Der indische Historiker Dipesh Chakrabarty ist weltweit dafür bekannt die eurozentrische Perspektive in den Geschichtswissenschaften in Frage zu stellen. Der marxistische Professor schlägt eine neue Geschichtsschreibung vor, die ihre Quelle von neuen Perspektiven bekommt als eurozentrische Standards oder auch nicht-europäische nativistische, nationalistische und atavistische Standards. Sein Buch „Europa als Provinz“ wird somit oft in der postkolonialen Geschichtsforschung rezipiert.

„To analyze its complexity, more and more scholars employ the methodological and theoretical concepts developed within the interdisciplinary field of Postcolonial Studies in order to provincialize U.S. history, to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term. Originally developed “to explore the capacities and limitations of […] European social and political categories in conceptualizing political modernity in the context of non-European life-worlds,” Chakrabarty’s concept simultaneously aims at rewriting European history from the margins. This particular form of thinking from the margins does not originate in some form of revolutionary nostalgia, envisioning a privileged access of the Damnés de la Terre to historical “truth,” but relies on the notion of power as a multidimensional network in which the “margins are as plural and divers as the centers” and are defined by historical processes of inclusion and exclusion which in turn created the nation in the first place. Transferred to the context of North American history, provincializing the United States accordingly entails the double movement of questioning traditional, national paradigms by reconstructing its historical development in an entangled modernity on the one hand and of rewriting U.S. history from the margins on the other.“ Auszug aus: Provincializing the United States. Colonialism, Decolonization, and (Post)Colonial Governance in Transnational Perspective, Herausgegeben von Ursula Lehmkuhl, Eva Bischoff und Norbert Finzsch, S. 10f.

Julien Sita, July, 28th 2022.