In the 1980s a group of mostly younger historians, coalescing around Ranajit Guha, launched Subaltern Studies. Originally conceived as a project to be sustained over three volumes, it outgrew its original ambitions, and recently published its twelfth volume. The early volumes of Subaltern Studies made a big splash in Indian historical circles, but their influence beyond these circles was limited; as Dipesh Chakrabarty was later to observe, while any historian of India was obliged to be conversant with aspects of the history of Europe, and was almost certain to have read Hobsbawm, Rude, Furet, Ginzburg and others, the reverse was not true. However, partly due to the publication of a selection of essays from the first five volumes, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, and with a Preface by Edward Said, the readership and influence of this intervention in Indian historiography expanded greatly. This accelerated the process of members of the Subaltern Studies collective using their Indian material not only to ask questions of Indian history, but also to engage with questions of wider, and often philosophical, import.
None did so more, perhaps, than Dipesh Chakrabarty. When Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference was published in 2000, its author was already well known in intellectual circles for his earlier essays and his first book; but Provincializing Europe very soon commanded a readership and exercised an influence much wider than his earlier works.Footnote1 In the decade since its publication, it has figured in debates in almost all the human sciences, and has been engaged not only by historians of India, but by historians more generally, and by anthropologists, sociologists, medievalists, scholars of literature, philosophers, and others. It has influenced work on Latin America, Africa, and—as represented in this issue—Europe, Australia, and, of course, South Asia. This special issue of Postcolonial Studies presents the work of scholars, working in different fields, whose scholarship has been influenced by this remarkable book. It comprises a selection of papers originally presented at a conference held at the University of Chicago in 2010 to mark the tenth anniversary of the publication of Provincializing Europe.
We begin with an essay by Carlo Ginzburg, author of The Cheese and the Worms, The Night Battles, Ecstasies, and other works. If provincializing Europe requires, among other things, treating Europe and its history as one history amongst others rather than as the telos of all human history, the origins of that project, Ginzburg argues, lie just as much in the ‘contentious, contradictory language’ of the Enlightenment as do the origins of treating Europe as universal. Ginzburg traces, with the dazzling erudition and the keen eye for irony that have made him one of the foremost historians of our age, the emergence in the eighteenth century of some concepts, tropes and patterns of thinking of which we are heirs. The text which is his principal focus, La Créquinière's The Agreement of the Customs of the East-Indians with Those of the Jews, is a work which can be read as a forerunner of comparative anthropology. In this work La Créquinière articulates an opposition between Europe and the Orient in terms of novelty versus antiquity, and progress versus stagnation; a contrast all too familiar to contemporary readers, though as Ginzburg notes, these were not commonplaces in 1704, when this work was first published, in French. However this contrast is less one between the pre-modern and modernity than it is an attempt to articulate the ‘quarrel’ between the ancients and the moderns. It is a contrast in which the Jews are aligned with Orientals as peoples of antiquity; peoples who, if they have not shaken off their blind adherence to the ways of their forefathers, and have not learned to think for themselves, have also not become slaves to caprice and ambition, and still preserve an admirable simplicity and naturalness. This anticipation of Rousseau should not be dismissed, Ginzburg argues, as a mere ‘rhetorical move’; it is rather the other side of the Enlightenment, of a period where, in conquering and subjugating others, Europe was also ‘learning to look at itself through the eyes of the people being conquered and enslaved by Europeans’. To retrace this history and to be reminded of it is also to be reminded that the project of provincializing Europe is, at least in part, enabled by conceptual tools and a sensibility provided by Enlightenment Europe.
Sandro Mezzadra's essay draws upon the rich tradition of Italian autonomist Marxism to engage with postcolonial theory. Mezzadra suggests that the heterogeneity of modernity lies not just in the multiple paths that it has taken—a theme explored in the literature on ‘alternative’ and ‘multiple’ modernities—but in the fact that ‘European modernity’ was never a pure form, of which other modernities are variations. The essence of this putative original or pure form of capitalist modernity is usually taken to lie in the emergence of free labour and the figure of the citizen, the two principal modes by which the state and capital produced a new mode of subjectivity, one in which the multiple temporalities that characterize human existence were now made (partly) commensurable. The historical account underlying this suggests the slow emergence of free labour out of various forms of unfree labour, and the concomitant rise of notions of equality until it became part of ‘commonsense’ in Europe, paving the way for the emergence of the free, equal, rights-bearing citizen. Mezzadra shows, however, that a ‘deep heterogeneity of the forms of subsumption of labour under capital’ has characterized and constituted global capitalism from the beginning to the present; ‘contrary to what both classical political economy and Marx argued, ”free” wage labour cannot be presented... as capitalist standard and norm’. The historical emergence of capital was always accompanied by, and drew upon, unfree labour—slavery, indentured labour, and so on. Marx's account of the emergence of free labour and his concepts of labour and of the working class ‘were built upon a single segment of the world labouring population and were not therefore able to grasp the diverse reality and subjective experiences of dependent labour under capitalism’. This historical account is accompanied by a theoretical rethinking that draws upon the second chapter of Provincializing Europe to argue that just as there are many histories of labour, so there are many histories of capitalism and modernity; and that recognizing this not only opens a space for thinking of the non-West differently, but that provincializing Europe in this way also opens the space to think of Europe anew.
