Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History) - Tapa blanda

"Chakrabarty's work gives us a richer, more penetrating language to deal with modernity and the colonial encounter. . . . It is the ambiguity of Chakabarty's own position as both a critic and archivist of modernity that gives his study its poetic undertow and its intelligent irresponsibility."--Amit Chaudhuri, London Review of Books

"The great value of this book lies in Chakrabarty's exceptional ability to bring to light what constantly gets glossed over and forgotten when we can only speak the standard languages of the academy. To do this requires the kind of bilingual consciousness which can bring into illuminating relation Adam Smith and Tagore. Chakrabarty makes you regret that so few are capable of doing this with a high degree of eloquence and insight."--Charles Taylor, IWM Newsletter

"This masterful re-examination of rationality, universality, and difference in the postcolonial world should prove inspiring for serious historians of all lands."--Alice Ballard, Theory and Society

Can 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.