The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus Volume 3 Issue 2 F.docx

The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 3 | Issue 2 | Feb
15, 2005
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Reclaiming Asia From the West: Rethinking Global History
Wang Hui
Reclaiming Asia From the West:
Rethinking Global History
by Wang Hui
Many Asians are now debating the idea of Asia.
Some want to create a regional system in
opposition to neo-liberal imperialism. Others
want to transcend nationalism, which they
regard as outmoded, and to create a fresh
sense of Asian identity that does not depend on
the old, and western-invented, dichotomy of
East and West.
By Wang Hui
Asia, like Europe, wants to create regional
institutions strong enough to counterbalance
the power of the United States. Two apparently
different ideas - liberal globalisation and the
new empire?- have knit together military
unions, collaborative economic associations
and international political institutions to set up

a global order encompassing politics, the
economy, culture and the military. This order
may be called neoliberal imperialism?
European societies have attempted to protect
themselves with a form of regionalism. The
German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, in an
article on why Europe needs a constitution (1),
proposes three major tasks in the construction
of post-national democracy: to form a European
civic society, to build a Europe-wide political
public sphere, and to create a political culture
which all citizens of the European Union will be
able to share.
Regionalism is also the subject of a major
debate in Asia. China, for instance, suggested a
few years ago that it could join the 10 members
of the Association of South-east Asian Nations
(ASEAN) (2) through a formula of ?0 plus one.?
Japan immediately followed, suggesting a
formula of ?0 plus three?(China, Japan and
South Korea). A Japanese news agency article
i n 2 0 0 2 s a i d : i f t h e u n i f i c a t i o n o f A s i a
accelerates . . . the sense of distance between
Japan and China will tend to disappear
naturally in the process of regional unification;
eventually, based on a first regional negotiation
occasion that excludes the United States, a
conference of ASEAN and the leaders of Japan,
China, and Korea may achieve an Asian version
of the reconciliation between France and
Germany (3).
When 10 eastern European nations were

accepted as formal members of the European
Union on 1 May 2004, a Japanese diplomat and
an Indian political scientist suggested that
China, Japan and India should be the axes of an
Asian version of Nato.
This raises the question of what Asians mean
when they speak of Asia.? Since the 19th
century, different forms of Asianism?have been
c l o s e l y l i n k e d w i t h d i f f e r e n t f o r m s o f
nationalism. But in the wave of modern Asian
nationalisms, the idea of Asia contains two
opposing concepts: the Japanese colonial
concept of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity
Sphere and the socialist concept of Asia
centred on national socialist and liberation
movements. In the context of the collapse of
the socialist movement and the reconstruction
of Asian imaginations, how should we regard
and deal with the socialist legacy in Asia? If we
seek today to surpass the nation-state, then an
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idea of Asia means that we have to substitute a
supranational state vision for 19th-century
imaginings.
Asia: A European notion
The idea of Asia?is not an Asian invention but a
European one. In the 18th and 19th centuries
the European social sciences (historical

linguistics, modern geography, philosophy of
r i g h t s , t h e o r i e s o f s t a t e a n d r a c e ,
historiography, political economy) developed
quickly, along with natural sciences. Together
they created a new world map. The ideas of
Europe and Asia were integrated into the
c o n c e p t o f w o r l d h i s t o r y . C h a r l e s d e
Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx,
among others, constructed the idea of Asia in
contrast with Europe and incorporated Asia in
a teleological vision of history (4).
The core elements of this vision can be summed
up as the opposition between Asian multi-
e t h n i c e m p i r e s a n d t h e E u r o p e a n
sovereign/monarchical state; between Asian
political despotism and European legal and
political systems; between the nomadic and
agrarian mode of production of Asia and
European urban life and trade. Since the
European nation-state and the expansion of the
capitalist market system were considered as
the advanced stage, Asia was consigned to a
lower developmental stage of history. In the
European imagination, Asia was not only a
geographic category, but also a civilisation with
a political form in opposition to the European
nation-state, a social form in opposition to
European capitalism, and in transition between
an unhistorical and a historical stage.
This discourse provided a framework within
which European intellectuals, and also Asian
revolutionaries and reformists, could represent
world history and Asian societies, establish
revolution and reform policies, and describe

the past and future of Asia. Through most of
the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of Asia
was contained in a universal discourse of
European modernity that provided a similar
n a r r a t i v e f r a m e w o r k f o r c o l o n i s t s a n d
revolutionaries. Ironically, European discourses
presented Asia as the starting point of world
history. Hegel wrote: the history of the world
travels from East to West, for Europe is
absolutely the end of history, Asia is the
beginning . . .The East knew and to the present
day knows that no one is free; the Greek and
Roman world, that some are free; the German
world knows that all are free. The first political
form, therefore, which we observe in history is
d e s p o t i s m , t h e s e c o n d d e m o c r a c y a n d
aristocracy, the third monarchy?(5).
This is a philosophical condensation of
European discourses on Asia. In The Wealth of
Nations, Adam Smith analysed the relationship
between agriculture and irrigation in China and
other Asian countries to contrast it with
western European cities, characterised by
manufacturing and foreign trade. Smith's
definition of four historical stages, of hunting,
n o m a d i c , a g r i c u l t u r e a n d c o m m e r c e ,
coordinates with his definition of regions and
races. He mentioned native tribes of north
America?as examples of nations of hunters, the
lowest and rudest state of society? Tatars and
Arabs as examples of nations of shepherds, a
more advanced state of society? and ancient
Greeks and Romans as examples of nations of
husbandmen, a yet more advanced state of

society?(6).
From Hegel's perspective, all these issues
belonged to the political sphere and the
formation of the state: hunting races were
regarded as the lowest and crudest because
hunter-gatherer communities were so small
that the political specialisation of labour
demanded by a state was impossible. When he
described world history, Hegel resolutely
excluded North America (characterised by
hunter-gathering) and placed the East at the
beginning of history. Smith divided history
according to different economic or productive
patterns, while Hegel classified by region,
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civilisation and state structure. Both linked
productive or political forms with specific
spaces such as Asia, America, Africa or Europe,
and arranged them into a relationship of
temporal periodicity.
When he expounded the evolution of socio-
economic systems, Marx defined four stages:
Asian, primitive, feudal and capitalist. His
unique version of the Asian mode of production
originated in a synthesis of Hegel's and Smith's
views of history. According to Perry Anderson
(7), a series of generalisations about Asia in
European intellectual history since the 15th

century formed the basis upon which Marx
built his idea of the Asiatic mode of production:
public or state ownership of land (from James
Harrington, Francis Bernier, Montesquieu);
l a c k o f l e g a l c o n s t r a i n t ( J e a n B o d i n ,
Montesquieu, Bernier); religion rather than
legal systems (Montesquieu); lack of hereditary
aristocracy (Machiavelli, Francis Bacon,
Montesquieu); slavery-like social equality
(Montesquieu, Hegel), isolated village
communal life (Hegel); agriculture that
overwhelmed industry (John Stuart Mill,
Bernier); stagnant history (Montesquieu,
Hegel, Mill). All these supposed characteristics
of Asia were regarded as the properties of
oriental despotism. This ensemble of ideas can
be traced back to discussions of Asia in Greek
thought (8).
Asian ideas of Asia
Asian ideas of Asia are the products of modern
nationalism. Although they are historically
opposed in substance, the various Asian
nationalist discourses - the Japanese departure
from Asia and joining Europe the national
a u t o n o m y a d v o c a t e d b y t h e R u s s i a n
revolutionaries, and the Pan-Asianism of
Chinese revolutionaries - were all based on the
idea of the antithesis between the nation-state
and empire.
The Japanese nationalist slogan came from a
short essay by Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901)
published in 1885. Departure from Asia reveals
a determination to abandon the China-centred

