciative of it and looking forward to the dialogue that follows after this brief introduction.

Well, Jared has already introduced me. So I’ll just say: I am speaking to you from my office at the University of Victoria situated on the traditional unceded territory of the Lek’wenjen (Songhees and Esquimalt) and WSANEC peoples on what is now called Vancouver Island. So that’s where I’m coming from, Jared.

MONIKA KIRLOSKAR-STEINBACH: Okay and I am Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach. Talking to you today from a small Dutch village close to Amsterdam built, of course, by many laborers, colonial capital and the capital which is moving around today. I have my roots, the roots of my family, in India, in the West of India, and many of my intellectual roots in Germany. So I am, in a third place, and speaking to you from these different roots, and with a very big interest in world philosophies, but also in another understanding of how we do political philosophy.

And let me finally close this opening intervention by just saying: thank you very much for inviting us to talk to you about the book, and with so many interesting people out there.

JARED: Thank you very much for joining us.

I’ll just say that we’re here at the University of Edinburgh, where we’ve had the pleasure of engaging with this book in a seminar series, and throughout our undergraduate teaching. So, for the past 3 years, undergraduates at the University of Edinburgh have been required to read “De-Parochializing Political Theory, and Beyond” in our first-year introductory course, “Political Thinkers”. My undergraduate honours seminar on “Anticolonial Political Thought” has read the entire book over 3 weeks. And at Critique we’ve held a seminar with PhD students and faculty here to engage in somewhat more detail alongside the undergraduate community as well. So, it’s really something that’s been setting the agenda and part of the environment here at the University of Edinburgh for the last month. And I think – I hope people agree – that the environment has been improved by doing so. So, thank you all very much.

This book, as I say, is a wonderful book. Thank you for the contribution. For those who haven’t read it yet, it’s presented in three main parts, and what we thought we’d do is just address each of them in turn.

The first essay, the lead essay, is “De-Parochializing Political Theory, and Beyond”. Jim, this essay originated at a conference in Victoria in 2012, and it will now be published for a third time next month in 2023. And of course, it also looks back to and builds upon your earlier work – both more programmatic methodological essays and examples of what you call “dialogues of reciprocal elucidation”.

You write in the book that “de-parochializing shares many similarities with projects to decolonize, provincialize, and de-imperialize political theory”. I wonder if you could begin by just explaining again for us: What do you mean by deparochializing? What is it about the dominant traditions of Western political theory that you see as requiring their deparochializing? And perhaps – how do you see the relationship between this deparochializing approach and your dialogical public philosophy more broadly, with which I think many in the audience will be familiar.

JIM: Okay, thank you for that question, Jared. It’s a great pleasure to begin to address it and kick off this seminar discussion of the book.

I should mention to everybody that Jared was a student here at the University of Victoria, so I’ve known him and admired his work for a long time, probably longer than everyone else in the network. So, it’s really a great pleasure to be here dialoguing with him and all your students.

Deparochialize is a term that my friend Melissa Williams invented in the early 2000s. She was a colleague of mine at the University of Toronto, and she is a leading political theorist in North America. She established a kind of research –now worldwide, including South Africa, Japan, and so on – trying to put Western political theory in conversation with non-Western traditions in a way quite similar to the way Monika does in her journal, The Journal of World Philosophies. So, Melissa invented this term, which I hadn’t heard before, and then she said: “let’s have a workshop out at University of Victoria in 2012 on it and bring some of the people working from around the world to talk about it”.

So that’s how I had inherited it from Melissa. And here’s how I interpreted it. I mean I spoke to Melissa about it, and it is quite similar to her use of the term. But my first attempt to say something about it, and the first draft of this article, “De-Parochializing Political Theory, and Beyond” was written for the 2012 workshop at the University of Victoria, and David Owen was present at that conference or workshop.

So, the thought is, first of all, that a lot of Western political theory tends to think of itself as universal – or providing a kind of disclosure of the world – which then is then talked about in these Western terms. So, the first step in deparochializing is to say, “wait a minute”, that pre-judgment of universality or cosmopolitanism needs to be placed back in its Western traditions and seen as parochial. It’s a way of talking about world systems and so on, if you wish, but from a Western tradition. So, step one in deparochializing is actually to parochialize presumptive claims of universality that sit in a lot of Western theories that I grew up with – as prejudgments, in Heidegger’s way of putting it. We just disclose the field in this language we’ve inherited. So, step number one is, we just take them back and say: “Well, these are Western ways of talking about these issues”. So, we put it back in their Western traditions.

