Reading Provincializing Europe: Introduction and Chapter 1

The continuation

What prompted us to read Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe was a question lingering in our previous discussions; the question of what is the ‘West’. In our previous reading (see previous entry in the blog), the author had mentioned the category, the ‘West’, as a monolithic uncontested one. We were wondering how other postcolonial and decolonial authors have conceptualized (perhaps added nuance) about it and what could be the possible ways in which ‘West’ could be understood, read and referred beyond a unitary assimilated pre-given category.

 

The discussion: Introduction

We began teasing out important terms from the Introduction and the relevance of it. The book is almost 20 years old now and some of the salient points it promises to engage are  the idea of a) provincializing Europe b) historicism c) intervention of subaltern studies as a critique of historicism. One of the important facets is to think about the term historicism, how is it constituted and deploying the term critically. The way one deploys the term could disrupt how we normally think of ‘history’. It is at this point we also engaged with the idea of what ‘history’ means, in our discussion. Making a distinction between history and historicism is essential to understand the ongoing conversation in much finesse. Chakrabarty contests the idea of history with the idea of ‘development’ and ‘progress’ in a linear sense. We, as philosophers, questioned if it does entail a complete rejection of teleology? ‘To provincialize’ narrows down to be a matter of a place, in the general sense of the term. But here as Chakrabarty points out, it has happened through an idea of history. An idea of universal history that simultaneously also works towards provincialization of concepts.  

We look at quotes to understand the points made above.

“The phenomenon of “political modernity”— namely, the rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise—is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe.  Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, the public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history. 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.” (Page 4)

A crucial question arises here in our discussion: Do we bear the brunt of  European enlightenment in today’s contemporary politics? Can we think of contemporary politics without European enlightenment? How would that look like?

Shifting to understanding Chakrabarty's take on this, we feel that he is elaborating on the situation of postcoloniality where one is trained in European thought to reproduce the same. An important distinction Chakrabarty himself makes is the difference between understanding a ‘legacy of a thinker’ and anthropologically reading a thinker. An alive thought is what the former European tradition carries perhaps. Such that, we engage with our everyday problems with these European thinkers (say, Marx, Heidegger, Spinoza) whereas the latter (from non-western tradition) becomes a matter of ‘historical research’ and thus it becomes increasingly inconceivable for us it is to employ them to our everyday alive-thought processes.  This is perhaps the politics of historicism. It chooses elements (subjects, here philosophers from other traditions (refer page 6) to historicize in a certain way. However, we make note of how interestingly he teases this point out but also at the same time himself never engages with philosophers from the Indian subcontinent. Why he does not do so and how things are challenging for him is something he mentions in the Preface of the book (but there could be more to think on this very move). We gather that the text is not completely doing away with the enlightenment philosophy. The author does mention that ‘political modernity is both indispensable and inadequate’ (page 6). 

We bring in contrasting approaches of decolonial thinkers such as Anibal Quijano's idea of the link between modernity and coloniality, and Enrique Dussel's idea to think with, against, and beyond European modernity. These give us a model of thinking that does not necessarily 'always' need enlightenment thought (how that would look like in specificity shall perhaps be clear in the next blog entry as we would like to read and engage with Enrique Dussel in the next session). 

We also try to bifurcate two modes of thinking that maybe is happening here and is essential to point out. One is the work that thinkers engaging with colonialism do, which is to point out the problematic repercussions of provincializing. The other work however is of, decolonizing. And we would want to be mindful of those subtilities as we engage with these thinkers. How are these engagements the same? How are they different?

It is here that we importantly also discuss and note the concerns of decolonial feminists who are more situated in the present. For example, they work on models with the ideas of racism, colonialism in a way such that it enables them to show how it affects their lived bodies in the present day. It would be useful to read their work vis a vis a work like Chakrabarty to tease out their epistemic concerns’ vis a vis colonialism. It is important we be aware of the differences perhaps.

