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Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference

Sep 12, 20244 min read

# Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference

Bibliography

Chakrabarty, D. (2007). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton university press.

Notes

Notes

“The Europe I seek to provincialize or decenter is an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clich ́ ed and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought that invariably subtend attempts in the social sciences to address questions of political modernity in South Asia.” (Chakrabarty, 2007, p. 4)

Go to annotation“One simply cannot think of political modernity without these and other related concepts that found a climactic form in the course of the European Enlightenment and the nineteenth century.” (Chakrabarty, 2007, p. 4)

Go to annotation“The European colonizer of the nineteenth century both preached this Enlightenment humanism at the colonized and at the same time denied it in practice.” (Chakrabarty, 2007, p. 4)

The ideas coming out of European thought and theory, brought into the world through the colonizers, also build parts of the foundation through which said colonizers can be criticized.

Go to annotation“Fanon’s struggle to hold on to the Enlightenment idea of the human—even when he knew that European imperialism had reduced that idea to the figure of the settler-colonial white man—is now itself a part of the global heritage of all postcolonial thinkers.” (Chakrabarty, 2007, p. 5)

The European colonial rule broke the intellectual chain of it’s colonies, reducing their thoughts to the matter of historical research, while not treating their own thought the same, as in, keeping Marx and Weber alive.

Historicism was an important colonizers tool to position Europe ahead and above the colonies. Stagist theories being an defining factor in that, placing a “not yet” against a “now” by the colonies. India has opted out of this, at least in terms of who is able to be citizen. India declared that all citizens, educated or literate or not, are fully capable citizens and are allowed to vote.

Go to annotation“The history and nature of political modernity in an excolonial country such as India thus generates a tension between the two aspects of the subaltern or peasant as citizen. One is the peasant who has to be educated into the citizen and who therefore belongs to the time of historicism; the other is the peasant who, despite his or her lack of formal education, is already a citizen.” (Chakrabarty, 2007, p. 10)

Go to annotation“This tension is akin to the tension between the two aspects of nationalism that Homi Bhabha has usefully identified as the pedagogic and the performative.” (Chakrabarty, 2007, p. 10)

There is further a very strong tendency in European thought and critique, to ascribe un- or underdevelopment to the colonizes, especially to the figure of the “peasant”, under the umbrella term “uneven development”.

Go to annotation“By explicitly critiquing the idea of peasant consciousness as “prepoliti­ cal,” Guha was prepared to suggest that the nature of collective action by peasants in modern India was such that it effectively stretched the cate­ gory of the “political” far beyond the boundaries assigned to it in Euro­ pean political thought.” (Chakrabarty, 2007, p. 12)

Another important critique by Guha was, that indian political processes of power are less related to capitalism then European thought would have it.

The author goes on to critique two assumptions:

He essentially calls for a pluriversal approach to social sciences.

Go to annotation“I take gods and spirits to be existentially coeval with the human, and think from the as­ sumption that the 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 [[[Chakrabarty, 2007, p. 16](zotero://select/library/items/IB28R3QY|or gods]])

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