Navigating the Planetary Polycrisis with Dipesh Chakrabarty

One of the most famous post-colonial historians and thinkers, I think that globally, author of many resonant concepts like provincializing Europe or planetary history and the author of well-known books like Provinzjonalizacja Europy, Provinzjonalization of Europe, the Polish edition. And in last year's more recently books and articles about climate in historical context and the planetary history as a kind of

Names mentioned from the semi-peripheral country from India, especially from Bengal state, in the face of the hegemony of Western historiography. Is it possible to think about it in asynchronous categories? Yes, both in asynchronous and asymmetric categories, because What led me to write Provincializing Europe, which was my second book. The first book was from my thesis on labor history in Calcutta, the city where I was born and raised. I left India when I was 27, so as people say, you can take somebody out of India, but you can't take India out of them.

Niezrozumiałe. Kiedy robisz zdjęcia europejskiej rodziny bourgeois, tzn. rodziny niemieckiej bourgeoisie, one wyglądają o wiele wyższe niż ludzie, których nazwałem bourgeois. W Indiach i w Bengalii. W Indiach i w Bengalii. Myślałem sobie, że one nie wyglądają tak samo. Nie są jednej klasy, ale żeby wyjaśnić historię muszę używać tych kategorii. Zakończyłem książkę małą dyskusją o tym problemie. I dlatego często mówię, że pierwszy odcinek o prowincjalizacji Europy jest w rzeczywistości ostatnim odcinkiem mojego pierwszego książki. I wtedy, kiedy zacząłem myśleć więcej o tym problemie, więc mój pierwszy książka pojawił się w 1989 roku.

In 1990 I went to the University of California, Berkeley. I was invited to teach by a colleague who recently passed away. He was going on leave and he wrote to me saying, would you like to teach as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History? And I was in Melbourne, in Australia. And I thought it would be interesting to have an American experience. I I came to America and they asked me to present a paper. And I had been thinking about my annies with Marxist categories. And the first paper I presented, I drafted, Sitting on the desk of my colleague in Berkeley was called, is the first time I actually used the expression provincializing Europe.

Wszyscy go czytają. I dlaczego nie wszyscy czytają historię bengalińskiej klaski? I as I thought about it more, I realized it's not only English nationalism or national identity writing itself in the title of the book. A larger thing happened, which is that the transition debate in Europe, Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism, structures the debate in the rest of the world about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I w tym sensie zrozumiałem, że Europa jest metasubjektem wszystkich historii modernity. I dlatego All historians have to read European history, but European historians don't have to read our history.

Going back to Europe. And then I realized that in the 80s I realized reading Gramsci, whom I've been reading for at least ten years, more than that, that even in Gramsci, Gramsci writes about his problem with the passive revolution, is that the French Revolution did not happen in Italy. So even he was measuring Italian politics, revolutionary politics, by the absence of something that for him was model-like, the French revolution. So revolution becomes passive because it's not direct. So I realized that even those days we did not think about Eastern Europe as a question, as I've been saying, but clearly the differentiation within Europe, difference between Northern Italy and Southern Italy,

North is industrialized, South is peasant. You can then see that within Europe, in the countries that are not typically part of Western Europe, that is Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, there is a differentiation being created whereby There is a modern European rediscovery of its peasantry. Sometimes as a negative condition of its history, that we are still peasants. Sometimes as a positive condition of your history, like I think the Solidarity Movement was a kind of positive moment. And I think Indian history was trapped in the same problem.

In the sense that Europe, Western Europe, but thought of as Europe, had already become a modular form of ideal history of transition. And I thought this is the Europe of our mind. And there are both good and bad things to it. One is that the youngest of the three ideas of Liberty and fraternity and equality. So of these three ideas, equality is the youngest idea. Because you can find liberty and fraternity in monasteries, you can find ancient thought, liberty.

And I cannot imagine modern India without that concept. I cannot imagine being modern without some commitment to this notion of equality in this life, in society, in law. And that was the good side of the ideal image of Europe. But the oppressive side of the idealization of Europe was that the demand that somehow ideas like equality, ideas like democracy, ideas like the parliament should look the same. Tak jak mój bourgeoisie, nie musiałem wyglądać jak Niemiec w Rembrandt's painting. Jest to książka, jaką François Lyotard napisał.

