Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical DifferenceCan European thought be dislodged from the center of the practice of history in a non-European place? What problems arise when we translate cultural practices into the categories of social science? Provincializing Europe is one of the first book-length treatments on how postcolonial thinking impacts on the social sciences. This book explores, through a series of linked essays, the problems of thought that present themselves when we think of a place such as India through the categories of modern, European social science and, in particular, history. Provincializing Europe is a sustained conversation between historical thinking and postcolonial perspectives. It addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of the modern in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Chakrabarty argues, is built right into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and human sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Chakrabarty finds that "Nativism," however, is no answer to Eurocentrism, because the universals propounded by European Enlightenment remain indispensable to any social critique that seeks to address issues of social justice and equity. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought-categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Chakrabarty demonstrates, both theoretically and with examples from colonial and contemporary India, how such translational histories may be thought and written. Provincializing Europe is not a project of shunning European thought. It is a project of globalizing such thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins. |
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... question of political modernity in non - Western societies . As I shall argue in more de- tail later , it was through recourse to some version of a stagist theory of history — ranging from simple evolutionary schemas to sophisticated un ...
... question is : How do we think the political at these mo- ments when the peasant or the subaltern emerges in the modern sphere of politics , in his or her own right , as a member of the nationalist movement against British rule or as a ...
... questions it raised from the very beginning about the nature of the political in the colonial modernity of India . Examining , for in- stance , over a hundred known cases of peasant rebellions in British India between 1783 and 1900 ...
... question of being human involves the question of being with gods and spirits.51 Being human means , as Ramachandra Gandhi puts it , discovering " the possibility of calling upon God [ or gods ] without being under an obligation to first ...
... question of post- colonialism itself is given multiple and contested locations in the works of those studying Southeast Asia , East Asia , Africa , and the Pacific.55 Yet , however multiple the loci of Europe and however varied ...
Contents
Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History | 27 |
The Two Histories of Capital | 47 |
Translating LifeWorlds into Labor and History | 72 |
Minority Histories Subaltern Pasts | 97 |
HISTORIES OF BELONGING | 115 |
Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject | 117 |
Nation and Imagination | 149 |
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Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference Dipesh Chakrabarty Limited preview - 2008 |
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Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts Bill Ashcroft,Gareth Griffiths,Helen Tiffin No preview available - 2007 |