world, its politics and Confucian ideology. The
idea of joining Europe was to establish Japan as
a European-style nation-state. Fukuzawa's view
of Asia was that it could be considered as
culturally homogenous, as a Confucian space;
he aimed to break with Confucianism by
transforming Japan into a nation-state. Japan's
self-consciousness as a nation-state was to be
achieved through separation from Asia and
reproduction, within Asia, of the dichotomy
civilised/barbarian, western/eastern.
He argued that Japan should not only depart
from its own past identity, but also reshape an
axis in the whole of Asia. In reality, its route as
a nation-state was not departure from Asia and
joining Europe?but rather entering Asia and
confronting Europe.?The Greater East Asian
Co-prosperity Sphere?proposed as a colonial
slogan in the early 20th century was used to
legitimise the Japanese invasions in Asia. Given
this colonial context, it is understandable that
most Chinese intellectuals became reluctant to
elaborate or to adopt this idea.
National liberation movements created a new
Asian imagination, echoing the socialist idea
present in the Russian revolution. The socialist
movement, anti-capitalist and fighting the
bourgeois nation-state, was from the start
directed towards internationalism and anti-
imperialism. However, like the theory of
departure from Asia in Japan, the theory of the
right of nations to self-determination was
elaborated within the dichotomy of nation-state
and empire.

Outcome of European modernity
Lenin published a series of articles on Asia 27
years after Fukuzawa's essay and soon after
the republican revolution erupted and the
provisional government of the Chinese republic
was established in January-February 1912 (9).
He described China as a land of seething
political activity, the scene of a vibrant social
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movement and of a democratic upsurge (10),
and condemned the fact that civilised and
advanced Europe with its highly developed
machine industry, its rich multiform culture
and its constitutions?came out, under the
command of the bourgeoisie, in support of
e v e r y t h i n g b a c k w a r d , m o r i b u n d a n d
medieval?(11). The opposing views of Lenin
and Fukuzawa are based on a common basic
understanding that Asian modernity was the
outcome of European modernity and that,
regardless of Asia's status and fate, the
significance of its modernity manifested itself
only in its relationship with advanced Europe.
In historical epistemology, there is no
substantial difference between Lenin's
revolutionary judgment and the idea of Asia
held by Hegel or Smith. All perceived the
history of the development of capitalism as an

evolutionary process from the ancient Orient or
A s i a t o m o d e r n E u r o p e , f r o m h u n t i n g ,
nomadism and agriculture to trade or industry.
H e g e l ' s v i e w o f w o r l d h i s t o r y a n d h i s
designation of Asia as medieval, barbarian and
non-historical was also Lenin's premise. His
Hegel-plus-revolution idea of Asia described
historical development in three stages: ancient,
medieval and modern (feudalism, capitalism,
proletarian revolution or socialism). It provided
a framework, when joined with temporality and
p e r i o d i s a t i o n f o r t h e c a p i t a l i s t e r a , t o
understand the history of other regions.
Lenin's arguments, especially the idea of an
inherent connection between nationalism and
capitalism, provide an outline to understand
the relationship between modern Chinese
nationalism and the idea of Asia. When Sun Yat-
sen visited Kobe in 1924, he (12) made his
famous speech on great Asianism (13). He
d i s t i n g u i s h e d t w o A s i a s : o n e w i t h n o
independent states that had been the origin of
the most ancient civilisation; another that was
about to rejuvenate. He claimed that Japan
would be the genesis for this Asia since it had
abolished a number of unequal treaties
imposed by Europe and had become the first
independent state in Asia. He applauded the
Japanese victory in its war with Russia as the
first triumph of Asian nations over the
European in the past several hundred years . . .
All Asian nations are exhilarated . . . They
therefore hope to defeat Europe and start
movements for independence . . . The great

hope of national independence in Asia is born
(14).
It was not just a question of East Asia as part of
a C o n f u c i a n c u l t u r a l s p h e r e , b u t o f a
multicultural Asia whose unity was based upon
the independence of sovereign states. Sun Yat-
sen's Asian nations?were the desired outcome
of national independence movements and not
awkward imitations of European nation-states.
He insisted that Asia had its own culture and
principles – the?culture of the kingly way?as
opposed to the?culture of the hegemonic way of
European nation-states. He called his speech
great Asianism?partly because he connected
the idea of Asia with the idea of the kingly way.
T h e i n h e r e n t u n i t y o f A s i a w a s n o t
Confucianism or any other homogeneous
c u l t u r e , b u t a p o l i t i c a l c u l t u r e t h a t
accommodated different religions, beliefs,
nations and societies. Great Asianism, or pan-
Asianism, was antithetical to the proposed
G r e a t e r E a s t A s i a o f m o d e r n J a p a n e s e
nationalism, and it led to a new kind of
internationalism.
The connection between socialist values and
Chinese traditions has inspired contemporary
scholars to reconstruct the idea of Asia.
Mizoguchi Yuzo argues that categories such as
h e a v e n l y p r i n c i p l e s ? ( t i a n l i ) , a n d
public/private?(gong/si) ran through Chinese
intellectual and social history from the Song
(960-1279) to the Qing (1911), and that
therefore there is an inherent continuity
between some themes of modern Chinese

revolution and the idea of land regulation. This
attempt to define Asian culture both resists and
criticises modern capitalism and colonialism
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(15). There is a sharp opposition between
socialist and colonialist ideas of Asia.
As early as the 1940s, Miyazaki Ichisada
started to explore the beginning of Song
capitalism by studying the history of wide-
ranging communications in different regions.
He argued that those who regard history since
the Song as the growth of modernity should
reflect on western modern history in light of
the earlier modernity in east Asia?(16). That his
theory of east Asian modernity overlapped with
the Japanese idea of the?Greater East Asian Co-
prosperity Sphere?does not obscure his
insights. Within a world-historical framework,
he observed how the digging of the Grand
C a n a l , l a r g e s c a l e m i g r a t i o n t o t h e
metropolises, and the use of commodities such
as spice and tea connected European and Asian
trade networks. He also argued that the
expansion of the Mongol empire, which
promoted artistic and cultural exchanges
between Europe and Asia, not only changed
internal relations in China and Asian societies,
but also connected Europe and Asia by land
and sea (17).

