Chakrabarty (2007) - Provincializing Europe In Global Times

Question 1

Critique of Marxist application in India

Answer 1

1)Author realized that relations in Indian factories revealed tension of the distant historical objectivity of European/German Marxism
2) Marxism widely perceived as true and prestigious
3) Indian Maoism had a shared dissident of this
4)After he travelled to Australia - observed unstable relations between any abstract idea and its concrete instantification (bro making up words at this point)

Question 2

Critique of modernization

Answer 2

There is no “catching up” or “cunning of reason” that ensures the convergence to the same point in history despite historical differences since there is no tabula rasa (absence of preconceived ideas)

Question 3

Poststructuralist critique

Answer 3

Language stems from modernity project and have included pre-existing histories, singular and unique to pasts of Europe and have lingered into concepts meant for all

Question 4

To “provincialize” Europe - meaning

Answer 4

To find out how, in what sense, European ideas that were universal were also drawn from particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim universal validity

This global relevance was unquestioned.

Question 5

Europe as a myth

Answer 5

• In India - made in the image of the colonizing power
• Making of Europe was not an act of Europeans alone
• it was the thinking of modernization, liberalism and socialism that assumed Europe into its existence