Abstract
<p>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? <i>Provincializing
Europe</i> 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.</p><p><i>Provincializing
Europe</i> 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. <i>Provincializing
Europe</i> 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. <i>Provincializing
Europe</i> 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.</p> 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 post-colonial 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.
Description
Wujastyk's main bibtex file, April 30, 2010
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