Beyond Deconstruction: An Introduction to Writing Social Theory in Arabic

This chapter offers both a brief introduction into the volume and some concluding remarks. It puts the anthology in the scholarly context of postcolonial enquiries, however, without itself considering to be a part of postcolonial studies. The chapter takes issue with the tendency in postcolonial scholarship to focus on deconstruction, i.e. to unmask the Eurocentric character of so-called Western thought. Instead, this introduction argues to go beyond mere deconstruction and to take stock of knowledge production beyond the metropolis, in the case of this anthology social theory in Arabic.