Parallel development
If the political, economic and cultural features
of Asian modernity appeared as early as the
10th or 11th century, three or four centuries
earlier than comparable features appeared in
Europe, was the historical development of
these two worlds parallel or associated?
Miyazaki suggested that East Asia, especially
China, not only provided the necessary market
and material for the industrial revolution, but
also nurtured the growth of humanism in the
French Revolution. He logically concluded: the
European industrial revolution was definitely
not a historical event affecting only Europe,
because it was not only a problem of machinery
but also an issue of the whole social structure.
To make possible the industrial revolution, the
prosperity of the bourgeoisie was necessary,
and the capital accumulation from trading with
east Asia was also indispensable. To make the
machines work not only required power, but
also cotton as raw material. In fact, East Asia
provided raw material and market. Without
intercourse with East Asia, the industrial
revolution might not have taken place (18).
The movement of the world is a process in
which multiple spheres communicate and,
interpenetrate and mould one another. When
historians located Asia in global relations, they
realised that the issue of modernity was not an
issue belonging to a certain society, but the
result of interaction between regions and
civilisations. In this sense, the validity of the

idea of Asia diminishes, since it is neither a
self-contained entity nor a set of relations. A
n e w i d e a o f A s i a - w h i c h i s n e i t h e r t h e
beginning of a linear world history nor its end,
neither self-sufficient subject nor subordinating
object - provides an opportunity to reconstruct
world history. This corrective must also lead to
a re-examination of the idea of Europe, since it
is impossible to continue to describe Asia based
upon Europe's self-image.
The accounts of Asia that we have discussed
reveal the ambiguity and contradictions in the
idea of Asia. The idea is simultaneously
colonialist and anti-colonialist, conservative
and revolutionary, nationalist and inter-
nationalist; it originated in Europe and shaped
the self-interpretation of Europe; it is closely
related to the matter of the nation-state and
overlaps with the vision of empire; it is a
geographic category established in geo-political
r e l a t i o n s . W e m u s t t a k e s e r i o u s l y t h e
derivativeness, ambiguity and inconsistency of
the way that the idea of Asia emerged, as we
explore the political, economic and cultural
independence of Asia today. The keys to
transcend or overcome such derivativeness,
ambiguity and inconsistency can be discovered
only in the specific historical relations that
gave rise to them.
The criticism of Euro-centrism should not seek
to confirm Asia-centrism but rather to eliminate

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the self-centred, exclusivist, expansionist logic
o f d o m i n a n c e . W e w i l l n o t b e a b l e t o
understand the significance of Asian modernity
if we forget the historical conditions and
movements we have discussed. In this sense,
new Asian visions need to surpass the goals
and projects of 20th-century national liberation
and socialist movements. Under current
historical circumstances, they must explore and
reflect on the unaccomplished historical
projects of these movements. The aim is not to
create a new cold war but to end forever the
old one and its derivative forms; it is not to
reconstruct the colonial relationship but to
eliminate its remnants and stop new colonising
possibilities from emerging.
The question of Asia is not merely an Asian
issue but one of world history. To reconsider
Asian history requires both a revision of the
19th-century European conception of world
history and an attempt to break through the
21st-century new imperial order and its logic.
This article, based on a talk at the London
School of Economics in May 2004, is revised
s l i g h t l y f r o m L e M o n d e D i p l o m a t i q u e ,
December, 2004. Wang Hui is a historian of
ideas and chief editor of Dushu, Beijing. The
article appeared at Japan Focus on February
23, 2005.

(1) Jurgen Habermas, “Why Europe needs a
constitution”, New Left Review, London, Sept-
Oct 2001.
(2) Asean, originally created in 1967 by
Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, now also
includes Cambodia, Laos,
Vietnam, Brunei and Burma.
(3) Nishiwaki Fumiaki, “Relationship between
Japan, the US, China, and
Russia from the perspective of China’s 21st
century strategy”, Sekai
Shuho, Tokyo, 12 February 2002.
(4) Teleology is the doctrine that certain
phenomena are best explained in terms of
purpose rather than cause. In the preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, Marx regarded the history of western
Europe as “an epoch marking progress in the
economic development of society”. This preface
was never reprinted during his lifetime. In
1877 he commented that one should not
“transform [his] historical sketch of the
development of western European capitalism
into a historical-philosophical theory of
universal development predetermined by fate
for all nations”. See Saul K Padover, ed, The
Letters of Karl Marx, Englewood Cliffs,
Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1979.
(5) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The
Philosophy of History, Colonial
Press, Jackson, Michigan, 1899.
(6) Adam Smith, “An inquiry into the nature
and causes of the wealth of
nations”, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and

Correspondence of Adam
Smith, vol II 2, Oxford University, London,
1976.
(7) Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolute
State, Verso, London, 1979.
(8) Op cit. Anderson’s analysis of the Asian
mode of production is
authoritative but he did not touch on the
important influence of Smith and the Scottish
school on the ideas that Hegel and Marx had
about Asia.
(9) “Democracy and Narodism in China”
(1912), in V I Lenin, Collected
Works, vol 18, Progress Publishers, Moscow,
1963; “The Awakening of Asia” (1913), vol 19;
“Backward Europe and advanced Asia” (1913),
vol 19. The Russian term “narodism” means
populism.
(10) “The awakening of Asia”.
(11) “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia”.
(12) Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) was president of
the first Chinese republic.
(13) Sun Yat-sen, “Dui Shenhu Shangye
Huiyisuo Deng Tuanti De Yanshuo” (speech to
organisations including the Kobe Chamber of
C o m m e r c e ) , i n S u n Z h o n g s h a n Q u a n j i
(complete works of Sun Zhongshan), Zhonghua
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shuju, Beijing, 1986.
(14) Ibid.

(15) See Mizoguchi Yuzo, Chugoku No Shiso
(Chinese thought), Hoso daigaku kyoiku
shinkokai, Tokyo, 1991; Mizoguchi Yuzo,
Chugoku Zen Kindai Shiso No Kussetsu to
Tenkai (Turns and changes in Chinese pre-
modern thought), Tokyo daigaku shuppankai,
Tokyo, 1980.
(16) Miyazaki Ichisada, Toyo Teki Kinsei (East
Asia’s modern age), Kyoiku
Times, Osaka.
(17) Ibid.
(18) Ibid. See also Philip S Golub, “All the
riches of the East restored”,
Le Monde diplomatique, English language
edition, October 2004.
Forbes/ Leadership Oct 29, 2013
5 Characteristics Of Grit -- How Many Do You Have?
Recently some close friends visited, both of whom have worked
in education with adolescents for over
40 years. We were talking about students in general and when I
asked what has changed with regards to
the character of kids, in unison they said “grit” – or more
specifically, lack thereof. There seems to be
growing concern among teachers that kids these days are
growing soft.

When I took a deeper dive, I found that what my friends have
been observing in-the-field, researchers
have been measuring in the lab. The role grit plays in success
has become a topic du jour, spearheaded
by Angela Duckworth, who was catapulted to the forefront of
the field after delivering a TED talk which
has since been viewed well over a million times. Additionally,
in the last month, Duckworth received a
$650,000 MacArthur fellowship, otherwise known as the
“Genius Grant,” to continue her work. And,
while Duckworth has made tremendous leaps in the field, she
stands on the shoulders of giants
including William James, K.E Ericson, and Aristotle, who
believed tenacity was one of the most valued
virtues.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, grit in the
context of behavior is defined as “firmness of
character; indomitable spirit.” Duckworth, based on her studies,
tweaked this definition to be
“perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” While I
recognize that she is the expert, I questioned
her modification…in particular the “long-term goals” part.
Some of the grittiest people I’ve known lack
the luxury to consider the big picture and instead must react to

immediate needs. This doesn’t diminish
the value of their fortitude, but rather underscores that grit
perhaps is more about attitude than an end
game.
But Duckworth’s research is conducted in the context of
exceptional performance and success in the
traditional sense, so requires it be measured by test scores,
degrees, and medals over an extended
period of time. Specifically, she explores this question, talent
and intelligence/ IQ being equal: why do
some individuals accomplish more than others? It is that
distinction which allows her the liberty to
evolve the definition, but underscores the importance of
defining her context.
The characteristics of grit outlined below include Duckworth’s
findings as well as some that defy
measurement. Duckworth herself is the first to say that the
essence of grit remains elusive. It has
hundreds of correlates, with nuances and anomalies, and your
level depends on the expression of their
interaction at any given point. Sometimes it is stronger,
sometimes weaker, but the constancy of your
tenacity is based on the degree to which you can access, ignite,
and control it. So here are a few of the

