An Interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Faculty of Arts- English Department Cairo University

2 Department of English, The University of Chicago

3 Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University

4 University of Wisconsin–Madison African Cultural Studies

Abstract

The talk delves into Dipesh Chakrabarty’s scholarship, with a special focus on his seminal works, including The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (2015) and The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021). About the need to re-envision concepts engrained in colonial legacies, such as democracy, human rights and equity, Chakrabarty argues that the conversational and dynamic nature of historical knowledge can serve as a tool for decolonial praxis—defying entrenched power dynamics and addressing the threats of domination and erasure in the context of dominant narratives a genuine possibility. The discussion further tackles the intersection of both postcolonial and decolonial thought, highlighting their shared, yet distinct, entanglement with European intellectual trajectories and their capacity to critique stark modernities. The possibility of envisioning pluralistic trajectories, as substitutes for hegemonic epistemologies, is also interrogated, considering Sousa Santos’s notion of epistemicide and its resonance in ongoing settler-colonial practices, such as those observed in Gaza. Amongst the points of discussion are also: the role played by social media in narrating historical knowledge, the tensions between secular and theological discourse in Western modernity, the challenges of gender studies in the Global South; and, ultimately, the urgent need for nuanced, interdisciplinary trajectories that join in decolonial thinking with ecological sustainability, addressing both the epistemic and material inequalities that define our global moment.

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