> Lastly, a book alert. I found an interesting book
> at the bookstore
> the other day: Modern Social Imaginaries by Charles
> Taylor. I am
> halfway through it and it is well and clearly
> written. He might be someone
> worth reading. I just had to read a book with a
> chapter entitled:
> "Provincializing Europe."
I've just finished reading Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty (part of the Subaltern Studies project) and thoroughly enjoyed it. There's a review on the LRB website by Amit Chaudhuri:
[...] 'Historicism - and even the modern, European idea of history - one might say, came to non-European peoples in the 19th century as somebody's way of saying "not yet" to somebody else.' To illustrate what he means, he turns to John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and On Representative Government - 'both of which,' Chakrabarty says, 'proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giving Indians or Africans self-rule.'
According to Mill, Indians or Africans were not yet civilised enough to rule themselves. Some historical time of development and civilisation (colonial rule and education, to be precise) had to elapse before they could be considered prepared for such a task. Mill's historicist argument thus consigned Indians, Africans and other 'rude' nations to an imaginary waiting-room of history.
The 'imaginary waiting-room of history' is another of Chakrabarty's compressed, telling images. I don't know if he picked it up from the German playwright Heiner Müller, who uses it of the 'Third World' in a 1989 interview; but he employs it to great effect. The phrase has purgatorial resonances: you feel that those who are in the waiting-room are going to be there for some time. For modernity has already had its authentic incarnation in Europe: how then can it happen again, elsewhere? The non-West - the waiting-room - is therefore doomed either never to be quite modern, to be, in Naipaul's phrase, 'half-made'; or to possess only a semblance of modernity. This is a view of history and modernity that has, according to Chakrabarty, at once liberated, defined and shackled us in its discriminatory universalism; it is a view powerfully theological in its determinism, except that the angels, the blessed and the excluded are real people, real communities. [...]
Again, since it's long, if anybody wants to read it they can email me.
Simon
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