<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In the Waiting-Room of History
Amit Chaudhuri
Review of Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference by Dipesh Chakrabarty
Excerpt:
The 'first in Europe, then elsewhere' paradigm that Chakrabarty speaks of - what is now the developmental paradigm - is what made the process of modernisation in non-Western countries seem to many, European and non-European, like mimicry. 'We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World,' Naipaul's narrator, Ralph Singh, says in The Mimic Men; Chakrabarty's friend, the exuberantly impenetrable Homi Bhabha, has an essay on mimicry and colonialism, 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse', that has long been part of every postcolonial primer.<b> In it he tries, using Lacan and referring in passing to Naipaul's great, intractable novel, to complicate and even rescue the idea of mimicry, to make it subversive: mimicry undermines the coloniser's gaze by presenting him with a distorted reflection, rather than a confirmation, of himself.</b> Some of the essay's formulations about mimicry - 'almost the same but not quite'; 'almost the same but not white' - are close enough to the kinds of problem Chakrabarty addresses. Once again, though, as with Said, I think Chakrabarty's work gives us a richer, more penetrating language to deal with modernity and the colonial encounter. There's a barely concealed utopian rage in Bhabha against the compulsion towards mimicry, and also an unspoken nostalgia for a world in which mimicry isn't necessary. For Chakrabarty, 'Europe' is a notion that has many guises, and these guises have both liberated us and limited us, whichever race we belong to. There is, therefore, a valuable element of self-criticism in his study: to provincialise Europe is not to vanquish or conquer it - that is, provincialising Europe isn't a utopian gesture - but a means of locating and subjecting to interrogation some of the fundamental notions by which we define ourselves.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Amit Chaudhuri
Review of Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference by Dipesh Chakrabarty
Excerpt:
The 'first in Europe, then elsewhere' paradigm that Chakrabarty speaks of - what is now the developmental paradigm - is what made the process of modernisation in non-Western countries seem to many, European and non-European, like mimicry. 'We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World,' Naipaul's narrator, Ralph Singh, says in The Mimic Men; Chakrabarty's friend, the exuberantly impenetrable Homi Bhabha, has an essay on mimicry and colonialism, 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse', that has long been part of every postcolonial primer.<b> In it he tries, using Lacan and referring in passing to Naipaul's great, intractable novel, to complicate and even rescue the idea of mimicry, to make it subversive: mimicry undermines the coloniser's gaze by presenting him with a distorted reflection, rather than a confirmation, of himself.</b> Some of the essay's formulations about mimicry - 'almost the same but not quite'; 'almost the same but not white' - are close enough to the kinds of problem Chakrabarty addresses. Once again, though, as with Said, I think Chakrabarty's work gives us a richer, more penetrating language to deal with modernity and the colonial encounter. There's a barely concealed utopian rage in Bhabha against the compulsion towards mimicry, and also an unspoken nostalgia for a world in which mimicry isn't necessary. For Chakrabarty, 'Europe' is a notion that has many guises, and these guises have both liberated us and limited us, whichever race we belong to. There is, therefore, a valuable element of self-criticism in his study: to provincialise Europe is not to vanquish or conquer it - that is, provincialising Europe isn't a utopian gesture - but a means of locating and subjecting to interrogation some of the fundamental notions by which we define ourselves.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->