Required readings: Chapters 1-3 of Dipesh Chakrabarty: “Provincializing Europe”
Graduate Workshop
Of Other Worlds to Come
MB113G Main Building, June 14, 3:00 p.m.
The major current in the critical rethinking of modernity today emanates from perspectives outside the North Atlantic, from various sites that either have been excluded and marginalized by the relentless universal historical march of Euro-American modernity or incorporated through the subordinating sign of belatedness or backwardness. This rethinking argues that we have to see the world as consisting of multiple temporalities that overlap and cannot and should not be hierarchized by means of a teleological progression from ‘earlier’ and ‘outmoded’ to ‘later’ and ‘new’, from the ‘not yet there’ to a universal end that is actualized in the present. This talk critically examines the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Nestor Garcia Canclini as well as Derrida’s concept of the ‘to-come’ (à-venir) in relation to some postcolonial novels (Michelle Cliff and Ninotchka Rosca). |
