| Thursday
• February 5, 2004 • 5:00 p.m.
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Magic and the Problem of Belief in Subaltern History
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor
of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of
Chicago
How do we think about the global legacy of the European
Enlightenment in lands far from Europe? To renowned postcolonial historian
Dipesh Chakrabarty, a secular subject like history faces particular problems
in handling practices in which gods, spirits, or the supernatural have
agency, in life-worlds that are not secular. Find out why the very idea
of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions
about disenchanted space, secular time, and human sovereignty.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is a social historian
whose work focuses on theoretical issues in historiography and nationalism,
particularly postcolonialism. Before joining Chicago's faculty, he taught
at the University of Melbourne, where he was the Ashworth Reader in Social
Theory and director of the Ashworth Centre for Social Theory. While in
Australia, he was extensively involved as a public speaker for the Amnesty
International campaign on human-rights abuses in India. He has been a
visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley, the Indian Institute
of Management in Calcutta, and Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Considered one of the most influential scholars in
Asian studies, Chakrabarty is known for his work in modern South Asian
history and historiography, postcolonial theory and its impact on how
history is written, and comparative questions and politics of modernity.
He has published numerous essays and reviews and has addressed conferences
throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, and South Asia. He is
a founding member of the series Subaltern Studies, co-editor
of Critical Inquiry, and a founding editor of the journal Postcolonial
Studies. He has also served on the editorial committee of Public
Culture and the American Historical Review.
Chakrabarty received his B.Sc. from Calcutta University
and his Ph.D. from the Australian National University.
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Event Coverage
Selected Publications
• Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake
of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; Delhi:
Permanent Black, forthcoming).
• Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought
and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000;
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal,
1890-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989; reprint 2000;
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989; reprint 1996). |