more salient characteristics to see how you measure up.
Courage
While courage is hard to measure, it is directly proportional to
your level of grit. More specifically, your
ability to manage fear of failure is imperative and a predicator
of success. The supremely gritty are not
afraid to tank, but rather embrace it as part of a process. They
understand that there are valuable
lessons in defeat and that the vulnerability of perseverance is
requisite for high achievement. Teddy
Roosevelt, a Grand Sire of Grit, spoke about the importance of
overcoming fear and managing
vulnerability in an address he made at the Sorbonne in 1907. He
stated:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how
the strong man stumbles, or where the
doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the
man who is actually in the arena, whose
face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strived
valiantly; who errs, who comes again and
again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;
but who does actually strive to do the

deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who
spends himself in a worthy cause; who
at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who at the worst, if he fails, at least
fails while daring greatly.
Fear of failure, or atychiphobia as the medical-set calls it, can
be a debilitating disorder, and is
characterized by an unhealthy aversion to risk (or a strong
resistance to embracing vulnerability). Some
symptoms include anxiety, mental blocks, and perfectionism
and scientists ascribe it to genetics, brain
chemistry, and life experiences. However, don’t be
alarmed…the problem is not insurmountable. On
Amazon, a “fear of failure” search yields 28,879 results. And
while there are millions of different
manifestations and degrees of the affliction, a baseline antidote
starts with listening to the words of
Eleanor Roosevelt: “do something that scares you everyday.” As
I noted in a recent post, courage is like
a muscle; it has to be exercised daily. If you do, it will grow;
ignored, it will atrophy. Courage helps fuel
grit; the two are symbiotic, feeding into and off of each
other…and you need to manage each and how

they are functioning together.
As a side note, some educators believe that the current trend of
coddling our youth, by removing
competition in sports for example, is preventing some kids from
actually learning how to fail and to
embrace it as an inevitable part of life. In our effort to protect
our kids from disappointment are we
inadvertently harming them? Coddling and cultivating courage
may indeed turn out to be irreconcilable
bedfellows. As with everything, perhaps the answer lies in the
balance…more to come.
Conscientiousness: Achievement Oriented vs. Dependable
As you probably know, it is generally agreed that there are five
core character traits from which all
human personalities stem called… get this…The Big Five. They
are: Openness, Conscientiousness,
Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neurotic. Each exists on a
continuum with its opposite on the other
end, and our personality is the expression of the dynamic
interaction of each and all at any given time.
One minute you may feel more agreeable, the next more
neurotic, but fortunately, day-to-day, they
collectively remain fairly stable for most of us.

According to Duckworth, of the five personality traits,
conscientiousness is the most closely associated
with grit. However, it seems that there are two types, and how
successful you will be depends on what
type you are. Conscientiousness in this context means, careful
and painstaking; meticulous. But in a
1992 study, the educator L.M. Hough found the definition to be
far more nuanced when applied to
tenacity. Hough’s study distinguished achievement from the
dependability aspects of conscientiousness.
The achievement-oriented individual is one who works
tirelessly, tries to do a good job, and completes
the task at hand, whereas the dependable person is more notably
self-controlled and conventional. Not
surprisingly, Hough discovered that achievement orientated
traits predicted job proficiency and
educational success far better than dependability. So a self-
controlled person who may never step out of
line may fail to reach the same heights as their more mercurial
friends. In other words, in the context of
conscientious, grit, and success, it is important to commit to go
for the gold rather than just show up for
practice. Or, to put it less delicately, it’s better to be a
racehorse than an ass.

Long-Term Goals and Endurance: Follow Through
As I wrote in the introduction, I had some reservations about
accepting the difference between
Webster’s definition of grit and Duckworth’s interpretation.
Both have to do with perseverance, but the
latter exists in the arena of extraordinary success and therefore
requires a long-term time commitment.
Well, since you are Forbes readers and destined for the
pantheon of extraordinary success, it is
important to concede that for you…long-term goals play an
important role. Duckworth writes:
“… achievement is the product of talent and effort, the latter a
function of the intensity, direction, and
duration of one’s exertions towards a long-term goal.”
Malcolm Gladwell agrees. In his 2007 best selling book
Outliers, he examines the seminal conditions
required for optimal success. We’re talking about the best of the
best… Beatles, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.
How did they build such impossibly powerful spheres of
influence? Unfortunately, some of Gladwell’ s
findings point to dumb luck. Still, the area where Gladwell and
Duckworth intersect (and what we can

actually control), is on the importance of goals and lots, and
lots and lots of practice…10,000 hours to be
precise.
Turns out the baseline time commitment required to become a
contender, even if predisposed with
seemingly prodigious talent, is at least 20 hours a week over 10
years. Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory
and Duckworth’s findings align to the hour. However, one of
the distinctions between someone who
succeeds and someone who is just spending a lot of time doing
something is this: practice must have
purpose. That’s where long-term goals come in. They provide
the context and framework in which to
find the meaning and value of your long-term efforts, which
helps cultivate drive, sustainability, passion,
courage, stamina…grit.
Resilience: Optimism, Confidence, and Creativity
Of course, on your long haul to greatness you’re going to
stumble, and you will need to get back up on
the proverbial horse. But what is it that gives you the strength
to get up, wipe the dust off, and
remount? Futurist and author Andrew Zolli says it’s resilience.
I’d have to agree with that one.

In Zolli’s book, Resilience, Why Things Bounce Back, he
defines resilience as “the ability of people,
communities, and systems to maintain their core purpose and
integrity among unforeseen shocks and
surprises.”
For Zolli, resilience is a dynamic combination of optimism,
creativity, and confidence, which together
empower one to reappraise situations and regulate emotion – a
behavior many social scientists refer to
as “hardiness” or “grit.” Zolli takes it even further and explains
that “hardiness” is comprised of three
tenents: “ (1) the belief one can find meaningful purpose in life,
(2) the belief that one can influence
one’s surroundings and the outcome of events, and (3) the belief
that positive and negative experiences
will lead to learning and growth.”
Wait, what? Seems that there is a lot going on here, but this is
my take on the situation in an elemental
equation. Optimism + Confidence + Creativity = Resilience =
Hardiness =(+/- )Grit. So, while a key
component of grit is resilience, resilience is the powering
mechanism that draws your head up, moves
you forward, and helps you persevere despite whatever
obstacles you face along the way. In other

words, gritty people believe, “everything will be alright in the
end, and if it is not alright, it is not the
end.”
Excellence vs. Perfection
In general, gritty people don’t seek perfection, but instead
strive for excellence. It may seem that these
two have only subtle semantic distinctions; but in fact they are
quite at odds. Perfection is excellence’s
somewhat pernicious cousin. It is pedantic, binary, unforgiving
and inflexible. Certainly there are times
when “perfection” is necessary to establish standards, like in
performance athletics such as diving and
gymnastics. But in general, perfection is someone else’s
perception of an ideal, and pursuing it is like
chasing a hallucination. Anxiety, low self-esteem, obsessive
compulsive disorder, substance abuse, and
clinical depression are only a few of the conditions ascribed to
“perfectionism.” To be clear, those are
ominous barriers to success.
Excellence is an attitude, not an endgame. The word excellence
is derived from the Greek word Arête

which is bound with the notion of fulfillment of purpose or
function and is closely associated with virtue.
It is far more forgiving, allowing and embracing failure and
vulnerability on the ongoing quest for
improvement. It allows for disappointment, and prioritizes
progress over perfection. Like excellence,
grit is an attitude about, to paraphrase Tennyson…seeking,
striving, finding, and never yielding.Are there
any others you’d add? By definition, passion is critical, but
what role do you think it plays? I am sure that
Duckworth will continue to explore and share the distinctions in
the years to come, but I’d love to hear
your thoughts.
ALI 150
C. Stammler
“Definition” Analysis SAMPLE RESPONSE
TITLE:
_____________________________________________________
__
AUTHOR:
_____________________________________________________