And then you ask, well, how do you bring these prejudgments that universalize, globalise or modernize, and put them back in your traditions? And the answer is, how we free a person from that prejudgment is by entering into what I’m calling “dialogues of reciprocal elucidation” – which I inherited from Michel Foucault. It’s a term he developed quite late in life.

So, what are dialogues of reciprocal elucidation? How do they free individuals from the prejudgments or modes of disclosure that we throw over the world when we start talking about it? It’s not a fault; if you look at the whole history of phenomenology in the twentieth century, it’s asking about that initial step that we take without really thinking about it, of throwing a mode of disclosure over the world that we’re talking about.

So how do we cultivate a certain distance from it? How do we free ourselves from it in this important sense of intellectual freedom that we’re trying to work out in Monika’s journal and Melissa’s work and Jared’s work, and so on?

And the answer is a certain kind of dialogue might help us do that. And that’s to say, we begin to ask each other: “what are your prejudgments that I’d like to call into the space of questions”? “What are mine”? “Help me free myself from them by telling me from your perspective what looks like an unwarranted universalization” or whatever.  So, we do this freeing ourselves dialogically and with each other. And that’s the key, I think, to the approach – that we’re better at deparochializing our prejudgements if we do this with others, than if we try to do it all by ourselves.

You look at Gadamer, he says, “well, we really have to surrender ourselves to these other traditions, and they’ll help us free ourselves from our own, and so on”. So, our thought is, well, why not have an actual dialogue? Not just a thought experiment, but a dialogue – as important as those are as well. And so, Melissa was working on this, as were lots of people engaged in deparochializing Western political theory at the same time. Dipesh Chakrabarty, who I was doing research with at the time, had a term called “provincializing Europe”. Sudipta Kaviraj was another scholar doing important work in this area, among many others.

But the big influence for me was working with indigenous people. I had the great good luck of spending four years listening to indigenous people from 1992 to 1996. We would just get together, and I would listen. And that was a dialogue, a reciprocal elucidation that helped me enormously.

So, we just got together with people coming from different traditions and began to discuss different ways of discussing and studying these issues together. What would be the conditions of dialogues that successfully do this mutual freeing? In the course of all those dialogues, and then the workshop in 2012, and then thinking about that, I rewrote it after the workshop, and got a draft going, and Monika can talk to us about how it came to be in the (I think it was) first edition of the Journal World Philosophies.

Melissa wanted to publish it, and so she did in a book, an edited volume that came out in 2020. And so, Melissa was one of our interlocutors for the 2016 version, as I was working up to it. And then we have the four wonderful dialogue partners in the Journal of World Philosophy that helped me yet again, and we can talk about them as we go along.

So, all I did in the version that you have in this book “Dialogue and Decolonization”, which is pretty much the original 2016 version, if I’m not mistaken, is what I call the six obstacles that you run up against when you try to engage in dialogues of reciprocal elucidation oriented towards decolonization. And then I, at the end of it, said, here are three possible features of a genuine dialogue. And again, the word genuine came from somebody at the 2012 workshop – it wasn’t my invention.

So I said, okay, I can work with this term. What’s a genuine and what’s a false dialogue? And then I found, actually, other people had been using these terms “genuine and false” too. And my colleague, Charles Mills, who was a major dialogue partner from 2016 on until his unfortunate death just after Monika, myself, Charles and others completed the Dialogue and Decolonization volume. The dialogue with Charles was particularly important to me. As a brilliant African American scholar, he helped me immensely work through many of my unexamined prejudgements, if I can put it that way. And if I could change anything it would be to have had him present in this dialogue. But I’ll be thinking of him as we go along this conversation. Okay, so that’s a start, Jared.

JARED: Great, and thank you for mentioning Monika’s role in this dialogue. One thing was initiating a conference in Victoria and now, being where it is at the moment, Monika, you’ve really been a co-creator of making this a global dialogue among many different dialogue-based public philosophies.

So one thing that I was curious about is: what initially did you find appealing about Jim’s particular account of deparochializing as both a scholar and an editor? And then, could you say something about how it relates to the project that you’re engaged in with the Journal of World Philosophies?

