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 | Provincializing Europe: |
First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. 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. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins. Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940. "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 Acknowledgments ix PART ONE: HISTORICISM AND THE NARRATION OF MODERNITY Chapter 1. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History 27 PART TWO: HISTORIES OF BELONGING Chapter 5. Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject 117 Notes 257 Another Princeton book by Dipesh Chakrabarty: Series:
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