1. Thesis Statement:
a. Is it Direct? (“Direct Quote” + para #)
_____________________________________________________
___________________
_____________________________________________________
___________________
b. OR Is it indirect/ implied?
_____________________________________________________
___________________
_____________________________________________________
___________________
c. Do you agree or support this definition? Why or why not?
_____________________________________________________
___________________
_____________________________________________________
___________________
_____________________________________________________
___________________
2. Supporting Arguments :
a. list 4-5 Supporting arguments/ definitions: “Direct Quote” +
(paragraph #)
b. Are these “definitions” or “arguments” persuasive? Why or
why not?
_____________________________________________________
___________________
_____________________________________________________
___________________
_____________________________________________________

___________________
3. MY DEFINITION: I define (term)
_________________________
as___________________________________________________
__________________________
_____________________________________________________
_________________________
_____________________________________________________
_________________________
4. Vocabulary: ( 3 words)
• Word 1: ______________________
• Word 2: ______________________
• Word 3: ______________________
5. Critical Thinking: Why is this term important and to what
audiences: to you, to society? Does the
writer have a compelling message? Write a COMPLETE

PARAGRAPH for full credit.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
The Idea of Provincializing Europe
Europe . . . since 1914 has become provincialized, . . .
only the natural sciences are able to call forth a
quick international echo.
(Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1977)
The West is a name for a subject which gathers itself in
discourse but is also an object constituted discursively;
it is, evidently, a name always associating itself with
those regions, communities, and peoples that appear
politically or economically superior to other regions,
communities, and peoples. Basically, it is just like the
name “Japan,” . . . it claims that it is capable of
sustaining, if not actually transcending, an impulse to
transcend all the particularizations.
(Naoki Sakai, 1998)
PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE is not a book about the region of
the world
we call “Europe.” That Europe, one could say, has already been
provin-
cialized by history itself. Historians have long acknowledged
that the so-
called “European age” in modern history began to yield place to

other
regional and global configurations toward the middle of the
twentieth
century.1 European history is no longer seen as embodying
anything like
a “universal human history.”2 No major Western thinker, for
instance,
has publicly shared Francis Fukuyama’s “vulgarized Hegelian
histori-
cism” that saw in the fall of the Berlin wall a common end for
the history
of all human beings.3 The contrast with the past seems sharp
when one
remembers the cautious but warm note of approval with which
Kant once
detected in the French Revolution a “moral disposition in the
human
race” or Hegel saw the imprimatur of the “world spirit” in the
momen-
tousness of that event.4
I am by training a historian of modern South Asia, which forms
my
archive and is my site of analysis. The Europe I seek to
provincialize or
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe : Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press,
2000.
ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utoronto/detail.action?docI
D=3030277.
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4 I N T R O D U C T I O N
decenter is an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded
in clichéd
and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought that
invariably
subtend attempts in the social sciences to address questions of
political
modernity in South Asia.5 The phenomenon of “political
modernity”—
namely, the rule by modern institutions of the state,
bureaucracy, and
capitalist enterprise—is impossible to think of anywhere in the
world
without invoking certain categories and concepts, the
genealogies of
which go deep into the intellectual and even theological
traditions of Eu-
rope.6 Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society,
public sphere,
human rights, equality before the law, the individual,
distinctions between
public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular
sover-

eignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear
the burden
of European thought and history. One simply cannot think of
political
modernity without these and other related concepts that found a
climactic
form in the course of the European Enlightenment and the
nineteenth
century.
These concepts entail an unavoidable—and in a sense
indispensable—
universal and secular vision of the human. The European
colonizer of the
nineteenth century both preached this Enlightenment humanism
at the
colonized and at the same time denied it in practice. But the
vision has
been powerful in its effects. It has historically provided a strong
founda-
tion on which to erect—both in Europe and outside—critiques
of socially
unjust practices. Marxist and liberal thought are legatees of this
intellec-
tual heritage. This heritage is now global. The modern Bengali
educated
middle classes—to which I belong and fragments of whose
history I re-
count later in the book—have been characterized by Tapan
Raychaudhuri
as the “the first Asian social group of any size whose mental
world was
transformed through its interactions with the West.”7 A long
series of
illustrious members of this social group—from Raja Rammohun
Roy,

sometimes called “the father of modern India,” to
Manabendranath Roy,
who argued with Lenin in the Comintern—warmly embraced the
themes
of rationalism, science, equality, and human rights that the
European En-
lightenment promulgated.8 Modern social critiques of caste,
oppressions
of women, the lack of rights for laboring and subaltern classes
in India,
and so on—and, in fact, the very critique of colonialism itself—
are un-
thinkable except as a legacy, partially, of how Enlightenment
Europe was
appropriated in the subcontinent. The Indian constitution
tellingly begins
by repeating certain universal Enlightenment themes celebrated,
say, in
the American constitution. And it is salutary to remember that
the writ-
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P RO V I N C I A L I Z I N G E U RO P E 5
ings of the most trenchant critic of the institution of
“untouchability” in
British India refer us back to some originally European ideas
about liberty
and human equality.9
I too write from within this inheritance. Postcolonial
scholarship is
committed, almost by definition, to engaging the universals—
such as the
abstract figure of the human or that of Reason—that were
forged in eigh-
teenth-century Europe and that underlie the human sciences.
This engage-
ment marks, for instance, the writing of the Tunisian
philosopher and
historian Hichem Djait, who accuses imperialist Europe of
“deny[ing] its
own vision of man.”10 Fanon’s struggle to hold on to the
Enlightenment
idea of the human—even when he knew that European
imperialism had
reduced that idea to the figure of the settler-colonial white
man—is now
itself a part of the global heritage of all postcolonial thinkers.11
The strug-
gle ensues because there is no easy way of dispensing with

these universals
in the condition of political modernity. Without them there
would be no
social science that addresses issues of modern social justice.
This engagement with European thought is also called forth by
the fact
that today the so-called European intellectual tradition is the
only one
alive in the social science departments of most, if not all,
modern universi-
ties. I use the word “alive” in a particular sense. It is only
within some
very particular traditions of thinking that we treat fundamental
thinkers
who are long dead and gone not only as people belonging to
their own
times but also as though they were our own contemporaries. In
the social
sciences, these are invariably thinkers one encounters within the
tradition
that has come to call itself “European” or “Western.” I am
aware that
an entity called “the European intellectual tradition” stretching
back to
the ancient Greeks is a fabrication of relatively recent European
history.
Martin Bernal, Samir Amin, and others have justly criticized the
claim of
European thinkers that such an unbroken tradition ever existed
or that it
could even properly be called “European.”12 The point,
however, is that,
fabrication or not, this is the genealogy of thought in which
social scien-
tists find themselves inserted. Faced with the task of analyzing

