Provincializing Europe

Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

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by Dipesh Chakrabarty

Princeton University Press

Due/Published September 2000, 320 pages, paper

ISBN 0691049092

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 examines how postcolonial thinking impacts on the social sciences. This book explores, through a series of 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 presents 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 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. As Princeton says, "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."

"The idea of provincializing Europe has been around for some time, but mostly as an insight waiting for elaboration. In this book, Dipesh Chakrabarty develops the idea into a project informed massively by fact and brilliantly by theory. A work of exemplary scholarship, it is a call to raise the level of current debates about modernity and the colonial experience and reexamine our approach to histories and cultures on both sides of the colonial divide. A formidable challenge."--Ranajit Guha

"Chakrabarty offers a fundamental rethinking of the most important and misunderstood of all historical categories--time itself. Never facile, always willing to confront the most intractable dilemmas, Chakrabarty forces us to reconsider our deepest historicizing impulses. His work is must reading for anyone with an interest in the future of historical studies."--Lynn Hunt

Review

In Provincializing Europe Dipesh Chakrabarty contends that European political thought is both indispensable and inadequate to understanding modernity in former colonial countries. The ideas of democracy, popular sovereignty, scientific rationality, and others are very much a part of the post-colonial political experience and continue to be rallying points in the pursuit of social justice. Yet, some aspects of European thought, in particular historicism and its emphasis on evolutionary or stagist developments in history, are lacking when it comes to the specifics of third world countries. Thus, while Chakrabarty views the European tradition as integral to the contemporary social sciences, he also argues that it must be “renewed and from and for the margins.” The essays in Provincializing Europe take advantage of what Chakrabarty views as the central fault line of European social thought, namely the divide between analytic thought as exemplified by Marx and hermeneutic thought as seen in the work of Heidegger. In the opening chapters of his study, Chakrabarty explores the relationship between ideas of history and historical time to colonial India. He then examines the experiences of modernity among upper-caste Bengalis. This work is an important, engaging, and provocative examination of the inevitabity of Europe in the postcolonial experience.