Ziya Gökalp and Provincializing Europe

We can now argue definitely that a serious interest in culture is absolutely requisite for the rise of a genuine interest in civilization.

—Ziya Gökalp, "What Is Turkism? A Recapitulation"

The Contradictory Splits of "Provincializing Europe"

Subaltern histories, when "conceived in relationship to the question of difference," writes Dipesh Chakrabarty, "will have a split running through them."

On the one hand, they are "histories" in that they are constructed within the master code of secular history and use the accepted academic codes of history writing (and therefore subordinate themselves to all other forms of memory). On the other hand, they cannot ever afford to grant this master code its claim on being a mode of thought that comes to all human beings naturally, or even be treated as something that exists in nature itself.¹

This split defines the essential, productive analytical tension within Chakrabarty's project of "provincializing Europe." He seeks "to hold in a permanent state of tension a dialogue between two contradictory points of view" (254): one derived from the acknowledgment of the "unavoidable" colonial "inheritance" of the European "universal but-never-to-be-realized" project of political modernity (254) and the other from its "limitations in conceptualizing political modernity in the context of non-European life-worlds" (20). Chakrabarty designates the first pole of contradiction as Europe's "indispensability" in "think[ing] through the various practices that constitute" modernity and the second as its inadequacy in that regard (6). The analytical split runs between the two.

On Europe's indispensability, Chakrabarty suggests that Europe's metaterritorial, "hyperreal" character both constitutes "the genealogy of thought in which social scientists find themselves" and, moreover, establishes the conceptual terrain of global political modernity:

The phenomenon of "political modernity"—namely rule by modern institutions of the state, bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise—is impossible to think anywhere in the world without invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual and even theological traditions of Europe. Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history.

(4–5)

Therefore, because "there is no political modernity" (or justice in the above senses) without Europe in these senses, postcolonial thought "cannot ever be a project of shunning European thought" (254). "There is no easy way of dispensing" with Europe (5). It is "indispensable" in precisely this sense.

Because, however, to provincialize means also to see Europe's profound colonial dimensions, and thus its limitations in the context of non-European life worlds, its intellectual traditions are also inadequate to the task of subaltern history. This postcolonial disposition requires rethinking Europe's "simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy," its ineliminable "contradictory relationship" to "the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations" (6). To describe the disposition of combined subaltern acknowledgment and resistance that undergirds the project of provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty offers the concept of "anticolonial gratitude"—anti, not post.

In Provincializing Europe, this anticolonial gratitude manifests itself in several critical exercises and proposals. Most explicitly, Chakrabarty counters the teleological and unilinear historicist tendencies of modern European history that tend to depict non-European thought and practice as temporally and spatially prior to Europe by rendering difference as a lack. "The modern, European idea of history," he writes, "one might say, came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody's way of saying 'not yet' to somebody else . . . [and] converted history itself into a version of this waiting room" (16). Chakrabarty thus calls for and demonstrates history writing that illustrates otherwise—how it is possible "to learn to think the present—the 'now' that we inhabit as we speak—as irreducibly not-one" (8). "I take gods and spirits," Chakrabarty writes, "to be existentially coeval with the human" (16). What historicism describes as "pasts" are thus, for Chakrabarty, the "that which is already there"—"there in taste, in practices of embodiment, in the cultural training the...