develop-
ments or social practices in modern India, few if any Indian
social scien-
tists or social scientists of India would argue seriously with,
say, the
thirteenth-century logician Gangesa or with the grammarian and
linguis-
tic philosopher Bartrihari (fifth to sixth centuries), or with the
tenth- or
eleventh-century aesthetician Abhinavagupta. Sad though it is,
one result
of European colonial rule in South Asia is that the intellectual
traditions
once unbroken and alive in Sanskrit or Persian or Arabic are
now only
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matters of historical research for most—perhaps all—modern
social scien-
tists in the region.13 They treat these traditions as truly dead, as
history.
Although categories that were once subject to detailed
theoretical contem-
plation and inquiry now exist as practical concepts, bereft of
any theoreti-
cal lineage, embedded in quotidian practices in South Asia,
contemporary
social scientists of South Asia seldom have the training that
would enable
them to make these concepts into resources for critical thought
for the
present.14 And yet past European thinkers and their categories
are never
quite dead for us in the same way. South Asian(ist) social
scientists would
argue passionately with a Marx or a Weber without feeling any
need
to historicize them or to place them in their European
intellectual con-
texts. Sometimes—though this is rather rare—they would even
argue with
the ancient or medieval or early-modern predecessors of these
European
theorists.
Yet the very history of politicization of the population, or the
coming
of political modernity, in countries outside of the Western
capitalist de-

mocracies of the world produces a deep irony in the history of
the politi-
cal. This history challenges us to rethink two conceptual gifts of
nine-
teenth-century Europe, concepts integral to the idea of
modernity. One is
historicism—the idea that to understand anything it has to be
seen both
as a unity and in its historical development—and the other is the
very
idea of the political. What historically enables a project such as
that of
“provincializing Europe” is the experience of political
modernity in a
country like India. European thought has a contradictory
relationship to
such an instance of political modernity. It is both indispensable
and inade-
quate in helping us to think through the various life practices
that consti-
tute the political and the historical in India. Exploring—on both
theoreti-
cal and factual registers—this simultaneous indispensability and
inadequacy of social science thought is the task this book has
set itself.
THE POLITICS OF HISTORICISM
Writings by poststructuralist philosophers such as Michel
Foucault have
undoubtedly given a fillip to global critiques of historicism.15
But it would
be wrong to think of postcolonial critiques of historicism (or of
the politi-
cal) as simply deriving from critiques already elaborated by
postmodern

and poststructuralist thinkers of the West. In fact, to think this
way would
itself be to practice historicism, for such a thought would
merely repeat
the temporal structure of the statement, “first in the West, and
then else-
where.” In saying this, I do not mean to take away from the
recent discus-
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sions of historicism by critics who see its decline in the West as
resulting
from what Jameson has imaginatively named “the cultural logic

of late-
capitalism.”16 The cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg
has point-
edly questioned whether history itself is not endangered by
consumerist
practices of contemporary capitalism. How do you produce
historical ob-
servation and analysis, Grossberg asks, “when every event is
potentially
evidence, potentially determining, and at the same time,
changing too
quickly to allow the comfortable leisure of academic
criticism?”17 But
these arguments, although valuable, still bypass the histories of
political
modernity in the third world. From Mandel to Jameson, nobody
sees
“late capitalism” as a system whose driving engine may be in
the third
world. The word “late” has very different connotations when
applied to
the developed countries and to those seen as still “developing.”
“Late
capitalism” is properly the name of a phenomenon that is
understood as
belonging primarily to the developed capitalist world, though its
impact
on the rest of the globe is never denied.18
Western critiques of historicism that base themselves on some
charac-
terization of “late capitalism” overlook the deep ties that bind
together
historicism as a mode of thought and the formation of political
modernity
in the erstwhile European colonies. Historicism enabled

European domi-
nation of the world in the nineteenth century.19 Crudely, one
might say
that it was one important form that the ideology of progress or
“develop-
ment” took from the nineteenth century on. Historicism is what
made
modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as
something
that became global over time, by originating in one place
(Europe) and
then spreading outside it. This “first in Europe, then elsewhere”
structure
of global historical time was historicist; different non-Western
national-
isms would later produce local versions of the same narrative,
replacing
“Europe” by some locally constructed center. It was historicism
that al-
lowed Marx to say that the “country that is more developed
industrially
only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own
future.”20 It is also
what leads prominent historians such as Phyllis Deane to
describe the
coming of industries in England as the first industrial
revolution.21 Histori-
cism thus posited historical time as a measure of the cultural
distance (at
least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist
between the
West and the non-West.22 In the colonies, it legitimated the
idea of civiliza-
tion.23 In Europe itself, it made possible completely internalist
histories of
Europe in which Europe was described as the site of the first

occurrence
of capitalism, modernity, or Enlightenment.24 These “events” in
turn are
all explained mainly with respect to “events” within the
geographical con-
fines of Europe (however fuzzy its exact boundaries may have
been). The
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inhabitants of the colonies, on the other hand, were assigned a
place “else-
where” in the “first in Europe and then elsewhere” structure of
time. This

move of historicism is what Johannes Fabian has called “the
denial of co-
evalness.”25
Historicism—and even the modern, European idea of history—
one
might say, came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth
century as
somebody’s way of saying “not yet” to somebody else.26
Consider the
classic liberal but historicist essays by John Stuart Mill, “On
Liberty”
and “On Representative Government,” both of which proclaimed
self-
rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against
giving Indi-
ans or Africans self-rule on grounds that were indeed
historicist. Ac-
cording to Mill, Indians or Africans were not yet civilized
enough to rule
themselves. Some historical time of development and
civilization (colonial
rule and education, to be precise) had to elapse before they
could be con-
sidered prepared for such a task.27 Mill’s historicist argument
thus con-
signed Indians, Africans, and other “rude” nations to an
imaginary wait-
ing room of history. In doing so, it converted history itself into
a version
of this waiting room. We were all headed for the same
destination, Mill
averred, but some people were to arrive earlier than others. That
was
what historicist consciousness was: a recommendation to the
colonized

to wait. Acquiring a historical consciousness, acquiring the
public spirit
that Mill thought absolutely necessary for the art of self-
government, was
also to learn this art of waiting. This waiting was the realization
of the
“not yet” of historicism.
Twentieth-century anticolonial democratic demands for self-
rule, on
the contrary, harped insistently on a “now” as the temporal
horizon of
action. From about the time of First World War to the
decolonization
movements of the fifties and sixties, anticolonial nationalisms
were predi-
cated on this urgency of the “now.” Historicism has not
disappeared from
the world, but its “not yet” exists today in tension with this
global
insistence on the “now” that marks all popular movements
toward
democracy. This had to be so, for in their search for a mass
base, antico-
lonial nationalist movements introduced classes and groups into
the
sphere of the political that, by the standards of nineteenth-
century Euro-
pean liberalism, could only look ever so unprepared to assume
the politi-
cal responsibility of self-government. These were the peasants,
tribals,
semi- or unskilled industrial workers in non-Western cities, men
and
women from the subordinate social groups—in short, the
subaltern

classes of the third world.
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A critique of historicism therefore goes to the heart of the
question of
political modernity in non-Western societies. As I shall argue in
more de-
tail later, it was through recourse to some version of a stagist
theory of
history—ranging from simple evolutionary schemas to
sophisticated un-
derstandings of “uneven development”—that European political
and so-

