Chakrabarty, Dipesh - Provincializing Europe

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. “Postcoloniality and the artifice of History” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The purpose of this chapter is to problematize the celebration of the subaltern studies as a “Indian” re appropriation of their capacity to represent their own history. “Insofar as the academic discourse of history –that is history, as a discourse produced at the institutional site of university - is concerned, “Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories” (27). All this other histories remain as variations of a master narrative of European history, a history made universal. Any subject position articulated as part of an “Indian” remains as subaltern. There is an asymmetric politics of ignorance, while European historian can ignore the “non western” works, it is impossible for subaltern intellectuals to reciprocate this gesture. The second symptom of subalternity is that even though the western theories presented as universal are shaped in ignorance to “the rest of the world” (only Europe is theoretically knowable, the other histories are “cases”), these theories are useful for third world intellectuals. By using these theories, the other histories become subject of a methodological and epistemological historicism: presented as previous stages in time and in conceptualization (ie the notion of pre-capitalist). The histories of third world become histories of a transition, of states of incompleteness, of a development towards a modern capitalist nation-state. The Subaltern Studies manifest itself claims to study the historic failure of a complete decolonization “ the failure of the nation to come to its own” “an inadequacy of the bourgeoisie and the working class”. The British rule shaped the desire to be a subject among the elite that would lead the nationalist movement, for them to be a modern individual meant to become European. In contrast the peasant and the working had to be modernized, characterized as ignorant, parochial, communal, imbued in false consciousness. He proposes to reread the narratives of transition in reverse and find “plenitude” where there is “lack”. The Indian individual is shaped mimicking the European “legal fiction of citizenship” (35) but the private self (as a deferred public self) still remains to be shaped–the autobiographic genre are never about an “interiority”. This “other constructions of self and community while documentable, will never enjoy the privilege of providing a metanarratives or teleologies of our histories.” (37) The attempt to use this other narratives to make a history based on the Indian difference turn to mythology of the peasant and the workers, but these narratives are ahistorical. History is thus “the site where the struggle goes on to appropriate on behalf of the modern (my hyperreal Europe), these other collocations of memory.” (37) If this histories are subordinated to a linear history towards citizenship, nation-state, and human emancipation in the terms of Enlightenment, and reaffirming European Enlightment project as the most desirable political community (and only project possible). But in many cases the collective mobilization towards nationalism was based on ahistorical structures of the kin and community (a community that was both ahistorical and particularly indina, but also the base for a political institutional community). This is a kind of double bind in which the Indian subject articulates itself: the “Indian people” subject of the modernization is also its object, the subject is the already modern elite and the object is the yet-to-be modernized peasant. This subject only existst as part of the metanarratives called Europe, that invents itself in this process: both in the coloniality and in the post coloniality. In this process the only possibility of self representation left is the mimicry (Bhabha) of a modern European subjectivity. The “Indian” subject, as anhistorical antimodern, subject cannot speak as “theory”, “this subject can only be spoken for and spoken of b transition narrative, which will always ultimately privilege the modern.”
Rather than making an “other” history he proposes to make a different alliance with the centre of modernity, and go against universalization. He proposes to provincialize Europe a way of exposing heterogeneity, contradictory, plural struggles and the forms of coercion in both sides. He proposes to show the process by which European reason was made as a valid knowledge outside Europe, a process not conceded to other “reasons” [nieztchean logic]. The acquisition of the term modern has o be considered as part of the colonial project, also it is something third world nationalism have contributed to shape. E proposes to unravel all the violence both foundational and quotidian that are the base to the modern state, a violence directly linked to forms of idealism. This project contrasts with a cultural relativism or to a rejection of modernity. This project cannot be realized within university, it is thus a project of impossibility, within larger “politics of despair”. It is a history that has to push to the limit of undoing itself by recognizing the impossibility of translation “so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous. (…) To provincialize Europe is to see the modern as inevitably contested… to write over privileged narratives other narratives of human connections.” (46)