A Postcolonial Reading on Eurocentrism, Otherization and Orientalist Discourse in Sociological Thought and Its Criticism

Abstract

Modernity has long been a dominant paradigm in producing knowledge and in determining theoretical framework of disciplines although it is in connivance with a Eurocentric ideology and conflict of paradoxes inherent to itself. The other participant of the crime, committed with Eurocentric ideology, is sociology as a method of observation that modernity uses to observe itself and that developed with it. They also display a tautological view with each other. Disharmony of paradoxes inherent in modernity makes such othering notions as rejection and negation inevitable. Otherization in sociological literature has been a reference point in historiography that is developed with the claim that historical process experienced throughout Europe is the only straight and universal one with an essentialist perspective, in the Orientalist discourse that is established in parallelism with colonial activities and generating ideal tips. This article aims to criticise the framework and the narrative in modernity and sociology as they contain Eurocentric discourse according to post-colonial theory. While chasing a non-othering paradigm, inquiring troubles and dilemmas that post-colonial theory faced will also be the another of this study. This paper aims to be authentic by determining the problems of post-colonial theory that criticises the dominant paradigm through orientalist discourse yet falls into clutches of self-orientalism.