cial thought made room for the political modernity of the
subaltern
classes. This was not, as such, an unreasonable theoretical
claim. If “polit-
ical modernity” was to be a bounded and definable phenomenon,
it was
not unreasonable to use its definition as a measuring rod for
social prog-
ress. Within this thought, it could always be said with reason
that some
people were less modern than others, and that the former needed
a period
of preparation and waiting before they could be recognized as
full partici-
pants in political modernity. But this was precisely the
argument of the
colonizer—the “not yet” to which the colonized nationalist
opposed his
or her “now.” The achievement of political modernity in the
third world
could only take place through a contradictory relationship to
European
social and political thought. It is true that nationalist elites
often rehearsed
to their own subaltern classes—and still do if and when the
political struc-
tures permit—the stagist theory of history on which European
ideas of
political modernity were based. However, there were two
necessary devel-
opments in nationalist struggles that would produce at least a
practical,
if not theoretical, rejection of any stagist, historicist
distinctions between
the premodern or the nonmodern and the modern. One was the
national-

ist elite’s own rejection of the “waiting-room” version of
history when
faced with the Europeans’ use of it as a justification for denial
of “self-
government” to the colonized. The other was the twentieth-
century phe-
nomenon of the peasant as full participant in the political life of
the nation
(that is, first in the nationalist movement and then as a citizen
of the
independent nation), long before he or she could be formally
educated
into the doctrinal or conceptual aspects of citizenship.
A dramatic example of this nationalist rejection of historicist
history is
the Indian decision taken immediately after the attainment of
indepen-
dence to base Indian democracy on universal adult franchise.
This was
directly in violation of Mill’s prescription. “Universal
teaching,” Mill said
in the essay “On Representative Government,” “must precede
universal
enfranchisement.”28 Even the Indian Franchise Committee of
1931, which
had several Indian members, stuck to a position that was a
modified ver-
sion of Mill’s argument. The members of the committee agreed
that al-
though universal adult franchise would be the ideal goal for
India, the
general lack of literacy in the country posed a very large
obstacle to its

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implementation.29 And yet in less than two decades, India
opted for uni-
versal adult suffrage for a population that was still
predominantly nonlit-
erate. In defending the new constitution and the idea of
“popular sover-
eignty” before the nation’s Constituent Assembly on the eve of
formal
independence, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, later to be the first
vice presi-
dent of India, argued against the idea that Indians as a people
were not
yet ready to rule themselves. As far as he was concerned,

Indians, literate
or illiterate, were always suited for self-rule. He said: “We
cannot say that
the republican tradition is foreign to the genius of this country.
We have
had it from the beginning of our history.”30 What else was this
position if
not a national gesture of abolishing the imaginary waiting room
in which
Indians had been placed by European historicist thought?
Needless to say,
historicism remains alive and strong today in the all the
developmentalist
practices and imaginations of the Indian state.31 Much of the
institutional
activity of governing in India is premised on a day-to-day
practice of his-
toricism; there is a strong sense in which the peasant is still
being educated
and developed into the citizen. But every time there is a
populist/political
mobilization of the people on the streets of the country and a
version
of “mass democracy” becomes visible in India, historicist time
is put in
temporary suspension. And once every five years—or more
frequently, as
seems to be the case these days—the nation produces a political
perfor-
mance of electoral democracy that sets aside all assumptions of
the histor-
icist imagination of time. On the day of the election, every
Indian adult
is treated practically and theoretically as someone already
endowed with
the skills of a making major citizenly choice, education or no

education.
The history and nature of political modernity in an excolonial
country
such as India thus generates a tension between the two aspects
of the
subaltern or peasant as citizen. One is the peasant who has to be
educated
into the citizen and who therefore belongs to the time of
historicism; the
other is the peasant who, despite his or her lack of formal
education, is
already a citizen. This tension is akin to the tension between the
two
aspects of nationalism that Homi Bhabha has usefully identified
as the
pedagogic and the performative.32 Nationalist historiography in
the peda-
gogic mode portrays the peasant’s world, with its emphasis on
kinship,
gods, and the so-called supernatural, as anachronistic. But the
“nation”
and the political are also performed in the carnivalesque aspects
of democ-
racy: in rebellions, protest marches, sporting events, and in
universal adult
franchise. The question is: How do we think the political at
these mo-
ments when the peasant or the subaltern emerges in the modern
sphere of
politics, in his or her own right, as a member of the nationalist
movement
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against British rule or as a full-fledged member of the body
politic, with-
out having had to do any “preparatory” work in order to qualify
as the
“bourgeois-citizen”?
I should clarify that in my usage the word “peasant” refers to
more
than the sociologist’s figure of the peasant. I intend that
particular mean-
ing, but I load the word with an extended meaning as well. The
“peasant”
acts here as a shorthand for all the seemingly nonmodern, rural,
nonsecu-
lar relationships and life practices that constantly leave their

imprint on
the lives of even the elites in India and on their institutions of
government.
The peasant stands for all that is not bourgeois (in a European
sense) in
Indian capitalism and modernity. The next section elaborates on
this idea.
SUBALTERN STUDIES AND THE CRITIQUE OF
HISTORICISM
This problem of how to conceptualize the historical and the
political in a
context where the peasant was already part of the political was
indeed one
of the key questions that drove the historiographic project of
Subaltern
Studies.33 My extended interpretation of the word “peasant”
follows from
some of the founding statements Ranajit Guha made when he
and his
colleagues attempted to democratize the writing of Indian
history by look-
ing on subordinate social groups as the makers of their own
destiny. I find
it significant, for example, that Subaltern Studies should have
begun its
career by registering a deep sense of unease with the very idea
of the
“political” as it had been deployed in the received traditions of
English-
language Marxist historiography. Nowhere is this more visible
than in
Ranajit Guha’s criticism of the British historian Eric
Hobsbawm’s cate-
gory “prepolitical” in his 1983 book Elementary Aspects of

Peasant In-
surgency in Colonial India.34
Hobsbawm’s category “prepolitical” revealed the limits of how
far his-
toricist Marxist thought could go in responding to the challenge
posed to
European political thought by the entry of the peasant into the
modern
sphere of politics. Hobsbawm recognized what was special to
political
modernity in the third world. He readily admitted that it was the
“acquisi-
tion of political consciousness” by peasants that “made our
century the
most revolutionary in history.” Yet he missed the implications
of this ob-
servation for the historicism that already underlay his own
analysis. Peas-
ants’ actions, organized—more often than not—along the axes
of kinship,
religion, and caste, and involving gods, spirits, and supernatural
agents
as actors alongside humans, remained for him symptomatic of a
con-
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sciousness that had not quite come to terms with the secular-
institutional
logic of the political.35 He called peasants “pre-political people
who have
not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in
which to ex-
press themselves. [Capitalism] comes to them from outside,
insidiously
by the operation of economic forces which they do not
understand.” In
Hobsbawm’s historicist language, the social movements of the
peasants
of the twentieth century remained “archaic.”36
The analytical impulse of Hobsbawm’s study belongs to a
variety of
historicism that Western Marxism has cultivated since its
inception.
Marxist intellectuals of the West and their followers elsewhere
have devel-
oped a diverse set of sophisticated strategies that allow them to
acknowl-