 

The discussion: 1^ST Chapter

Universal history- We attempt to understand the meaning of ‘rejection of universal history’. Does it give us the option of a totalitarian rejection or yield us to a base wherein some pockets of the old could be adjusted with a new formation of historical reconfigurations?

History- Briefing on the term ‘history’,  as a continuation of understanding it from the Introduction, we understand that Chakrabarty is pointing to the normative baggage of enlightenment. He illustrates the institutionalization of history in academia and how non-western history is always dependent on the history of the West. There is an ‘asymmetric ignorance’ in the way, non-western history exists in these academic fields. Philosophically speaking, the problem is more than the asymmetric ignorance. Apparently non-western histories depend on ‘narratives of transition’. It as if they are always in an imaginary waiting room, summoned to be called and validated when they have become ‘developed enough’.

Challenging ‘nationalistic history’ with subaltern studies- However, just having space for ‘non-western’ history is not enough because it is often seen how the account of these histories then fall into the trap of having a ‘nationalistic version’ which completely does not take into account the nuances of history (is reductive and violent) that happens in the margins of that area and period. Thus, subaltern studies challenges (page 31) nationalistic reduction and takes the failure of writing nationalistic history to the task by rewriting history through the inclusion of the sublatern. An attempt is made to write a more nuanced, careful history of the past where minorities are engaged with. It is also a space to be self-critical and understand the contradictions and ambivalences of various class positionalities against the colonizers (here we turn to the example of Indian nationalism and history in the book).

Postcolonial Historiography- We then understand how complicated the project of postcolonial historiography is. It meets the challenges of rewriting, excavating history (with the subaltern in mind) from the margins, whilst at the same time also attempting to challenge European ideals. It also seems that postcolonial historiography is an attempt to study the ‘lack’ (Indian as the ‘lack’ as refereed in the text example) and thus challenge the hegemony of European ideals (which assumingly gives a ‘fuller’ model). This way of doing postcolonial historiography has its own struggle. There is an attempt to read differences in an affirmative manner. Pointing to normative enlightenment ideals and socio-cultural assimilation of them, it seems the historian applies the method of negation of the negation, thus subject’s position is denied continually.

 

Final Open discussion

Finally, these contradictions and ambivalences point towards a ‘politics of despair'. We note that the Introduction and the 1^st chapter provide a mode of questioning history but do not provide a new framework (noted earlier too in reference to Dussel as a possible alternative to a different framework). We wonder how totalizing academia is, and can there be any space of intervention (through another model). We note, it seems like three strands of thinking are happening here in the above discussion. a) The usefulness of enlightenment idea continues without completely dismissing them b) the idea is also not to fall back to nativism, nationalism c)At the same time, there is an attempt to re-think universal history (and have the subaltern in mind). We try to hinge on the last question and have a critical inquiry: Can we posit any reformulation of universalization without the baggage of European history? 

Tied to the above, we now have another question: What does it mean to have a reformulation of Universal history? How do we combat violence -theoretically and materially?  For a bit, we go back to the text (page 44 reference) and tease out what the term retroactive storytelling could mean. Does history justify violence? Always? We note that there are two forms of history negotiation perhaps. a) Idealist Universal History b) Negativist Universal history. It is noted that a lot of anti-colonial thinkers such as Fanon, have imagined a way out of this negativist history towards an idea of a collective new humanism. There is a universal strand here but it is sophisticated and espouses hope for the future. It is coming from a place of recognition of certain particularities. We thus make a case for a place of thinking about 'history from the place of violence' which seeks universalism (a nuanced one, like a new humanism) but is not reductive. This plea for a humanism (possibly tied to a universalism)  is different from the idea of a violent universalism (wherein particularities are often erased).  We wonder then if any kind of recuperation work in history-making and understanding must engage with non-western thinking. This observation brings us to the question: What does it mean to think beyond western modernity? To derive a direction in this line of thought, we are reading Enrique Dussel for next week. 

We wait for thinkers to hint pathways in the next reading session!