MONIKA: Okay, thank you. So, I am trained in Germany. I did my dissertation there and the rest of my academic qualifications too. I always had this problem of what Jim calls the false dialogue with my interlocutors in Germany, and this continues to date in Europe because those dialogues they conducted with me were (and are) what Jim in the book called “Imperial Dialogues”. We will come to that later. So, the only person who seemed to be training me to work with their traditions the way in which Jim does in the book, and elsewhere, was my own doctoral supervisor. I soon found out he was the only interlocutor I had for a genuine dialogue.

Until, in 2002, I stumbled upon Jim’s article on political philosophy as critical activity. That was an eye opener for me because I realized that one essay contained (in the form of an essay) all my problems and possible ways to develop solutions to them. But, of course, my hands were tied because of being the minority scholar I am in Europe.

I shared a very early piece on Gandhi with him and, from then, my own dialogue with Jim started. The journal was founded in Germany. I’m the founding co-editor. The idea behind initiating this journal was to get these kinds of approaches to Germany which, despite it’s very rich tradition in Critical Theory, in my view, was not conducting those genuine dialogues when it came to structural minorities, or members of structural minorities, like me.

So the idea was to familiarize audiences in Germany and more widely Europe with debates happening in this space. I was soon told that I’d have to flip the journal into an open access journal because it’s first avatar in Germany was not enough. It was not reaching out to that global audience, which we began doing with Indiana University Press when the journal moved there in 2016. And in the first few issues with the German publisher Verlag Karl Alber (it ran under the title Confluence: Online Journal of World Philosophies from 2014-2016), we had already opened up the dialogue with African American traditions. Because, me being from India, these dialogues are typically conducted along the binary of the East-West access which I had from the beginning thought is one more of those constructions which contain a dialogue.

Then, the idea was to, sort of, also open up that space for a dialogue with Indigenous philosophers and thinkers. So, I consulted the Indigenous philosophers I knew to ask how I should create a space in that journal for a dialogue alongside Indigenous philosophers and thinkers when none of us on the-then editorial team had an Indigenous identity ourselves.

So, when the editorial team and I were told that we can do it in this way – that we open up the space by first building up trust by having someone in there who incorporates that trust – then, of course, the first choice was James Tully, because he then could do two things. He could walk with the understanding of the genuine dialogue I had already seen in his work running up to that publication, but also open up that space. So the discussion on dialogue was not done, and there was more discussion in next issue. It was staggered across two issues. And then, maybe in the next round, I can talk about the choice of the interlocutors for Jim’s dialogue.

JARED: That would be great. That was going to be the next question, because the second part of the book is taken up by those responses to Jim’s essay, and I think you’ve done a nice job of communicating to us the importance of the Journal of World Philosophies for creating a space for such a remarkable range of subjects, authors and perspectives. Perhaps you could mention the four responses if you like. Not only Charles Mills, the late Charles Mills, who’s been referenced before, and sort of covered, but also to other thinkers that maybe are somewhat less well known to Western audiences. And they all write from distinct backgrounds and perspectives.

And really, I think that what we found in the seminar is that by reading them all together, rather than in isolation, is that the sort of cumulative effect of doing so really helps to resituate the lead essay, and to allow us to see it slightly differently, or perhaps very differently. So I know it was some time ago, Monika, but could you just say a little bit about how those responses came together? Why those particular authors were either targeted by you? Or why they were willing to engage? Or how that came about? And then maybe one or two of what you see as the most important contributions that those responses have made and make in the new volume of the book Dialogue and Decolonization.

MONIKA: Yeah, thanks.

So, Carl Mika was the Indigenous philosopher and part of the journal’s editorial team then, who is today a co-editor of the journal, and who helped me sort of work out the modalities of such a discourse. It was his idea that, since Jim is based in the Americas, we should have interlocutors outside of the Americas to open up that space for an Indigenous dialogue across traditions in a philosophy journal which routinely does not even attend to Indigenous traditions. So that is how Garrick Cooper, Carl Mika’s colleague, was consulted and agreed.

The second dialogue partner, Sor-hoon Tan has changed institutions within Singapore but continues to be a major voice in debates on Confucian philosophy, and very well known amongst circles which do political philosophy and Confucianism. So, we asked her.

Charles Mills was asked because we wanted to figure out how genuine dialogues can be done within settler colonial relations, which continue to shape our scholarship and daily life till today. And Sudipta Kaviraj finally because I knew of Jim’s interest in Gandhi and because of my own work on Gandhi.

