Part of the "Occasional Papers" series of CSSSC, this essay is a brief, and sharply posed, exchange between Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Das Gupta on working class consciousness in Bengal. it posits that this consciousness is not a mechanical outcome of the capitalist mode of production, itis not a thing but a process; that even failure must be taken on board in order to flesh out that process; that not only was the working class present (and therefore conscious) of its own making, but drew from rich pre-capitalist cultural traditions of dissent, rebellion and republicanism.The essay asks pertinent questions about the morality of labour, history of peasant revolts, capitalist intervention, religious discrimination among labourers etc.

Some Aspects of Labour History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century: Two Views (Social Science Acrosss Disciplines)

Business & Money

Chakrabarty, Dipesh

Chaudhuri, Rosinka

Dasgupta, Ranajit

Economics

Oxford University Press

Part of the "Occasional Papers" series of CSSSC, this essay is a brief, and sharply posed, exchange between Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Das Gupta on working class consciousness in Bengal. it posits that this consciousness is not a mechanical outcome of the capitalist mode of production, itis not a thing but a process; that even failure must be taken on board in order to flesh out that process; that not only was the working class present (and therefore conscious) of its own making, but drew from rich pre-capitalist cultural traditions of dissent, rebellion and republicanism. The essayasks pertinent questions about the morality of labour, history of peasant revolts, capitalist intervention, religious discrimination among labourers etc.

Unish Shotoke Banglar Shromik Itihaser Koyekti Dik: Duti Porjacholona

Dasgupta, Late Ranajit

Mondal, Anirban

The Climate of History in a Planetary Age

For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider--from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals. Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty's work--the globe is a human-centric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World

Science & Math

Earth Sciences

Can European thought be dislodged from the center of the practice of history in a non-European place? What problems arise when we translate cultural practices into the categories of social science? Provincializing Europe is one of the first book-length treatments on how postcolonial thinking impacts on the social sciences. This book explores, through a series of linked essays, the problems of thought that present themselves when we think of a place such as India through the categories of modern, European social science and, in particular, history.
 Provincializing Europe is a sustained conversation between historical thinking and postcolonial perspectives. It addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of the modern in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Chakrabarty argues, is built right into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and human sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Chakrabarty finds that "Nativism," however, is no answer to Eurocentrism, because the universals propounded by European Enlightenment remain indispensable to any social critique that seeks to address issues of social justice and equity. Provincializing Europe proposes 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. Chakrabarty demonstrates, both theoretically and with examples from colonial and contemporary India, how such translational histories may be thought and written. Provincializing Europe is not a project of shunning European thought. It is a project of globalizing such thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.

Provincializing Europe

History

Asia

Princeton University Press

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

Dipesh Chakrabarty combines a history of the jute-mill workers of Calcutta with a fresh look at labor history in Marxist scholarship. Opposing a reductionist view of culture and consciousness, he examines the milieu of the jute-mill workers and the way it influenced their capacity for class solidarity and "revolutionary" action from 1890 to 1940. Around and within this empirical core is built his critique of emancipatory narratives and their relationship to such Marxian categories as "capital," "proletariat," or "class consciousness." The book contributes to currently developing theories that connect Marxist historiography, post-structuralist thinking, and the traditions of hermeneutic analysis. Although Chakrabarty deploys Marxian arguments to explain the political practices of the workers he describes, he replaces universalizing Marxist explanations with a sensitive documentary method that stays close to the experience of workers and their European bosses. He finds in their relationship many elements of the landlord/tenant relationship from the rural past: the jute-mill workers of the period were preindividualist in consciousness and thus incapable of participating consistently in modern forms of politics and political organization.

Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940

Dipesh Chakrabarty combines a history of the jute-mill workers of Calcutta with a fresh look at labor history in Marxist scholarship. Opposing a reductionist view of culture and consciousness, he examines the milieu of the jute-mill workers and the way it influenced their capacity for class solidarity and "revolutionary" action from 1890 to 1940. Around and within this empirical core is built his critique of emancipatory narratives and their relationship to such Marxian categories as "capital" "proletariat" or "class consciousness" The book contributes to currently developing theories that connect Marxist historiography, post-structuralist thinking, and the traditions of hermeneutic analysis. Although Chakrabarty deploys Marxian arguments to explain the political practices of the workers he describes, he replaces universalizing Marxist explanations with a sensitive documentary method that stays close to the experience of workers and their European bosses. He finds in their relationship many elements of the landlord/tenant relationship from the rural past: the jute-mill workers of the period were preindividualist in consciousness and thus incapable of participating consistently in modern forms of politics and political organization.

Rethinking Working-Class History

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 Europe proposes 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.

Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference - New Edition (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History)

Americas

This final installment of the Millennial Quartet addresses the question of whether cosmopolitanism—ways of thinking, feeling, and acting beyond one’s particular society—is simply the universalism of a Western particular. Assembling scholars from an array of disciplines including English literature and language, romance languages, art history, South Asian studies, and anthropology, this special issue of Public Culture recenters the theory and history of translocal political aspirations and cultural ideas from the traditional Western vantage point to areas outside Europe, such as South Asia, China, and Africa. By examining new archives, framing new theoretical formulations, and suggesting new possibilities of political practice, these essays stretch the term cosmopolitanism to new definitions. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism may be taken to promise a form of supraregional political solidarity, but on the other, it may erode precisely those cultural differences that derive their meaning from a particular place and tradition. Given that most cosmopolitan political formations, from the Roman imperium to European imperialism to contemporary globalization, have been coercive and unequal, can there be a noncoercive and egalitarian cosmopolitan politics? At the most elevated level of conceptualization, while cosmopolitanism may promise a universalism of knowledge, it more typically represents an unwarranted generalization of a European idea or practice.

Cosmopolitanism: Millennial Quartet IV (Volume 12) (Special Issue of Public Culture: Millinneial Quartet)

Politics & Social Sciences

Pollock, Sheldon

Bhabha, Homi K.

Breckenridge, Carol A.

Social Sciences

Duke University Press Books

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