Genealogy Through the Decolonial Turn: Cultivating Critical Attitudes

This thesis offers a reconsideration of the contentious relationship between Michel Foucault and postcolonial thought through the decolonial turn, by interpreting critique as attitude. The discussion of continuity in Foucault’s work on subjectivity, between his genealogical and ethical periods, leads to an understanding of critical attitude as a mode of critique and self-critique that depends on genealogy as a method of historical inquiry. Meanwhile, the shift away from European modes of rationality described by the decolonial turn in philosophy, proposes an approach to social transformation and the dismantling of Eurocentrism through understanding critique as operative in terms of the decolonial attitude. A comparison of these two attitudes as modes of critique provides common ground for the recognition of their mutual compatibility as techniques for reinterpreting history that also work in the service of contending with coloniality