All of them agreed immediately. And, in fact, Charles Mills and Sudipta Kaviraj told me that James Tully would be such an important interlocutor for them that I should wait till they made time in their schedules to engage in this dialogue, which they did. Both then, when I approached them, first told me that I should not just confine the dialogue to a journal issue, but that they would then, a year later, make time in their summer vacations to completely rewrite that essay for a book project, which is what was also done.

So even at the beginning, when working out what the project should look like, it was a very bottom-to-top enterprise.

JARED: That’s great, thank you. And it’s interesting to know, since I don’t think I actually remembered that when we were discussing them, that these were completely rewritten by Sudipta Kaviraj and Charles Mills.

I think we can move on eventually to what some of the contributions were of those critiques or engagements, and I know that we spent time engaging with them, and people around this table felt that some were worth following up on. So, we’ll do that a little bit later.

But rather than reiterating each response in detail, I thought we could move now to the third part of the book, where, Jim, you respond to your interlocutors. I’m sure it must have been a pleasure to receive them, and a rewarding challenge to respond to them.

But I wonder if one of the best ways into this – to get some ideas on the table for our online audience as well ­– would be to ask you to say something about how responding to those questions maybe allowed you to clarify your own views? Or clarify to yourself, your views on the terms of the book’s title – namely, “decolonization” and “dialogue”?

You introduce the response to all four interval architectures by way of Edward Said’s account of the global contrapuntal ensemble of culture and imperialism. Said has been a key reference across your work: from Public Philosophy in a New Key, which both starts and ends with references to Said; and here, the notion of contrapuntal ensemble helps, I think, to contextualize Dialogue and Decolonization as an intervention in what you call the contemporary neo-colonial field.

Could I ask you to say something about how you understand this contemporary neo-colonial field and its hegemon-subaltern relations? And then how has contextualizing this book, Dialogue and Decolonization, within this field deepened the critique from the lead essay of the dominant languages of Western political theory that we’re familiar with?

JIM: Well, that’s a short question! So the Said influence is obvious, and I’ve learned a lot from Edward Said. I had a graduate student, Bassel F. Salloukh, who knew Edward Said, introduced his work to me, and showed me its importance. His doctoral studies were deeply influenced by Said. That’s how I came to know Said’s work, and I found it immensely helpful.

Another person I should mention here that helped me all along the way was David Owen, since he’s here. And maybe he will, I hope, intervene in the question period. He was there in 2012, at the beginning, and he’s been an indispensable interlocutor all along the way. So, David, good morning, and I hope we hear from you later on.

So Said gave me a way of thinking about this situation we’re in, in this language of contrapuntual ensemble. But I want to mention how I then unravel that. And that was with this language of hegemon and subaltern relations of what Michel Foucault called practices of governance and practices of freedom.

I am quite happy with this language, and Bassel Salloukh uses it now in the Middle East. So there’s not any kind of incongruency between Said and Foucault’s language of thinking about all the unequal relationships we’re in, the multiplicity of them, overlapping, crisscrossing, cancelling each other out, and so on in everyday life, right up to very systematic relations of supply chains and military relationships. We can think about them in terms of hegemon and subaltern, which I think this is a much richer vocabulary than the old traditional Western vocabulary of master and servant. The (Hegelian) master-bondsman language tends to generate, as we know, negative dialectics which repeat themselves.

This language of hegemon and subaltern in practices of governance goes as follow. On the one hand, the hegemonic partner, individual/collective; and on the other side, the Subaltern, the people who are in some way subaltern relative to the Hegemon and are engaged in being governed or guided by the Hegemon directly or indirectly (e.g. through AI these days, end up being data-mined, and then prompted to follow steps, and so on). Probably the most sophisticated global use of practices of governance and the limited practices of freedom we have on the Internet are a good example of the richness of this language.

I must say that the whole “Governmentality School” arose at the same time, right in the 1980s and 90s, and these researchers were developing this language and using it in all sorts of different situations – feminists using it in patriarchal relationships; LGBTQ students using it in societies that are still dominantly heterosexual.

The short answer is I found this language very helpful for all sorts of reasons. Particularly, within the relationship of governing and being governed, there is a certain room through manoeuvre, Spielraum in German, which just means that within in it you’re not dominated in complete detail. And this seemed to be true of almost all relationships. For example, Nelson Mandela mentioned that he found a realm of freedom while he was in prison and also became friends with one of the guards. So even in the most tightly monitored relationships we still find this Spielraum or room to manoeuvre.

