Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

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 Europeproposes 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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe 3

PART ONE: HISTORICISM AND THE NARRATION OF MODERNITY

Chapter 1. Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History 27
Chapter 2. The Two Histories of Capital 47
Chapter 3. Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History 72
Chapter 4. Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts 97

PART TWO: HISTORIES OF BELONGING

Chapter 5. Domestic Cruelty and the Birth of the Subject 117
Chapter 6. Nation and Imagination 149
Chapter 7. Adda: A History of Sociality 180
Chapter 8. Family, Fraternity, and Salaried Labor 214
Epilogue. Reason and the Critique of Historicism 237

Notes 257
Index 299