We Europeans only have 200 years old history. And I used to say to them that if that was true, you would not know what to do with the church. The church was invented a long time ago. And that invention is part of your history. I mean, you've carried that history onto this land. So yeah, that's how So that's the journey from rethinking working class history to provincializing Europe. You have already referred a couple of times to the provincializing Europe. It has now been over a quarter of a century since you published the book and also 18 years since its Polish translation appeared. So that is roughly the same amount of time that in our legal system and also many other Western

Jay opisał mnie jako This was his expression, I've now made it my own with acknowledgement to him. He said, Dipesh, once you were provincializing Europe and now you're provincializing humanity. But I think the more I've thought about it, I thought he's right in the sense that the exercise of provincializing was never just a negative exercise. It was always an acknowledgement of what you have received from that which you want to provincialize. I w tym sensie jest to projekt odnowienia swojego porozumienia z tym, co chcesz zrównoważyć. Chcesz odnowić to, gdzie jesteś na świecie. Ten rodzaj Europy, którą może potrzebować w Calcutcie czy w Bengalii, nie jest jednocześnie tym rodzajem Europy, którą potrzebujesz, ale jest to połączenie między

Your Europe, that you may want to claim as part of being European, and the Europe that I want to claim as part of my heritage, because that's what European imperialism did, it made Europe everybody's heritage. And whether you go to a university in Madras or Calcutta or Lucknow or here, A lot of the syllabuses in the universities would have things in common. So if you go to a class on political thought, they'll be reading more or less the same people, if not the same textbooks. The major people. I mean, you know, the minor people would obviously be different. So it was critiqued from the very beginning, the book, when it came out.

Znowu, czasami krytyki mówią o formach ignorancji, które masz, ale nie jesteś nawet świadomy o nich. Pierwsze rewizje w Indiach, pierwsze sześć rewizji, pięć lub sześć rewizji były absolutnie niebezpieczne, całkowicie negatywne. I dwa z tych rewizji napisane przez indyjskich specjalistów historii Europy, Powiedzieli, że w tym nie ma nic nowego i że Europie nie będą w ogóle zainteresowani tym książką. Teraz, nie myślałem, i nadal nie myślę, że oni są absolutnie nieprawidłowi.

Nie miałem wiedzy, z której historyjni filozofi Europy mogliby porozmawiać o swoim filozofii. Ale gdzie oni byli nieprawidłowi, co nie wiedzieli jako specjalistki Europy, ...was that the Europe they had learned about was changing. And that Europe itself was developing its own post-colonial forms of awareness about itself, through migration, through the questions of race, through post-imperial forms of racism, like the establishment of La Paine, mainly by people, ex-colonial French people going back. Or a reformation of Europe, British racism. After empire that Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha faced, right?

And these people faced. But it was interesting to see that Europeanists in India who teach Russian history, European history, taught an older Europe, right? And I thought they were factually right. I didn't have the amount of knowledge ...that a Koselleck would have had in thinking about European history. I mean, he was a specialist. He controlled many more languages than I would. But the thing is, the world had come into a position where my question had a life. To say that I owe something to Europe, but I don't have to be European through my modernization, that question had become relevant.

Names mentioned in English. Names mentioned in English. O Europie, która też została zakończona. Były zmiany na obu stronach. Wydaje mi się to fascynujące, że pierwsze dwie rewizje przewidowali, że Europie nie będą zainteresowani książką. Myślę, że to było zainteresowanie Europą książką, co dało jej nowe życie. I bardziej rozszerzone życie, ponieważ zostało to przetłumaczone. Moje europejskie przyjaciele, Ewa Dwańska i Monika Bahr, przyjechali do mnie i powiedzieli, że to jest Wschodnia Europa, z której się nie zidentyfikujemy. Zdaję się świadomy, że nawet Vera Zasulich, o której wspominałem w moich lekcjach, Czechosłowakia w 1968 roku i Tomasz Zaryski, który mówił o Polsce w 1968 roku w swoim dzisiejszym wywiadzie.

We knew these things as Czechoslovakia in 68, Hungary in 56, but this is the eruption of Eastern Europe as a problem both in Soviet imperialism, but in European history. So actually, as I was saying before, Eastern Europe, not even by that name, was present in our Marxism, which is why Zasulica's question to Marx Names mentioned. Names mentioned. Names mentioned. Names mentioned.