And that’s “the area of free play”, if you like, as the philosopher of dialogue David Bohm calls it. It’s a kind of free play or creative freedom or room to manoeuvre we have within many relationships. Students are familiar with this creative freedom in student-professor relationships that are dialogical. Within these, students have found out from World War Two onwards how to be active agents within the pedagogical institutions of modern Western societies. By exercising this, each generation is different in quite distinct way. So we’re all familiar with it.

So I just found that way of thinking about the human condition made it infinitely more complex than the standard juridical (“oh, it’s all about laws and obedience or disobedience, right and wrong, and so on”). It’s not that such language is useless by any means, but it doesn’t capture what’s going on, if you like, beneath, but also within the legal, juridical and police relationships that we live in. It doesn’t capture the day-to-day interaction we have with other human beings.

And another feature of this – and then I’ll stop this long answer – is that I came across David Abram’s work, who did a PhD on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in the 1990s at the State University of New York. He then travelled around the world interviewing indigenous people and talking to them and learning good ways of entering into genuine dialogues with them, and he was doing also a lot of interesting work with the First Nations on the West Coast.

And so, Abram’s argument was in his first book, The Spell of the Sensuous, where he asserts, as Charles Taylor was right to say, that we’re dialogue animals all the way down. But the dialogue is deeper than the linguistic dialogue. There is what we might call a phenomenological dialogue that Foucault was exploring thanks to his colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It’s what we call body language, just very briefly, but deeper than that is a phenomenal perceptual dialogue we have every instant of our life with the living environment, with Gaia. Abram began to write about this and the fact that, at some deep level, the prejudgment that fuels the climate crisis is our failure to see that we are in perceptual dialogical relationships of symbiosis with the living earth.

In every breath we take, as Thich Nhat Hahn says, every step we take, every bite of food we take, every time we reach and touch that living world Gaia. We’re in a perceptual dialogue, and we’re perceptually unprepared and uneducated to deal in a good – namely, sustainable – gift-gratitude reciprocity relation with it. We think we’re dominators of nature, but we’re actually kind of “blind” or “don’t know our way around” living members, citizens, very poor citizens of these perceptual dialogues with the living earth. And part of our decolonization is decolonizing our exploitative power over the living earth and our hegemonic and false hegemonic relationship with the living earth.

So this language started with Said, and if you like Foucault in the last years of his life. One more dimension is that, since it’s all part of the dialogue, it begins with this dialogical relationship you have with yourself, whether you think of it in terms of kinesiology, meditation or proprioception, all the different terms we have. A bad relationship with yourself is where you think you have complete control over your emotional life. And the good one is where you work with your living system, the nervous system that makes up you as a living system within a world of living systems. You take up a dialogical relationship with the well-being of your life systems. Learn to – as Thich Nhat Hahn says – never get angry or fearful. Treat that anger or that fear like a friend, to be befriended and work with it; come to understand it, and get in a good relationship with it, and you can sublimate it into a healthy relation like compassion or empathy. And so you’ve got a dialogical relation going at the beginning from your very practices of the self that you begin with as you step out of bed in the morning, and begin to think about that relation with yourself.

So, I’ll stop there.

JARED: Great, thank you. And yes, it was a long question, so a long answer is more than helpful! And you’ve also shown, I think, really helpfully, how difficult it is to sort of extract – even from the book – and how potentially misleading it was even to construct the question as: “well, let’s talk about ‘decolonization’, first, and then, ‘dialogue’”. Because these are practices and concepts that are bound up so tightly for you in the book.

But one question that I would want to raise about your approach to dialogue in the book concerns your excavation, or recovery, or construction of what you call the “democratic” or “pragmatic dialogue tradition”. You’ve already mentioned a number of exemplary or important figures that could be taken to, and that do constitute this tradition for you, and some others in the book are familiar to philosophers and theorists like Wittgenstein, or, as we’ve said, Said. But others are better known to anthropologists like Franz Boas. And for the room: just to say that, what they share, according to Jim in the book, is what Jim describes as the lack of a “universal strand”. So, this lack of a universal strand in the dialogue tradition differentiates it from other modern traditions – both universalist and historicist.

But I wonder if you could say, Jim, what does understanding these exemplary figures, and then, of course yourself, as constituting a “tradition” – what does that help us to understand about your own approach to dialogue?

