Resumo

DUBE, Saurabh. Historicism and Other Disciplines of Modernity: Reading Dipesh Chakrabarty. Hist. graf [online]. 2024, n.63, pp.149-190.  Epub 21-Jun-2024. ISSN 1405-0927.  https://doi.org/10.48102/hyg.vi63.503.

This essay offers critical considerations of historicism alongside other disciplines of modernity. I frame the exercise as a close and careful engagement - over more than three decades - with the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, who has raised key questions around historicism in his influential Provincializing Europe. My endeavour has five steps. To begin with, I provide a brief sketch of Dipesh’s oeuvre. Second, I trace how Chakrabarty’s provocations can be read as pointing toward post-coloniality and modernity as necessarily contradictory, contended, and contingent procedures and perspectives. Third, the essay tracks pathways that PE haltingly intimates and partially illuminates, but that the work chiefly shies of treading. Fourth, this allows me to open up instead the different registers of historicism, the hermeneutical, and the analytical, including their mutual interplay and formidable entanglements, as formative of modern knowledges. Fifth and finally, these steps help foreground my own explorations of modernity, which access but also exceed Chakrabarty’s concerns. Here, braiding together theory and narrative, anthropology and history, I focus on modern institutionalized non-nomothetic human sciences. These formations of knowledge intimate not just modern disciplines but disciplines of modernity. Such contradictory and contrary disciplines are founded in the interplay between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, progressivism and romanticism, the analytical and the hermeneutical, and empire and nation.

Palavras-chave : Historicism; Modernity; Difference/Power; Analytical/ Hermeneutical.