Hegel and Empire

Participative cultural productions of the oppressed: The master-servant dialectic through an Indian lens

“…Chu points out that Hegel saw the Atlantic slave trade as superior to African forms of slavery, european enslavement as emancipatory, and believed that slavery should be abolished only gradually (see also Habib, 2017). while emphasising the failure of the Hegelian master-servant dialectic in the case of the black-white and colonisercolonised encounter in general, referring especially to Hegel's own unjustifiable views of Africans in several texts, Fanon underscores the need to read the dialectic on the social plane as a struggle of the unequally placed group to gain recognition from the privileged other, breaking the vicious circle of each referring back merely to abstract self-identity.…”

“…There is justifiable criticism of Hegel (see Habib, 2017). Andrea Long Chu (2004) argues that there is only 'infinite hard labor' (bad infinity) for the servant in Hegel; it is 'a freedom to come that never comes, continually postponed or deferred through the dialectical mediation that history itself is' (p. 417).…”