You recover this ‘tradition’ from both sources ‘inside’ the Western tradition and sources ‘outside’ the Western tradition. So I wonder if you could just reflect briefly on the role of ‘tradition’, and the importance of reconstructing ‘counter-traditions’ – and specifically the counter-tradition of pragmatic dialogue.

JIM: Yes, well it’s a pragmatic tradition in the sense that it takes political theories not to be theoretical knowledge above all these relationships we’re talking about; but as a practice, a practical art within them, so it’s practical knowledge. And it comes from Aristotle in that sense, of course, where he says “all these things we say about politics just hold for the most part, they have to be articulated in everyday language” and so on. I see this pragmatic tradition developing from Aristotle to the present.

And Socrates plays a role here, too. Because you learn about how to take care of yourself and take care of your fellow citizens in the polis by entering into dialogue and asking these questions to your fellow citizens. So they play a big role in this practice-based tradition.

But Wittgenstein, when he was working up the Philosophical Investigations – in what are now called the Blue and Brown Books – he criticized Socrates for Socrates’ prejudgment that the answer to all these questions about justice must be one definition of justice that holds in every case, and that for me is the universalizing prejudgment that we have to work on.

Aristotle said that a word like justice has variable uses; has family resemblances. So in each context, where we try to say what’s just in this case, we’re going to get a slightly different answer from the other cases. But, secondly, each person involved in that particular case of injustice, because of their subject formation in the relationship they are in, are going to have a slightly different way of talking about justice and injustice in it.

So, in a sense, Wittgenstein vindicates all of Socrates’ interlocutors where every time Socrates says to Meletus, “Well, I can’t generalize for that”. Well Wittgenstein will come along and say, “well, that’s not a big fault”! Meletus is telling us something about the family relationship and justice within it, and so on.

So, you get this wonderful view that are our main philosophical concepts like justice, oppression and so on are perspectival. They have legitimate ranges of use from different perspectives. Hence the need for the dialogue with people who are differently situated within them. Listen to all the subalterns and all the hegemons and so on within it, in order to understand the very political situation we’re supposed to be dealing with from these different perspectives.

And the second aspect of it is brought up by Stephen Mulhall in his book Seeing Aspects. A person from a different perspective than your own puts forward a way of thinking about a shared problem. They bring to light slightly different aspects of the situation itself. It’s not just a bunch of subjective, isolated, egocentric perspectives we’re talking about. We’re talking about, if it is a dialogue, a genuine one, then each person is bringing forward aspects of the real here that go unnoticed or concealed – in Heidegger’s terminology – from other subject positions. So there are similar and dissimilar perspectives bringing forward similar, dissimilar and overlapping aspects that come to the fore. So, it’s a much more complicated world than we usually realize.

I tried to express this early in “Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy” in 1989, and then in a kind of genealogy of Western thought in the enlightenment, and then later in twentieth century contextualization of Western philosophy with this awareness of the perspectival, and aspectival dimensions of knowing. And then, so the question is: How do we get together and agree on things and change things? And then the answer to this is the very difficult steps and missteps from one perspective to another through these dialogues of reciprocal elucidation that I talk about and for which Wittgenstein was helpful.

But here I have to mention Charles Taylor. He has worked on dialogue throughout his distinguished career, and continues to do so today, in both philosophy and in practice. We taught together for 20 years at McGill University, and we taught in the dialogue format. We had this huge course of about 150 students and people would drop in and we would always pick one author like Rousseau or Locke. And one person would talk about one author for four lectures, and then another person would talk about different interpretations of the author in question. There were two other interlocutors, Samuel Noumoff, who was a Jewish Maoist from Manhattan who moved to Montreal and travelled around to several revolutions going on at the time, and would later come back and give us a perspective from what was going on in the latest subaltern revolution. The fourth interlocutor was from South Africa, John Shingler, who was Dutch South African, and kept us up to date with what was going on in the multilogue in South Africa.

So these dialogues went on for 20 years at McGill. One of our graduate courses was also always in the dialogue format. So that was really indispensable. The other dialogue influence that deepened it for me was the storytelling practices of indigenous people on the West Coast. They called dialogues Potlatch, since you’re giving the person the gift of your story. So here’s how I see the problem. And then they sit down. Somebody else says this is my story. And, then, quite often, participants may want to bring in the animals and plants, and ecosystems that are being affected by the problem. So, you put on a mask of the animal, and you do a particular kind of dance that helps you to see or even experience how the problem is experienced by ‘all affected’ (e.g., decimation of the salmon fisheries here on the coast, learn about how the salmon are suffering, and so on). So that’s another dialogue tradition that’s been immensely helpful to me and lots of people, many of whom I could mention here.