In France by Paul Vane or Michel de Sartre on historical prose, even Barthes' book on Michelet. So Europe actually had a kind of self-conscious critical relationship to history writing all the time among historians. Names mentioned in Polish Academy of Sciences.

W serii, w której interwjuje się, nauczyciele historii są wciąż życi. Moja generacja i trochę młodsza. Kiedy pojawia się mój książka o historii pracy, w dwóch czy trzech przypadkach ludzie nie nazywają mnie i mówią, a co z historiami postmodernistycznymi? Ale postmodernizm to złe słowo. Są to ludzie, którzy mówią o strukturalizmie, o filozofii. Ale w Europie i innych miejscach... Pierwsza reprezentacja napisana przez historyjnika amerykańskiego w Chinach była dosyć krytyczna.

You know, so and so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so-and-so is a so Jest to kwestia pozostałą. Chciałbym trochę odwrócić tę kwestię, ponieważ opowiadałeś o tym, jak krytykowie reagowali na książkę, a także, że te krytyki były bazowane na zrozumieniu twoich punktów. Zastanawiam się, czy również spotkałeś coś przeciwnego, powiedzmy, bardzo entuzjastycznych reakcji. Names mentioned, which resulted in that kind of interpretation that you would not identify as your own original idea about provincializing Europe.

Did you also encounter something similar to that? It came... I forget the critic's name. I have an acknowledgement of this critic. W preface, który napisałem w edycji 2008 na temat prowincjalizacji Europy, bo w tamtych czasach cały ten krytyk had come out. Siedem lat przeszło, widziałem te krytyki. I tam był ktoś z akademii literatury kanadyjskiej, którego imię teraz nie ma, mam teraz moment seniora, który w zasadzie podkreślił, że to jest książka, która jest także o straceniach globalizacji. What you lose through globalization? In my history one and history two, that chapter on two histories of capital, the somewhat nostalgic but archival views of my own pasts, of my Bengali pasts in the second phase of the book,

So many of the moments in the book I where I make something visible because I've lost it. And I see that when I was growing up in India, Europe was not a question, it was part of life. It's only going to Australia and seeing all these different figurations of democracy. I went to the Parliament and within the Parliament, in Australian Parliament there is a little kind of area where they write about the history of the Parliament. I dzieci szkoły przyjeżdżają do tego, żeby to przejrzeć. Więc Parlament sam jest Instytutem Demokracji Pedagogicznym, tak? Tak, że ludzie przyjeżdżają i uczą się o Parlamencie. Nie sądzę, że Indianie są tak pedagogiczne jak Australijski Parlament.

He may or may not have, but I had it thanks to him. So the thought is that a book begins when a loss or a wound becomes a question. And I think the loss of my Indian Europe I the emergence of Europe as a question was to do with my migration to Australia. Again, the discourse figure that I was talking about. And loss of that innocent relationship to Europe was a loss. I mean, you never thought that street lanes were European. Ruchy trafiku były europejskie. Zgady trafiku były europejskie. Kraków był europejskim meczem, o którym bardzo znany indyjski myślnik Ashish Nandy mówił kiedyś, że kraków był innym meczem, zbudowanym w Anglii.

I would like to follow the concept of province and also the position of Europe in our contemporary world. If we would like to follow, let's say, very basic meaning and understanding of what province is, it could be defined as something that is situated far away from the center of political gravity and also Wielokrotnie jest to połączone z faktem, że jest to ekonomicznie załatwiające. I można powiedzieć, że to jest to, co obecnie się dzieje w Europie. Że Europa nie jest już najważniejszym aktorem geopolitycznym, który akceleruje całego świata. Również dotyczy to teorii wielkiej akceleracji, jak wszystkie te statystyki, które pokazują, że konsumpcja i produkcja skierowują się po 1950 roku.

Now one could say that the principal geopolitical and economic poles of power in the world are both United States and China. This is also becoming apparent in the economic sphere, like when we look at Online products, online tools that are quite often produced by American companies, while when we look at, let's say, material stuff, also taking into account cars, for instance, there are quite many Chinese automobiles increasingly visible in Europe. Has the time therefore come to reverse the direction and to provincialize China?