Provincializing Europe

Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

Author: Dipesh Chakrabarty
ISBN: 9780691049090

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 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. Provincializing Europe 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 assumpt

Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publish Date: 2000

Subjects: History / Asia / India & South Asia

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Cross-Cultural Center (Location: Europe (EURO))