However I’ll only mention four of my colleagues: John Borrows, Aaron Mills, Heidi Stark, and Val Napoleon. These conversations have been going on for many years. Many Indigenous students have also educated me: Dawnis Kennedy and Kinwa Bluesky, both Anishinaabe, would respond to a lecture on “parrhesia” (fearless speech in the Western tradition) by describing and often enacting the different ways in which difficult questions are raised in their communities. Johnny Mack, Nuu-Chah-Nuth, presented four truthful ways of speaking truth to power in his tradition and integrated them into his Masters of Law degree. So we were just getting all these different ways of talking about how to get a dialogue going, and how to – once you see the diversity of views – begin to understand each other across the similarities and differences that overlap (if fortunate) and begin to thread or braid together as Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it, you braid together ways of living together through these dialogues.

JARED: Great. Thank you. I think one of the things that came out very clearly in your response is that this book is not a new theory of dialogue but, rather, is a reflection and an embodiment of practical dialogue. I know that people around this table will want to hear more about how you’ve been influenced by indigenous storytelling traditions.

I’ll just make one note so that everybody watching online knows that this will be interactive. We will open up to a wider conversation very shortly. So please pop some questions in the chat, or the Q&A. We have a couple already, and so we’ll register those and raise them to our guests.

But I thought that I would conclude this sort of structured portion of the dialogue by turning now to Monika and the concluding reflections that you offer on this dialogue between Jim and his interlocutors. So the book ends with your reflections, and I thought we should end our reflections with that note.

In your intervention, Monika, you explore the book’s contributions to the critique of what you call the Eurocentric bias of academic discourse. You do this by reconstructing W. E. B. Du Bois’ analysis of academic bias and his recommendations for how we might resist it. And, in doing so, you’re developing your own critique of what you term methodological whiteness, and your reflection ends by posing a crucial question. Namely, “what reason would structural minorities have to accept the invitation to engage in a genuine dialogue with members of dominant groups” (page 194)? So, Monika, could you just tell us, as a way of concluding and opening to the wider conversation, what do you mean by methodological whiteness here? And how do you see this book as working to unsettle it? And then, would you mind restating for us that crucial question on which the book ends? You suggest a possible response to it, strikingly by drawing on some of Jim’s work, and if we could collectively pressure Jim to responding to your suggestive response that would maybe be a way of continuing the book’s dialogue beyond the book itself.

So, Monika.

MONIKA: Okay, thank you. So methodological whiteness is something that goes back to some of my discussions with Jim when we were working on this project, but also to some of my discussions with Charles. Because I saw some, especially those of us interlocutors in the book who have histories of colonization, saying that the so-called “West” is not something external to us, but it is something we carry with us, as also that other thing called the “East”. This may be for people not associated, or colonized themselves but coming from these histories, external entities. But these are histories we carry with us. And I thought that the book beautifully put the spotlight on that fault line within many of us and, well, that many of us don’t even see it as a fault line. You’re just getting those two parts of yourself with you. Because in my own readings in political philosophy I always noticed, especially in the German context, how the West is used as this very neutral term – as if it was just a placeholder for individualism, human rights and so forth.

And then, in my discussion with Charles, both of us came to the conclusion that, for us, this can never be a neutral term, because we both see the racial underpinning of that concept. At the same time, I was also working on Du Bois, who then, in his Darkwater. Voices from Within the Veil says whiteness is basically a property that is claimed by those, or as something they possess due to their inherent birth in a particular community. And Du Bois suggests in that work that basically this is a property because it is defining a person’s access to resources globally. The way academic structures of knowledge production work today, they are, in my view – and you can see that clearly in the study of world philosophical traditions – governed by that framing of whiteness.

So, I tried to make sense for myself of what was happening there. I used the term methodological whitenessbuilding upon Du Bois, but also on Charles, who’s building upon Du Bois. Charles calls it conceptual whiteness, while Du Bois calls it whiteness as property. And then I was using the framing of methodological whiteness to sort of frame the problem for myself, to identify, to go forward differently. And here then I came to, or returned back to Jim’s genuine dialogues which I’m familiar with for more than 20 years now. It seems to me that, in at least the halls of European Universities, which I know very well, that you now have a sudden explosion of interest in diversity and decolonization, at least in that discourse of diversity and decolonization.

