The term “Eurocentrism” denotes the very powerful paradigm that places Europe at the centre of “world history” and the teleological master narrative of civilization and modernity. The critical element of the Eurocentrist perspective is the imperial placement of Europe as subject and the non-European colonized world as object, as a fundamental difference that has supposedly defined the structure of world and representation since the Renaissance, and has been applied – often by violent means – throughout the world. As a process complementing the course of capitalist expansion that makes entire continents and their inhabitants into a resource, this control discourse becomes universal.
The complex of orientalism as analysed by Edward Said (and any form of exoticism) can then be regard as a counterpart of Eurocentrism, imagining the “other” of the civilized, “occidental” world in colourful images, awaiting the arrival of the colonists and missionaries.
Postcolonial criticism counters this by working on the decentring or “provincialization” (Dipesh Chakrabarty) of Europe, the West or the North, on a non-universal, but rather trans-local writing of history, which can acknowledge the “entangled histories” (Shalini Randeria), global interdependencies and interferences between North and South, and in a wider perspective, on an alternative to the epistemology of the North in general.