The aim of creating distance in relation to the Eurocentric tradition is to open analytical spaces for realities that are ‘surprising’ because they are new or have been ignored or made invisible, that is, deemed non-existent by the Eurocentric critical tradition … keeping distance does not mean discarding the rich Eurocentric critical tradition and throwing it into the dustbin of history. … It means including it in a much broader landscape of epistemological and political possibilities. It means exercising hermeneutics of suspicion regarding its ‘foundational truths’ by uncovering what lies below their ‘face value’. It means giving special attention to the suppressed or marginalized smaller traditions within the big Western tradition. (De Sousa Santos, 2014, p 44)

True global history is only possible to the extent that both Ethnocentrism and Eurocentric anti-Eurocentrism, both Occidentalism and orientalism are superseded. Such history is more accurate on the epistemological level and more progressive on the social, political and cultural. Only this kind of history will allow the world to recognize itself in its infinite diversity. (Jack Goody, as cited in De Sousa Santos, 2014, p 100)