Knowledge hegemonies and autonomous knowledge

With the emergence of the modern social sciences in the nineteenth century came recognition of the problem of knowledge imperialism both in the imperial centres and in the colonised world, understood to be inseparably tied up with the dominant orientation in knowledge production, Eurocentrism. This orientation is still held to dominate the various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. While there is much consensus over this characterisation of the problem, the assumption that the central ideological problem in knowledge production is that of Eurocentrism is not sound. There are several other hegemonic orientations that affect knowledge production in the Third World, many of which predate the colonial period by centuries and have little to do with the colonial experience. These include androcentrism, traditionalism, culturalism, ethnonationalism and sectarianism. If this is true, then the task of decolonising knowledge is far from sufficient. For this reason, scholars in the Malay world speak of the need to generate autonomous knowledge – that is, knowledge that is autonomous from not only Eurocentric but also other hegemonic orientations. This article discusses the dominant hegemonic orientation in knowledge production in our times and the response to these in terms of the idea of autonomous knowledge.