25 Years “Provincializing Europe”. Not yet?
In 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty published “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference” (Princeton University Press), a book that ever since has stirred much debate about the dynamics of power in history and historiography. Critically engaging with the discipline of history and historical narrative form, the book’s key intervention was to stress the inadequacy and indispensability of European epistemologies and what this ambiguity and hegemony means for the writing of history. The book has been particularly welcomed by students and scholars of extra-European and global history as it became an invaluable tool to address previously excluded historical agents, marginalized historical agency, and silenced subaltern pasts. For people and places that had been assigned as “not yet” by the grand narratives of modernity, “Provincializing Europe” has signaled an exit route out of the “waiting room of history”. For everyone else it has provided an inevitable intellectual exercise to critically reflect on Eurocentrism and the blind spots as well as the asymmetries and dynamics of power it might create in their own research, especially within the discipline of history.
This panel discusses “Provincializing Europe” and how it has influenced researchers since its initial publication, a quarter century ago, and provide a forum to discuss the book and its impact among historians in Germany. We have invited scholars of Western as well as non-Western history, who grew up with “Provincializing Europe” throughout their academic careers. From South Asia, in which Dipesh Chakrabarty’s archival anker moors, to the histories of East Asia, Europe, Africa, the Pacific and North America, the panel is global in its scope and represents various theoretical approaches reaching from cultural, social and political history to global history and the history of everyday life. The panel is designed as a roundtable with a short introduction (5 minutes), three short presentations (3×10 minutes) about the historiographical practice of provincializing Europe in Germany, a short comment by Dipesh Chakrabarty himself (10 minutes), and open discussion with the audience (45 minutes).
Like historiographic debates in Germany, “Provincializing Europe” took a similar trajectory in Australia, Chakrabarty’s academic training ground. De-centering Europe and its claims on the national narrative became essential for re-thinking the history of the settler society ever since the beginning of the Australian History Wars. Both countries are grappling with their postcolonial condition, yet are addressing very specific “historical wounds”. Considering German discussions through the looking glass of the Australian debates reveals that “Provincializing Europe” stands for an ongoing exercise until today, but also that we as professional historians have to be mindful of the material and political conditions of this historical practice.
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book has heavily influenced historians of Africa from inside and outside the continent to reflect on tacit elements of Eurocentrism embedded in the field of African History, on the diverse ways in which Africans have experienced time and modernity, and on the possibilities for understanding history through multiple and diverse narratives instead of searching for a single narrative. In particular, the book has encouraged historians of Africa to augment and contrast sources from institutional archives with oral histories and local narratives, to understand colonial modernity as co-constituted by Europeans and Africans, and to act more open to impulses from other disciplines.
My research focuses on the negotiation of citizenship/subjecthood in the discursive and practical field of student politics and national education in South Asia. In addition to problematizing the idea of progress, my work draws on Chakrabarty’s thoughts on sovereignty in colonial and postcolonial nation states. These have helped me think through the manner in which students in the Pakistan movement as well as in postcolonial Pakistan were in constant state of negotiating the “right kind of politics”. The involvement of students in the movement for Pakistan’s independence illustrates how students actively co-produced ideas of citizenship through their engagement in politics. The activism of students stood in tension to their ascribed role as ideal citizens and their embodiment of national sovereignty.