askchapo

Hey I saw this comment yesterday but was too tired after posting to look for it; I made a big effort-thread above https://hexbear.net/comment/5475137 if you didn't see it, where I posted a bunch of excerpts from Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, linking to the books (which I recommend, required reading imo) that might hem in some of your thinking along the aspects you're looking for. It's an insanely complex topic which grew out of and continues evolving in a universe of dialectical history and relations with all that is deemed "not Western"

as well as the dialectical history and relations within and between-these-worlds, of the evolving definition of what is deemed such, and how that has been and is determined; and the "values" and "attitudes" and the constantly redisposed and redefined definitions that are produced in the respective outcomes and perspectives in and regarding the antagonistic contradictions between "the superior and familiar Us" and "the exotic and inferior Other" and the relations and struggle between them on its various fronts and levels.

What is "not-West" defines what "is West" just as much as what the hegemony of "the West" itself defines as "not-West;" and the "not-West" is relied upon as necessary for "the West" to be itself as a construct," with the power imbalance between "the West" and "the Other" defining the starting and primary direction of the dialectic. Because in reality the world is a globe and everyone is both "east" and "west" of each other (and also south and north!). The same as how in the colonial relationship the colonizer only exists because there is a colonized and vice versa; and just as in the invention of racial categories, for which there is no material basis beyond what became self-organized as an invented practical reality and super-structural body of theory and practice in white supremacy from and out of the material history and power relations which created it

the artificial construct of "whiteness" only exists in contrast to what is and has been made into the construct of "blackness."

Just as there is in reality no biological basis for race; there is no singular world of objectively defined "Western values" any more than there is a unified culture and consensus in all of Asia and Africa to make an "Eastern values" against which "the West" can be defined. In fact to make a "the West" is to force a categorization and definition on all fronts; from geographical to cultural and religious, to social and economic, to political and military, to the scientific and historiographical; of "the East" and "Eastern values," upon and regardless of those people and their lives, cultures, histories, beliefs, attitudes, etc. who live and have lived in "the East"

which in the historical dynamic of power and lack of consent to this categorization inherently suboordinates "the East" to "the West in a interdependent-and-opposing dialectical relationship; which is all what happened in history to make what we know as "the West" and "the East" as a living evolving social phenomenon. linked again https://hexbear.net/comment/5475137