Western “Supremacy” and the “Renaissance” Issue: Decolonising as Imitative Reaction

Abstract

Claude Levi-Strauss reminds us that “the notion of humanity, encompassing, without distinction of race or civilization, all forms of the human species, is a recent phenomenon and of limited expansion … But for the major part of the human species, dozens of millennia, this notion appears totally absent. Humanity stops at the frontiers of the tribe, the language group, often even of the village …” (Finkielkraut 1996, 1).