Writing Back: A review of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe4

Abstract

The title of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s latest book suggests an attempt to “other” Europe by testing the ability of certain European social and political categories, such as rights, citizenship, fraternity, civil society, politics and nationalism, to conceptualize non-Western political modernities (20). The project is animportant one for postcolonial theory, since it demonstrates that Enlightenment universals paradoxically serve to achieve the displacement of imperial structures.