Dipesh Chakrabarty

Dipesh Chakrabarty
দীপেশ চক্রবর্তী
Born1948 (age 75–76)
Kolkata, India
AwardsToynbee Prize
Academic background
Alma materAustralian National University
Academic work
Main interestsSubaltern Studies, Postcolonialism

Dipesh Chakrabarty (born 1948, in Kolkata, India) is an Indian historian and leading scholar of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. He is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in history at the University of Chicago, and is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, named after Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, that recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity.[1] He is the author of the seminal Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000).

Biography

Dipesh Chakrabarty attended Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, where he received his undergraduate degree in physics. He also received a Post Graduate Diploma in Management (MBA) from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. Later he moved on to the Australian National University in Canberra, from where he earned a PhD in history.[2]

Chakrabarty has had an extensive program of visiting lectureships: visiting fellow, Humanities Institute, Princeton, USA (2002); Hitesranjan Sanyal Visiting professor of history, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, University of Calcutta (2003); visitor, Humanities Center, State University of New York, Stony Brook (2004); visiting fellow, Max Planck Institute for Historical Sciences, University of Göttingen, Germany (2005); Faculty, Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine (2005); visiting research professor, University of Technology, Sydney (2005 and 2009); visitor, Center for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi (2005); scholar-in-residence, Pratt Institute, New York (2005); visiting professor, European Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania (2006); Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting professor, University of Iowa (2007); distinguished visitor, Institute of Advanced Study, University of Minnesota (2007); Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2008–09): Katz Professor in the Humanities, University of Washington, Seattle (2009); Hallsworth Visiting professor, University of Manchester, England (2009); Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna, Austria (2010); Lansdowne Lecturer, Victoria University, Canada (2012); Nicholson Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2013). In 2014, Chakrabarty delivered the IWM Lectures in Human Sciences in Vienna; a public lecture at Cankaya Municipality (Ankara, Turkey); Principal's Distinguished Visitor, Queen's University, Canada; distinguished visitor, Humanities Institute, Stony Brook University, New York; visitor, University of Barcelona, Spain; visiting fellow, Humanities Research Centre, College of Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National University (2014);[3] GLASS scholar, Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) – Humanities University of Leiden, (2015).[4]

He also served on the Humanities jury for the Infosys Prize from 2014 to 2016.[5]

The academic Christine Fair has accused Chakrabarty of making an inappropriate sexual comment during her time as a student in 1994.[6] Fair also alleged that Chakrabarty made similar comments to others.[6] The University of Chicago released a statement in 2017 inviting students to formally report such allegations.[7] In 2021, the Graduate Employee's Organization at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign protested the university's decision to host Chakrabarty at a roundtable on criticism and interpretive theory, in response to Fair's allegations.[8][9]

Honours

2004: Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[10]

2006: Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities[11]

2010: Doctor of Letters (D.Litt. (Honoris Causa)), University of London (conferred at Goldsmiths)[citation needed]

2011: honorary doctorate by the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2011; Distinguished Alumnus Award, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta (conferred on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the institute in 2011)[12]

2014: Toynbee Prize, named for Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, that recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity[2]

2019: Tagore Memorial Prize (Rabindra Smriti Puraskar) awarded by the Government of West Bengal, India.

Bibliography

Books

  • Rethinking Working Class History (1989)
  • Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000)
  • Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (2002)
  • The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (2015)
  • The Crises of Civilization: Exploring on Global and Planetary Histories (2018)
  • (With Ranajit Dasgupta) Some Aspects of Labor History of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century: Two Views (2019)
  • The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021)
  • One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023)

Edited volumes

  • Cosmopolitanism (2002), editor with Carol Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, and Homi K. Bhabha
  • From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (2007), editor with Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori
  • Historical Teleologies in the Modern World (2015), editor with Henning Trüper and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Selected articles

  • "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 1–26.
  • "The Death of History? Historical Consciousness and the Culture of Late Capitalism." Public Culture 4.2 (Spring 1992): 47–65.
  • "Universalism and Belonging in the Logic of Capital." Public Culture 12.3 (Fall 2000): 653–678.
  • "Where Is the Now?" Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 458–462.
  • "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35.2 (Winter 2009): 197–222.
  • "Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change." New Literary History 43.1 (Winter 2012): 1–18.
  • "Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories." Critical Inquiry 41.1 (Autumn 2014): 1–23.
  • "Humanities in the Anthropocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable." New Literary History 47.2–3 (Spring and Summer 2016): 377–397.

