Social Sciences and the Modern

Reassessing Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe

Abstract

This article seeks to situate Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty within a broader set of reflections on the relationship between Europe and modernity. In doing so, it encourages a reading of the work that goes beyond the framework of postcolonial debates triggered by decolonization, and instead considers intellectual and political traditions emerging from other contexts. It highlights how these earlier debates helped shape the arguments and conceptual tools of Provincializing Europe, thereby inviting a reading of the book within configurations that are not primarily those of the political radicalism, with which it is often—though inaccurately—associated.