SESSION 8- Dipesh Chakrabarty

One of the main assumptions of Chakrabarty's arguments is the inescapability of certain structures and modes of thinking. We are, in some ways, stuck within the paradigm we are in- no matter how much we try to "read against the grain" or not project onto the past what we see in our present, or to even see the past "in its own terms". As discussed by Amin- the effort to discover "the true story" is a fruitless exercise- it cannot be recovered.

Chakrabarty speaks of more than just the sources, however, which makes his work slightly more interesting. He speaks in the realm of ideas and structures. He states that where we can critically state that some categories or institutions, or modes of thinking are "created" (the idea of Europe, the importance of the nation-state), does not mean they exist only in the realm of ideas. There are numerous other accompanying practices and discourses which make them come into existence and become reality. This relates to our discussion of structuralism as well. Structures may be based on an idea, and be "created", but they have their own power as well, and the ability to wield violence. They take shape and form, they are given authority and respect (even deference).

Given this, historians, or any other social scientists cannot simply state they are moving beyond it, or can do away with them. Nor can they give them a status of "natural" and "pre-existing" as some often tend to do. So where we should question the framework, as we discussed last time, there are certain benefits to working within it as well; it gives us new insights, and unique avenues of reform and change. It is in criticisms that we can find altered (though not completely new) modes of thinking and being.

This reasoning is specially relevant for post-colonial studies and the Subaltern collective as a primarily post-colonial field. In some ways, there is no escaping the history that the collective is a response to; it still forms our identity, it still plays an integral role in what we do. Yet at the same time, we cannot go down the alternate deterministic route and blame EVERYTHING on European Colonialism (although to be fair, we can blame quite a lot on it).

Here again, there needs to be a balance. if even the method we critique them in is claimed by them, if our way of an alternative to their writing is a "fractured", less organized narrative, how are we not playing into those oriental tropes we so criticize? Where the "West" is modern, structured, organized, and the Orient is fractured. Even if these claims are false- they are given legitimacy by discourse and structures.

Perhaps the way out of these contradictory forces is to simply acknowledge and recognize biases. It is to employ what we discussed as central to the Subaltern project- "self relfexivity". If we can understand and recognize biases, we can recognize the way power operates, the way it has shaped our presents and our pasts (and probably our futures)- it allows us to not be paralyzed by the weight of our histories, or its limitations.

"The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it."