It is in that discourse a very appropriate space for that right kind of discourse at the right time, because academic knowledge output is determined by market value. And in this space, well, that certain people do conduct those genuine dialogues and want to conduct with other subalterns, is something I would not dismiss. It is something with which I am familiar. Many of my mentors have been people who have conducted these genuine dialogues with me, but it seems to be a very fragile space. So, for those of us who are carrying those long histories of being colonized in that academic space, and constantly being subjected to injustice, I thought I would just pose the question to the reader. How do I, as one of many in these European academic spaces, who’s coming there talking about colonized populations and histories – and having come from a knowledge tradition which we know very little of today because of those histories of colonization – how do I even know whether someone is an interlocutor? How do I judge for myself that that person will want to have a genuine dialogue with me?

This is how I thought I should be ending that book, but also my own thought process going forward.

JARED: Great. Thank you. So, the book ends on a provocation or a question to the readers – to ourselves – but also to Jim. And I suspect that some of the questions that we have will phrase that provocation in similar but slightly different ways. I don’t know, Jim, if you’d like to respond immediately?

JIM: Jared, could I just mention one feature in response to Monika’s question, because we haven’t covered it. I think Monika’s answer in her conclusion in the book is the right one. That the reason you want to at least offer the gift of a dialogue, whether you’re a hegemon or a subaltern, is because of the deep interdependency of human beings. We’re not autonomous agents. We’re in very complicated relationships of interdependency. Most of them are hegemon-subaltern relations.

In these circumstances, the offer of the gift of listening can often be rejected. If, for example, someone from the hegemonic culture offers to listen to Martin Luther King and perhaps help him in his struggle, why should King trust this person? That is a crucial question and there are several reasons why a subaltern will say, “no thanks, I don’t want to enter into a dialogue.” We exist in highly structured relationships of unjust interdependency in the sense of power-over-and-under (hegemon-subaltern), These undermine the conditions of generating mutual trust and the power-with relationships of equality in liberating dialogues of reciprocal elucidation.

Nevertheless, contemporary participatory community-based practices of cultivating trust from the ground up have found practices of offering the gift of dialogue across these deep divisions.

This is the peaceful way, as Gandhi and King would say. It’s a nonviolent way, but in the long run it’s I think the slow but sure way to decolonize the planet. And lots of millions of people are trying to do it around the world and have started movements and “territories of life” movements, networks. I am involved in a few of these, and they’re building from the ground up communities that exercise power with each other. They understand freedom as the freedom of being with each other in relationships of equality, that they co-create and co-react over time through dialogues of reciprocal elucidation. Anytime there’s a problem, somebody says “I’m listening”; “tell me what’s gone wrong here”. Why aren’t we working together in good ways?

They develop from childhood onwards practices of just being with this mutuality of being which Martin Luther, King and Du Bois dreamt about. And remember when King gave the eulogy for Du Bois, he said: What we both agree on is we’re only going to decolonize America and demilitarize it if the kids of all colours go to school together from grade one onwards. And that’s the kind of point about participatory democracy, that it is a skillset. We have to learn how to share power with each other, understand freedom with each other, dialogue with rather than over and under, and so on.

There are lots of reasons for not accepting the gift: distrust of the hegemonic partner that’s offering it; fear of the consequences; having experienced a whole bunch of false dialogues (maybe when you opened yourself to a dialogue-oriented community-based researcher they took advantage of it).

But, on the other hand, there is this deeper reason for (certainly for people in the hegemonic culture) to offer that gift to subaltern communities of practice and say: “I just want to listen”. This is a two-way street. You can learn many things from the people who engage in the subaltern community of practice – Vandana Shiva is very good at this. But what you can bring as an academic are certain things, certain kinds of knowledge and examples from other parts of the world that aren’t available to that community and get a genuine dialogue of reciprocal exchange going if you have the patience.

Furthermore, community-based research can be at different distances from the community of practice. For example, in Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-led Social Movements (2021), Monique Deveaux develops what might be called an intermediate form of research in relation to practice. She works with archival material, publications, documents, occasional connections and communications. She does not enter into community-based, face-to-face, dialogical research practices. Yet, this is a kind of dialogue at a distance with the oppressed that throws an important critical light on the struggles she studies that brings them into a dialogue with academic political theorists. Her research shows us that there are many ways of entering into enlightening decolonizing dialogues today.