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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing of Europe

By Abikal Borah

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference is about recognising the limitations of Western social science in explaining the historical experiences of political modernity in South Asia. Chakhrabarty offers a critique of the Enlightenment concepts of a universal human experience and of secular modernity. However, his project is not about rejecting European thought as a whole but rather, an effort to renew European thought “from and for the margins” (16), where the diverse histories of human beings and belonging can have a place for themselves. In other words, the idea of Provincializing Europe represents Chakrabarty’s attempt to pluralize the history of global political modernity.

Provincializing Europe is set in the intersection between subaltern studies and postcolonial theory. In alignment with postcolonial theory, Chakrabarty offers a critique of historicism both as philosophical thought and a conceptual category. He sees postcolonial thought as a practice of critically “engaging the universals—such as the abstract figure of the human or that of Reason—that were forged in eighteenth century Europe and that underlie the human sciences” (5). In other words, Chakrabarty locates a problem in Enlightenment philosophy for assuming the human as an abstract figure. Postcolonial thought, as Chakrabarty suggests, is invested in understanding the different conditions of being, which, in a way, allows one to recognize the diversity of human experiences. It is this recognition of diversity that compels Chakrabarty to describe the visions and experiences of political modernity in India as different from Europe. This recognition of historical difference allows him to further question historicism as an idea that suggests that, to “understand anything it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development” (6). Chakrabarty therefore, chooses to displace the temporal structure that historicism as a mode of thinking represents. He argues that historicism represents a stagist theory of development wherein modernity, capitalism and civilization appears in a “first in Europe and then elsewhere” temporal frame. As Chakrabarty problematises this linear temporal frame he proposes an alternative reading of the processes of global political modernity by engaging with its antinomies.

Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Furthermore, Provincializing Europe rejects the idea of a universal history of the globalisation of capital by examining the multiple constitutive elements of that history. This move enables Chakrabarty to interrogate Karl Marx’s conceptual category, “abstract labour.” Similar to his critique of historicism, Chakrabarty rejects the temporal totality of history. As opposed to Marx’s universal history of capital, Chakrabarty conceptualises two histories of capital: “histories posited by capital” as History 1 and the histories that exist outside of “capital’s life process” as History 2. Chakrabarty considers History 1 as purely analytical whereas History 2 beckons him “to more effective narratives of human belonging” (71) In other words, Chakrabarty calls for an exploration of the “politics of human diversity” and argues that various History 2s continuously modify History 1. The remarkable achievement of Chakrabarty’s conceptualisation of History 2 lies in his ability to create room for incorporating the history of human subjective experiences into the history of capital and vice-versa. To put it differently, Chakrabarty shows a way toward a sensitive reading of the subject while we grapple with the diverse histories of capital’s life processes.

Provincializing Europe also reflects on the problem of conceiving history as a secular subject. Chakrabarty considers secular histories inadequate when it comes to explaining the postcolonial conditions of being. In the particular case of India, there lies a difficulty in conceptualising political modernity as “the seemingly nonmodern, rural, nonsecular relationships and life practices” constantly influence the modern institutions of government (11). Since the task of conceptualising the present in the postcolonial context is laden with such anachronisms, Chakrabarty seeks to develop a conceptual framework that take into account other forms of the past, other histories that capital encountered as its antecedents. Chakrabarty’s desire for the inclusion of the other forms of past makes his critique of secular histories powerful. In other words, the idea of Provincializing Europe matters for its reincarnation of the other forms of the past; pasts that constitute the postcolonial conditions of being and belonging.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, (Princeton University Press, 2000)

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Dominance without Hegemony by Ranajit Guha (1997)

By Katherine Maddox

The theory that dominance in society is based on a hegemonic culture was initially posited by Antonio Gramsci based on a Marxist analysis of economic and social class. Gramsci proposed that prevailing cultural norms should not be perceived as natural and inevitable but in fact represent artificial social constructs imposed by the ruling class and that the roots of these constructs reveal the instruments of social-class domination. In the framework of the nation, this translated to the state maintaining its position through a mix of sheer force (or coercion in political society) as well as the active participation of the subordinate groups (or consent through hegemony in civil society). Gramsci’s work on domination and consent founded in hegemony inspired many scholars that followed, and particularly those studying societies emerging from European imperial rule in the decades after World War II.

Thomas-Hirschhorn-Gramsci-Monument-2013-via-Daniel-Creahan

Dominance without hegemonyOne of the most significant works in the field of post-colonial studies to draw on Gramsci’s concept was Ranajot Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony. Published only in 1998, the groundwork for the book had been laid almost fifteen years earlier with the establishment of the Subaltern Studies journal in 1982, which was founded by an initial group of eight South Asian scholars. The term “subaltern” is also an allusion to Gramsci, who called for the emergence of “subaltern intellectuals” to challenge the cultural hegemony of the ruling bourgeois class. In this context, subaltern refers to any person or group of inferior rank and position to those who dominated society. While the works of prominent post-colonial scholars such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said had previously challenged the extent of hegemonic dominance in societies under direct or indirect colonial rule, the Subaltern Studies Group in its journals and in the overall approach of the individual scholars beyond this sought more directly to apply Gramsci’s theoretical relation of dominance to hegemony to the context of India and to highlight the issues with it.

Ranajit Guha.

Ranajit Guha.

The Subaltern Studies Group’s take on dominance without hegemony in India, as outlined by Guha in his book, begins with the experience of the British Raj and the inherent difference between the colonial history and that of the metropolitan bourgeois state narrative in Europe (as well as America). In colonial India, political coercion outweighed persuasive cultural hegemony in civil society and this carried over to the post-independence period as well. The post-colonial elite (both newly minted bourgeois capitalists and more well-established land owners) had distinctly different interests than the subaltern groups in the new nation. Consequently, Guha argues, this split in the politics of the state meant that the Indian bourgeoisie, unlike the European bourgeoisie, failed to establish Gramscian cultural hegemony over Indian subalterns. The inability of the colonial state and then the independent nation to assimilate civil society into political society, as had been accomplished in the West, led the state to exercise dominance without hegemonic consent.

In the decades since the subalternists began their influential work, the theory of dominance without hegemony has not been without its critics. Most recently, Vivek Chibber challenged the conclusions reached by Guha and his colleagues Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty. In particular, Chibber takes issue with the assumption by these scholars that the narrative of hegemony could be founded in the agency of the bourgeoisie, and that they in turn could speak for the nation in the West or the East. The Subaltern Studies Group, Chibber argues, romanticized the bourgeois democratic mission and capitalist power relations. Among other things, the Subalternists misdiagnosed cultural differences as the failure of the dominant classes to secure consent through hegemony – a process that Chibber asserts is more grounded in political economy than the absolute social hegemony the Subaltern Studies Group refutes. Chibber ultimately calls for a more nuanced understanding of the nature of dominance and hegemony in Europe, which he asserts the subalternists mistakenly use as a counter-factual.

Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Harvard University Press, 1998)

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Sources:

Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013).

Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs and Eric Hobsbawm (2000).

Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (1998).

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Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

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