Page 26 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Introduction
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have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time,
111
National
and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy.”
movements such as those of African Americans and Oromos emerged from within un-
democratic political structures, providing cultural degradation, humiliation, and denial
of human rights. Some elements of the educated class can only transform the resis-
tance of the subjugated people into national movements by refashioning it as cultural
and political movements. If there are no material and subjective factors for these de-
velopments, these intellectuals cannot invent national movements.Therefore, it is es-
sential to explore the dynamic linkage among the structures of racial/ethnonational
domination and the origin of conflict, political mobilization, organization, and collec-
112
tive political action when we study national movements.
The emergence of national movements and the critical scientific discourse associ-
ated with them challenged the biological theories of race and developmental and evo-
lutionary theories. With the decline of European colonial domination and the
flourishing of revolutionary nationalism together with critical scientific discourse,
these older theories lost scientific credibility, although they survived as popular ide-
ologies. Gradually, racial/ethnonational stratification came to be seen as social in-
113
One important aspect of oppressed
equality and injustice by critical scholars.
nationalism is the struggle for social scientific knowledge to demystify the racist and
ethnocratic discourse of the colonizing structure.To a certain degree critical nation-
alist discourse exposes and challenges racist distortion of history. Colonialists look at
history from the top down and thus erase the historical and cultural experiences of
the subject peoples. They praise their own cultural and historical achievements, in-
cluding the experiences that have been based on the violation of human rights, and
deplore the experiences of the dominated populations. Such distorted knowledge has
been challenged by emancipatory knowledge. As McKelvey says,“knowledge of ob-
jective reality can be attained only when humanity has become unified in a single
‘unitary cultural system.’...The struggle for truth is therefore interrelated with the
struggle for social change and social justice:‘There exists therefore a struggle for ob-
jectivity (to free oneself from partial and fallacious ideologies) and this struggle is the
same as the struggle for the cultural unification of the human race.’” 114
The colonial knowledge elites and states have developed policies that denied or
limited the accessability of subjugated peoples to education and positions of author-
ity and knowledge-making in universities, business, and government. Oppressed na-
tionalism and emancipatory knowledge attempt to promote social scientific
knowledge that is socially and historically conditioned and not eternal. 115 However,
such knowledge and its ideology must be reexamined critically. As D. J. Haraway
comments,“That of the subjugated are not exempt from critical reexamination, de-
coding, deconstruction, and interpretation. . . .The standpoints of the subjugated are
not ‘innocent’ positions. On the contrary, they are preferred because in principle they
are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretative core of all knowl-
edge.” 116 Critical social scientific knowledge and nationalism are linked to the cul-
tural and historical experiences of the subjugated population.The comparative study
of the African American and Oromo movements reflects this critical social scientific
knowledge that is open to re-examination. Since these movements have been pro-
moting the principles of self-determination or multicultural democracy, it is neces-
sary to explore the relationship between oppressed nationalism, cultural rights, and
human dignity.