Review of Provincializing Europe
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
In a sentence, his aim is to make room for a different way of analyzing and describing things; not instead of the European way, but alongside it. In opening his discourse, Chakrabarty informs us that he is not going to be dealing with "the region of the world we call 'Europe,'" but rather the "imaginary figure [of Europe] that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought." (Chakrabarty, 4)
In doing so, he produces an exemplary piece of philosophy of history, proposing four major premises: that European thought is no longer the sole property of Europeans and can be used by postcolonialists to good effect, when revised for local conditions; that there are two broad and useful ways of looking at history, one based on capital and the other on non-capital, as Chakrabarty understands from his readings of Marx; that history is not a continuously linear progression through time in an evolutionist sense; and that time itself is worth reanalysis.
Organizing Our Thoughts: Chakrabarty's Layout
Before exploring these four premises, it is useful to look at the way in which Chakrabarty organizes his book. As a historian of India, Chakrabarty relies on studies of Indian culture and history for illustrating his concepts, organized as a series of individual, largely unrelated essays.
More technically, the book is arranged as an introduction, four essays from a highly Marxist/Marxian perspective, four essays that he calls "Histories of Belonging" and that are inspired by the thinking of Heidegger, and an epilogue. The first four chapters largely set up the terms of the second four chapters, which are significantly narrower in their scope, focusing on the Bengali middle class. It is in the introduction and the first four chapters that Chakrabarty best and most clearly elucidates his four central premises.
The Worldwide Ownership of Ideas
Chakrabarty’s argument for the use and common ownership of European ways of thought is a complex one. In the book Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States, Basch et al make the argument that "to perceive and analyze transnationalism [and perhaps globalization more widely] we need a global perspective […] that moves beyond the bounded categories of ethnic group, nation, and race." (Basch et al, 268)
For Chakrabarty, the best perspective with which to answer this argument is the European one. To him, it is the most universal. He points out that concepts such as citizenship, the state, human rights, the individual, equality before the law, social justice, democracy, and more were originated in Europe, more or less codified during the Enlightenment era and the nineteenth century, and spread throughout the world by European colonizers who "both preached this Enlightenment humanism at the colonized and at the same time denied its practice." (Chakrabarty, 4)
In essence, his argument here is that postcolonial scholars should not dismiss the European heritage of their thought as a "matter of what Leela Gandhi has aptly called 'postcolonial revenge,'" for "provincializing Europe is not a project of rejecting or discarding European thought," but one that is able to use European thought "renewed from and for the margins." (Chakrabarty, 16)
The Two Histories
Chakrabarty’s two Marxist histories best come out in the second chapter, entitled "Two Histories of Capital," but in many ways after direct the course of the text.
History 1, the history of capital, "a past posited by capital itself as its precondition," is the form of history that "forms the backbone of the usual narratives of transition to the capitalist mode of production." (63) History 2, on the other hand, is almost an everything else category; "it allows us to make room […] for the politics of human belonging and diversity," without which "there would be no way humans could be at home – dwell – in the rule of capital, no room for enjoyment, no play of desires, no seduction of the commodity." (63) As it applies to postcolonial studies, Chakrabarty argues that it can be used to describe the transition of postcolonial societies to capitalism, and modernity.
The Argument Against Historicism: A New Way of Looking at Time
In taking up arms against historicism and a linear, evolutionist approach to history, Chakrabarty is not unusual amid postcolonial theorists. His complaint is that to understand history in this light is to inevitably see certain non-European states and regions as "lacking" something, rather than as dealing with problems in a different way, and as thus further behind in development. Rather than adopt this approach, he sees history as a plurality of times and eras, and uses the example of how people can seem to live in different centuries, not just in India, but also in many other parts of the world, while living modernly.
Chakrabarty’s concept of time is related: He sees it as disjointed. People can experience something for decades after it happened, even if the event was seconds long, or people can compress a whole day’s events (or a whole lifetime’s) into a few short breaths (or a small autobiography). He is trying to challenge the reader not to accept the highly Western, progressive look of history as a series of ongoing developments, with all steps forward and no steps back.
Conclusion
While I do not feel that Chakrabarty achieved his ambitious stated goal of providing an alternative pattern to European thinking or eliminating historicism – and who could in three hundred pages? – I do feel his work is an important step in the dialogue along these lines. The actual text and the content can be quite challenging to read, there are numerous weaknesses in style, and, some might argue, in theory as well, but in the end, Chakrabarty's work deserves to be read for what it has to say.
Sources
Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, c1993)
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000
Provincializing Europe
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