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IAN BAUCOM |
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In the Winter 2009 issue of Critical Inquiry, Dipesh Chakrabarty published
an essay entitled “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Widely known as
one of the leading postcolonial theorists of his generation, Chakrabarty has
earned his reputation over the past two decades by consistently contesting the
authority and explanatory power of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment
philosophies of history, particularly those Hegelian-inspired forms of historical
thinking predicated on the progressive, teleological unfolding of a
singular, universal history. It comes as no immediate surprise, then, that in
his Critical Inquiry essay, Chakrabarty is as much concerned with a historiographic
question as he is with a historical problem. And that is because, he
argues, “the current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming,” has
both effected and demands a collapse of the long-standing division between
human and natural history.
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PRATHAMA BANERJEE |
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This essay is part of ongoing work on possible histories of our political present,
written from the perspective of colonial/postcolonial Bengal. Here I
explore the twentieth-century recasting, not entirely successful, of Chanakya
as the figure of the quintessential political man of India. Chanakya, also
known as Kautilya and Vishnugupta, was an ancient Indian political figure.
He is believed to be the author of the Arthashastra (The science of wealth and
governance), an early Indian treatise on statecraft. He is also believed to
have been the legendary Brahman minister of King Chandragupta Maurya
(340-293 BCE) and the real brain behind the overthrow of the then-ruling
dynasty of the Nandas and the establishment of the Mauryan empire, the
earliest imperial formation in Indian history.
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MOHAMED NACHI |
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This is an inquiry into the question of difference, of the right to difference in
Islamic societies. How is difference treated or engaged there? What are the
terms of this debate in Islam? I want to argue that a reflection focusing on the
concept of ikhtilâf would be illuminating and enriching in a number of ways. Ikhtilâf is an endogenous concept of wide-ranging and diverse significance,
and it engages issues that are at once political, juridical, religious, cultural,
ethnic, and social.
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ELIZABETH WEED |
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In literary studies—English literature in particular—there is something like a groundswell of support for new ways of reading. These new practices bring Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's call for "reparative reading" together with "surface reading" as formulated by a 2009 issue of Representations. This seems like good news: no critical practice can maintain its vitality without continually questioning its theories of reading. On a closer look, however, it turns out that these "new" ways of reading rely on rather familiar indictments of the practice of critique. What is noteworthy, perhaps, is that the very sources of the indictments are not honed opponents of theory but, rather, former fellow travelers.
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