"Engaging Dipesh Chakrabarty: An Introduction", in Saurabh Dube, Sanjay Seth, Ajay Skaria (eds.), Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South: Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Perspectives, and the Anthropocene, Routledge, forthcoming 2020. (original) (raw)

2020, Saurabh Dube, Sanjay Seth, Ajay Skaria (eds.), *Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South: Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Perspectives, and the Anthropocene*, London: Routledge.

Across the past four decades, the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty has offered wide-ranging reflections on history, modernity, and the character and limits of the disciplines that constitute the human sciences. A central challenge issued by these writings has turned, in distinct yet overlapping ways, on the “un-thought” and “under-enunciated” of theory and practice in the disciplines, at large. Thus, in work of the 1980s on jute mill workers, Dipesh queried the historiographical assumption of absolute individuation of the modern worker, which obscured the hierarchical relations of the working-classes in Bengal. In these ways, Chakrabarty pointed to how “culture” and “consciousness” intimated “the ‘unthought’ of Indian Marxism.” Across the long 1990s, Dipesh raised key questions concerning the pervasive ways in which a spectral yet tangible Europe/West stands reified and celebrated as the site and scene of the birth of the modern, working as a silent referent that dominates the discourse of history. Alongside, he opened up issues of historical difference, revealing glimmers of heterogeneous temporal-spatial terrains, through various measures that each underscored the under- and un-enunciation of “place”. Finally, over the past decade Dipesh has highlighted how “public pasts” are at once invoked yet occluded, routinized and obscured, as they variously break upon professional practices of history writing. He has pointed as well to the requirements of thinking through the “rift” between the “global” the “planetary”, so that the human species as a geological force of the Anthropocene does not remain “un-thought” and “under-enunciated” following the protocols of human historical experience. Clearly, in taking up such tasks Chakrabarty has brought to the fore critical matters of method and theory, concept and evidence, philosophical thought and historical understanding. This book is offered as a sustained engagement – critical conversations rather than mere exegeses – with the main themes in Dipesh’s oeuvre.