Dipesh Chakrabarty

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Dipesh Chakrabarty 2012 in Hannover-Herrenhausen during an international conference on the limits of growth

Dipesh Chakrabarty (born December 15, 1948 in Calcutta ) is an Indian historian who has dealt with topics such as cultural imperialism , post-colonialism , human history and the labor movement in Bengal, India . He is "one of the pioneers of post-colonial historiography ".

Life

Chakrabarty attended Presidency College at the University of Calcutta , where he received a degree in physics . He later received a Diploma in Business Management from the Indian Institute of Management , also in Kolkata . He received his PhD from the Australian National University in Canberra , Australia in trade history . In 2004 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He is currently (2016) Professor at the University of Chicago , Lawrence A. Kimpton Chair in the History Department of South Asian Languages ​​and Cultures.

Chakrabarty writes articles for Public Culture , a journal published by Duke University , and teaches at the Center for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta.

Chakrabarty is a member of the Subaltern Studies Group and deals with theories of postcolonialism and their connection to historiography. In his best-known work Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (German: Europe as Province: Perspectives on Postcolonial Historiography ) he criticizes the centering of international historiography on the history of Europe. European modernity and its concepts such as enlightenment , bourgeoisie , reason, etc. are viewed as a universal benchmark and, regardless of their ties to European cultural history, applied to their own cultural history by non-European intellectuals. The history of Europe is the prototype of a universal development of all stories. This discrepancy automatically falls to the detriment of non-European cultures, since the unattainable “ideal” creates a story of lack and failure. Fundamentally, the problem of power or rule and the subalternity of Indian history represent a global process of negotiation and demarcation that marks the contrasts between European and non-European.

Act

As Dipesh Chakrabarty his collection of essays Europe as a Province. Perspectives on Postcolonial Historiography. published, the intellectual tendency of postcolonialism had already been concerned with the effects of colonial power on the colonized since the middle of the 20th century, after the colonial power had long since left the country.

As a historian, Chakrabarty focuses on the problems of writing history in his native India. He describes that "Europe acts as a tacit yardstick in historical knowledge". He describes the difficulties in breaking free from the omnipresent European history, without which Indian historiography does not seem to be possible to him. Because the history of India, but also of other former colonies, is shaped by European discourses. Concepts such as capitalism , bourgeoisie or Enlightenment , which belong to the tools of every historian, appear as supposedly universally applicable, neutral quantities. However, this is not the case. According to Chakrabarty, because of the context in which they originated in European history, they implicitly continue to refer to it as their inherent point of comparison. Corresponding phenomena in the context of colonial historiography then flash up as 'variations of a main narrative' in which Europe remains the unspoken subject. Culturally or otherwise caused 'deviations' thus automatically appear in a deficient light, whereby the former colony on the representative level of language is repeatedly caught in the situation of lack.

Chakrabarty calls for people to recognize and perceive this problem in order to enable a critical examination of this topic and to dare to take a new look at fixed terminology. Although it cannot be a simple rejection of modernity or a “cultural relativism”, he regards Europe as a province of a heterogeneous world and advocates contextual historiography in order to break up the existing power relations so that the equation of European history with a universal story is prevented. The ambivalences, contradictions, use of violence, tragedies and ironic moments in the history of modernity must be exposed. Therefore, among other things, Chakrabarty suggests following the history of modern medicine, public health, and personal hygiene. At this interface of modern people, who have both a public and a private side, modern values ​​were enforced pandemically and every day by means of violence (e.g. compulsory vaccination).

Publications

in German language
  • Exhibition catalog: The Ultimate Capital is the Sun: Metabolism in Art, Politics, Philosophy and Science , de / en. New Society for Fine Arts , Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-938515-57-0 .
  • Collection of essays: Europe as a province. Perspectives on Postcolonial Historiography. Translated from the English by Robin Cackett, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-593-39262-2 .
in other languages
  • The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth . University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, USA 2015, ISBN 978-0-226-10044-9 .
  • as co-editor with Henning Trüper and Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Historical Teleologies in the Modern World . Bloomsbury Academic, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-474221061 .
  • El humanismo en la era de la globalización. Katz Barpal Editores, Buenos Aires / Madrid 2009, ISBN 978-84-96859-52-4 .
  • as editor with Shahid Amin: Volume 9 of Subaltern Studies .
  • Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois 2004 ISBN 0-226-10039-1 .
  • Cosmopolitanism. with Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, and Homi K. Bhabha .
  • Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historial Difference. University of Princeton Press, Princeton, New Jersey 2000, ISBN 0-19-565537-0 .
  • Rethinking Working Class: Bengal, 1890–1940. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 2000, ISBN 0-691-07030-X .
  • Communal Riots and Labor: Bengal's Jute Mill Hands in the 1890s . Center for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta 1976.

Exhibitions

  • The Ultimate Capital is the Sun: Metabolism in Art, Politics, Philosophy, and Science . New Society for Fine Arts, Berlin 2014.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincialize Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History. In: Dipesh Chakrabarty: Europe as a Province. Perspectives on Postcolonial Historiography. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2012, pp. 41–65.
  2. ↑ Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincialize Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History, in ders .: Europe as a province. Perspectives on Postcolonial Historiography. Campus, Frankfurt 2012, p. 41
  3. ↑ Dipesh Chakrabarty: Europe as a province. Perspectives on Postcolonial Historiography . Campus, 2010, ISBN 978-3-593-39262-2 , pp. 27 .
  4. ↑ Dipesh Chakrabarty: Europe as a province. Perspectives on Postcolonial Historiography . Campus, 2010, ISBN 978-3-593-39262-2 , pp. 63 f .
  5. ↑ History from the Edges. In: FAZ . February 24, 2011, p. 34.
  6. ^ A story of its own in: Frankfurter Rundschau of December 7, 2010, page A8
personal data
SURNAME Chakrabarty, Dipesh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Indian historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 15, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Calcutta , West Bengal , India