Provincializing Europe 2007 Preface

Dipesh Chakrabarty's 2007 preface aims to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the original publication.  Specifically, what does it mean to provincialize Europe?

Chakrabarty talks about his attraction to Marxism throughout his life, but also the tension he experiences in trying to relate Marxist ideas to life in India.  And it is not just Marxism that is at stake;  it is the entire European Enlightenment.

The problem for Chakrabarty is that these ideas arose within a particular historical tradition, and they claim universality at the same time.  "For the very language and the circumstances of their formulation  must have imported into them intimations of pre-existing histories that were singular and unique, histories that belonged to the multiple pasts of Europe" (location 77).


Even though European Enlightenment ideas claim universality, they cannot escape the history of their formulation. Accordingly,

To provincialize Europe was precisely to find out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical conditions that could not claim any universal validity.  It was to ask a question about how thought was related to place. Can thought transcend places of their origin? Or do places leave their imprint on thought in such a way as to call into question the idea of purely abstract categories? (location 78).

The universal idea, then, becomes "a highly unstable figure, a necessary placeholder in our attempt to think through questions of modernity" (location 87).

Universal thought is always "modified by particular histories, whether or not we could excavate such pasts fully" (Location 91).

Thanks for reading,
Best,
Trev


Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. ebook.