For many years Chakrabarty lived and taught in Australia, where he forged friendships with a number of scholars of that country, especially those working on the history of indigenous Australians. Through his conversations and writings he influenced many of these historians, just as his own work was, in turn, influenced—as is amply attested in Provincializing Europe. The next two essays provide instances of the fecundity of those exchanges.
If E H Carr drew attention to the inescapability of selectivity and judgement in the writing of history, in recent decades the debate has moved from the presumptions of the historian to the presumptions embedded in the protocols and practice of history-writing. This trend, ‘internal’ to historiography and taking place largely in the academy, has had its counterpart in the public life of history, where there are those who have challenged and rejected the protocols of history-writing. Bain Attwood examines both these movements, and the ways in which they have sometimes interlaced and collided, in Australia. Efforts to include Aboriginal peoples in the writing of Australian history—representations of the past ‘undertaken by professional historians practising their discipline in largely conventional ways’—have also been accompanied by the proliferation of representations of the past ‘produced in keeping with the conventions of memory and myth’, and which implicitly and sometimes explicitly challenge the protocols of academic history-writing. The function of testimony, for instance, has increasingly become not ‘the acquisition of historical knowledge about pasts poorly known’, but rather ‘the transmission of pasts to future generations in a manner that creates a sense of connection between the author or speaker on the one hand and the reader or listener or viewer on the other’. This has been especially so in the public debates and controversies surrounding the ‘stolen generations’, those children who were forcibly removed from their Aboriginal parents and communities by the state, to be placed with white families or in white-run institutions. Such developments have been disconcerting for many academic historians, but others have sought to bridge the divide by various means. In providing a genealogy and analysis of these developments, Attwood also contributes to a rethinking of those acrimonious public debates that came to be known, in Australia, as the ‘history wars’.
Public discussion of the dispossession of Australia's Aboriginal peoples, and the many horrors and cruelties inflicted upon them, led to a controversy over whether or not the Australian government should issue an official apology to indigenous Australians. An apology was finally delivered in a speech by the (then) Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, in 2008, as part of what was conceived as a process of ‘reconciliation’. Miranda Johnson uses the occasion of this speech to critically examine the discourses of reconciliation, and the changed meanings they have given to ‘indigeneity’. Apologies of this sort, Johnson argues, ‘ground authority within national territory rather than as “over there” with the imperial metropole’, a grounding (or rather, regrounding) which is a deeply felt need in former member colonies of the British empire in a postcolonial and post-imperial age, and which finds expression in a search for ‘alternative idioms for expressing national identity’. The language of reconciliation helps to provide this idiom, Johnson argues, for it has much less to do with reparations and with righting historic wrongs than it does with redefining nationhood. Moreover, it functions to allow settler states to appropriate the language of primordial belonging for settler, and not only indigenous, populations; ‘indigeneity’ becomes something that pertains ‘to indigenous people, settlers and even recent immigrants’. The bitter irony, with which Johnson concludes her essay, is that, ‘Having acknowledged and apologized for the injustices of the past, the settler state redefines postcolonial nationhood in terms of [an] indigeneity appropriated from its former victims.’
These two essays on history, politics and indigeneity in the new world are followed by two essays principally concerned with South Asia; the impact of Chakrabarty's work on the scholarship of this region hardly needs elaboration. Ajay Skaria seeks to extend and to add a twist to Chakrabarty's provincializing of Europe; for Skaria, to provincialize Europe is to eschew thinking of equality in terms of an abstract universalism and the ‘general responsibility’ of law to majorities and minorities. Provincializing Europe entails thinking equality in non-Eurocentric terms, and Skaria finds an elucidation of such a thinking of equality in the thought of one M K Gandhi. If the republican tradition of political thought sought to ‘reconcile the minor and the major within a totality’, for Gandhi, ‘the minor is constitutively non-totalizable, and a democratic politics would have to adhere by the minor in this sense’. This politics is encapsulated in Gandhi's invocation of Ramarajya, a form of politics and of rule in which equality is radically, if inconsistently, rethought. In this original reading of Gandhi's thought and its implications, Skaria provides a model of how to reread the Mahatma in his time, but for ours.
‘Humanity’ is a category usually thought to be an invention of the Enlightenment. Non-European societies, and ‘religion’ (the two often mapping onto each other, for non-European societies were seen as those which had not yet emancipated their public life from religion), were thought to be constitutively incapable of conceiving of this abstraction, let alone endowing it with flesh and blood. In his provocative essay, Faisal Devji suggests that in fact the category of humankind can be found in nineteenth-century Islamic thought, and figures prominently in the rhetoric of contemporary Islamic ‘extremism’ or ‘fundamentalism’. In the poetry of the Indian/Pakistani poet Muhammad Iqbal, Islam was defined by its attachment to an abstract ideal of universality, just as communism was—which, indeed, was why communism was the greatest rival of Islam. But whereas communism was clearly a form of politics, the universality of Islam properly lay in its neutral, disinterested detachment from ‘interests’ and hence ‘politics’—a disinterest manifested in the requirement that its followers adhere to ‘archaic demands’ and ‘technical routine’. For Al-Qaeda and contemporary Islamic ‘terrorism’, ‘sacrifice’ and ‘martyrdom’ are the signs of a commitment to universality in its Islamic, and to its adherents its only genuine, form.
We conclude with a response to these various essays from Dipesh Chakrabarty, who in addition to being the author of Provincializing Europe, the book that has occasioned this issue, was also a founding co-editor of this journal for the first decade of its existence.
Notes
1. Republished by Princeton University Press, with a new Preface, in 2007.