Abstract
An irony of Third World, or non-Western, historiography, and scholarship for that matter, is that it cannot be processed in total ignorance of the architects and major figures of European history and their conceptual paradigms. Here ‘anctioned ignorance’ of the elites is unpardonably and absolutely out of the question. European historians from Edward Thompson, through Le Roy Ladurie, George Duby, Carlo Ginsberg, Lawrence Stone, Robert Darnton, to Nathalie Davies can go about their work without bothering about non-Western systems of knowledge. Finding himself in a dilemma, Dipesh Chakrabarty ruefully argues in Habitations of Modernity that while non-Western historians, including himself, cannot afford to turn a blind eye to authorities in the field and are hard put to display their credentials time and again, a Western scholar can set about his/her work within hard and fast Eurocentric standards and without this besmirching the credibility of his/her work. The situation becomes all the more exacerbated when Chakrabarty himself acts out that logic while discussing the nineteenth-century reformers Rammohun Roy and Iswarchandra Vidysagar as they approached the subject of Sati (widow-burning.) Referring the phenomenon to lack of compassion, which habit had rendered imperceptible, Chakrabarty adduces the authority of Adam Smith. A few lines later, he refers to Hume’s definition of pity in a gesture that articulates the impossibility of going beyond that heritage.1
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Notes
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of the Subaltern Studies, London: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 123 (199–234).
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008, p. xiii.
Ibid., p. xii.
Philomena Mariani, ‘God Is Man’, in Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, Seattle: Bay Press, 1991, p. 2.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge ed. Colin Gorder, New York: Pantheon Books, 1977, p. 81.
Quoted in Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London & New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 52–3.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p. 278.
Quoted in Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism After Structuralism, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 86.
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, New York: Time Inc., 1994, p. 160.
Amilcar Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’, in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988, p. 54.
Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent, in ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Lowis Gates, Jr, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 186.
Quoted by Marwin Harris, Culture, Man, and Nature, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1971, p. 507.
Werner Sollors, ‘Who Is Ethnic?’ in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, eds Bill Aschcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 220.
Abdelkabir Khatibi, Penser le Maghreb, Rabat: SMER, 1993, p. 76.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 44–5.
Quoted in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 189.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, London: Penguin Books, 1967, p. 40.
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© 2012 Taoufiq Sakhkhane
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Sakhkhane, T. (2012). Identity. In: Spivak and Postcolonialism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349414_7
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