Books in Bengali Language

  • ইতিহাসের জনজীবন ও অন্যান্য প্রবন্ধ (আনন্দ পাবলিশার্স, 2011)[13][14]
  • মানবিকতা ও অ-মানবিকতা (অনুষ্টুপ, 2018)
  • মনোরথের ঠিকানা (অনুষ্টুপ, 2018)[15][16][17]
  • উন্নয়ন ও আধুনিকতা: বর্তমান-সর্বস্ব এই সময় (কলিকাতা লেটারপ্রেস, 2019)
  • সাম্প্রতিক ইতিহাস-ভাবনা: আমার ইতিহাসের আলপথ ধরে (তালপাতা প্রকাশনা, 2019)
  • বন্ধুর চিঠি বন্ধুকে (with রাঘব বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায়) (অনুষ্টুপ, 2019)
  • স্মৃতি সত্তা সংলাপ (নির্ঝর, 2020)
  • জলবায়ু পরিবর্তন ও বর্তমান অতিমারি: মানুষের ইতিহাসে একটি সন্ধিক্ষণ (লৌকিক প্রকাশন, 2021)

See also

References

  1. ^ "Dipesh Chakrabarty Named 2014 Toynbee Prize Recipient". Toynbee Prize Foundation. Retrieved 9 September 2021.
  2. ^ a b Dipesh Chakrabarty Named 2014 Toynbee Prize Recipient Archived 27 January 2020 at the Wayback Machine, Toynbee Prize Foundation, 9 July 2014, accessed 22 July 2015
  3. ^ HRC 2014 Visiting Fellows, Australian National University, accessed 24 July 2015
  4. ^ Dipesh Chakrabarty (Fall 2015), University of Leiden, accessed 24 July 2015
  5. ^ Humanities Jury, Infosys Science Foundation. "Infosys Prize – Jury 2016". Infosys Science Foundation. Archived from the original on 14 November 2017.
  6. ^ a b ""#HimToo: A Reckoning", accessed 11 November 2022". BuzzFeed. Fair has subsequently withdrawn several of the claims made in this article ""Retraction Statement" accessed 11 November 2022". 8 September 2022.
  7. ^ "UChicago and the Asymmetry of Power: Academic circles can be unwelcoming and dangerous for women". 20 November 2017.
  8. ^ "GEO Statement on the "Author's Roundtable with Dipesh Chakrabarty" Hosted by UIUC's Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory". 10 April 2021.
  9. ^ "Graduate students express concern over University-invited professor with sexual harassment allegation". 14 April 2021.
  10. ^ "Dipesh Chakrabarty | History | The University of Chicago". history.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 15 November 2019.
  11. ^ "Fellows". Australian Academy of the Humanities. Retrieved 15 November 2019.
  12. ^ Dipesh Chakrabarthy Archived 13 November 2020 at the Wayback Machine, Heyman Centre, accessed 24 July 2015
  13. ^ "আনন্দবাজার পত্রিকা – পুস্তক পরিচয". archives.anandabazar.com. Retrieved 6 June 2019.
  14. ^ "ইতিহাসের জনজীবন ও অন্যান্য প্রবন্ধ". www.goodreads.com. Retrieved 6 June 2019.
  15. ^ Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2018). Manorathera ṭhikānā. Kalakātā. ISBN 9789382425823. OCLC 1035635633.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  16. ^ "জনজীবনের বিশ্লেষণী দর্পণ". anandabazar.com. Retrieved 6 June 2019.
  17. ^ ঘোষ, সেমন্তী. "তর্কের জায়গাও রইল খোলা". anandabazar.com. Retrieved 6 June 2019.

Further reading

  • Dimova-Cookson, Maria (2012), "Subaltern studies, post-colonial Marxism, and 'finding your place to begin from': an interview with Dipesh Chakrabarty.", in Browning, Gary; Dimova-Cookson, Maria; Prokhovnik, Raia (eds.), Dialogues with contemporary political theorists, Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 58–73, ISBN 9780230303058