edge the evidence of “incompleteness” of capitalist
transformation in Eu-
rope and other places while retaining the idea of a general
historical
movement from a premodern stage to that of modernity. These
strategies
include, first, the old and now discredited evolutionist
paradigms of the
nineteenth century—the language of “survivals” and
“remnants”—some-
times found in Marx’s own prose. But there are other strategies
as well,
and they are all variations on the theme of “uneven
development”—itself
derived, as Neil Smith shows, from Marx’s use of the idea of
“uneven
rates of development” in his Critique of Political Economy
(1859) and
from Lenin’s and Trotsky’s later use of the concept.37 The
point is,
whether they speak of “uneven development,” or Ernst Bloch’s
“syn-
chronicity of the non-synchronous,” or Althusserian “structural
causal-
ity,” these strategies all retain elements of historicism in the
direction of
their thought (in spite of Althusser’s explicit opposition to
historicism).
They all ascribe at least an underlying structural unity (if not an
expressive
totality) to historical process and time that makes it possible to
identify
certain elements in the present as “anachronistic.”38 The thesis
of “uneven
development,” as James Chandler has perceptively observed in
his recent

study of Romanticism, goes “hand in hand” with the “dated grid
of an
homogenous empty time.”39
By explicitly critiquing the idea of peasant consciousness as
“prepoliti-
cal,” Guha was prepared to suggest that the nature of collective
action by
peasants in modern India was such that it effectively stretched
the cate-
gory of the “political” far beyond the boundaries assigned to it
in Euro-
pean political thought.40 The political sphere in which the
peasant and his
masters participated was modern—for what else could
nationalism be but
a modern political movement for self-government?—and yet it
did not
follow the logic of secular-rational calculations inherent the
modern con-
ception of the political. This peasant-but-modern political
sphere was not
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bereft of the agency of gods, spirits, and other supernatural
beings.41 So-
cial scientists may classify such agencies under the rubric of
“peasant be-
liefs,” but the peasant-as-citizen did not partake of the
ontological as-
sumptions that the social sciences take for granted. Guha’s
statement
recognized this subject as modern, however, and hence refused
to call the
peasants’ political behavior or consciousness “prepolitical.” He
insisted
that instead of being an anachronism in a modernizing colonial
world,
the peasant was a real contemporary of colonialism, a
fundamental part
of the modernity that colonial rule brought to in India. Theirs
was not a
“backward” consciousness—a mentality left over from the past,
a con-
sciousness baffled by modern political and economic
institutions and yet
resistant to them. Peasants’ readings of the relations of power
that they
confronted in the world, Guha argued, were by no means

unrealistic or
backward-looking.
Of course, this was not all said at once and with anything like
the clarity
one can achieve with hindsight. There are, for example,
passages in Ele-
mentary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India in
which Guha
follows the tendencies general to European Marxist or liberal
scholarship.
He sometimes reads undemocratic relationships—issues of
direct “domi-
nation and subordination” that involve the so-called “religious”
or the
supernatural—as survivals of a precapitalist era, as not quite
modern,
and hence as indicative of problems of transition to
capitalism.42 Such
narratives often make an appearance in the early volumes of
Subaltern
Studies, as well. But these statements, I submit, do not
adequately repre-
sent the radical potential of Guha’s critique of the category
“prepolitical.”
For if they were a valid framework for analyzing Indian
modernity, one
could indeed argue in favor of Hobsbawm and his category
“prepoliti-
cal.” One could point out—in accordance with European
political
thought—that the category “political” was inappropriate for
analyzing
peasant protest, for the sphere of the political hardly ever
abstracted itself
from the spheres of religion and kinship in precapitalist

relations of domi-
nation. The everyday relations of power that involve kinship,
gods, and
spirits that the peasant dramatically exemplified could then with
justice
be called “prepolitical.” The persisting world of the peasant in
India could
be legitimately read as a mark of the incompleteness of India’s
transition
to capitalism, and the peasant himself seen rightly as an “earlier
type,”
active no doubt in nationalism but really working under world-
historical
notice of extinction.
What I build on here, however, is the opposite tendency of
thought that
is signaled by Guha’s unease with the category “prepolitical.”
Peasant
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insurgency in modern India, Guha wrote, “was a political
struggle.”43 I
have emphasized the word “political” in this quote to highlight
a creative
tension between the Marxist lineage of Subaltern Studies and
the more
challenging questions it raised from the very beginning about
the nature
of the political in the colonial modernity of India. Examining,
for in-
stance, over a hundred known cases of peasant rebellions in
British India
between 1783 and 1900, Guha showed that practices which
called upon
gods, spirits, and other spectral and divine beings were part of
the net-
work of power and prestige within which both the subaltern and
elite
operated in South Asia. These presences were not merely
symbolic of
some of deeper and “more real” secular reality.44
South Asian political modernity, Guha argued, brings together
two
noncommensurable logics of power, both modern. One is the
logic of
the quasi-liberal legal and institutional frameworks that
European rule

introduced into the country, which in many ways were desired
by both
elite and subaltern classes. I do not mean to understate the
importance of
this development. Braided with this, however, is the logic of
another set of
relationships in which both the elites and the subalterns are also
involved.
These are relations that articulate hierarchy through practices of
direct
and explicit subordination of the less powerful by the more
powerful. The
first logic is secular. In other words, it derives from the
secularized forms
of Christianity that mark modernity in the West, and shows a
similar
tendency toward first making a “religion” out of a medley of
Hindu prac-
tices and then secularizing forms of that religion in the life of
modern
institutions in India.45 The second has no necessary secularism
about it;
it is what continually brings gods and spirits into the domain of
the politi-
cal. (This is to be distinguished from the secular-calculative use
of “reli-
gion” that many contemporary political parties make in the
subconti-
nent.) To read these practices as a survival of an earlier mode of
production would inexorably lead us to stagist and elitist
conceptions of
history; it would take us back to a historicist framework. Within
that
framework, historiography has no other way of responding to
the chal-
lenge presented to political thought and philosophy by

involvement of the
peasants in twentieth-century nationalisms, and by their
emergence after
independence as full-fledged citizens of a modern nation-state.
Guha’s critique of the category “prepolitical,” I suggest,
fundamentally
pluralizes the history of power in global modernity and
separates it from
any universalist narratives of capital. Subaltern historiography
questions
the assumption that capitalism necessarily brings bourgeois
relations of
power to a position of hegemony.46 If Indian modernity places
the bour-
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geois in juxtaposition with that which seems prebourgeois, if
the nonsecu-
lar supernatural exists in proximity to the secular, and if both
are to be
found in the sphere of the political, it is not because capitalism
or political
modernity in India has remained “incomplete.” Guha does not
deny the
connections of colonial India to the global forces of capitalism.
His point
is that what seemed “traditional” in this modernity were
“traditional only
in so far as [their] roots could be traced back to pre-colonial
times, but
[they were] by no means archaic in the sense of being
outmoded.”47 This
was a political modernity that would eventually give rise to a
thriving
electoral democracy, even when “vast areas in the life and
consciousness
of the people” escaped any kind of “[bourgeois] hegemony.”48
The pressure of this observation introduces into the Subaltern
Studies
project a necessary—though sometimes incipient—critique of
both histor-
icism and the idea of the political. My argument for
provincializing Eu-
rope follows directly from my involvement in this project. A
history of
political modernity in India could not be written as a simple
application

of the analytics of capital and nationalism available to Western
Marxism.
One could not, in the manner of some nationalist historians, pit
the story
of a regressive colonialism against an account of a robust
nationalist
movement seeking to establish a bourgeois outlook throughout
society.49
For, in Guha’s terms, there was no class in South Asia
comparable to the
European bourgeoisie of Marxist metanarratives, a class able to
fabricate
a hegemonic ideology that made its own interests look and feel
like the
interests of all. The “Indian culture of the colonial era,” Guha
argued in
a later essay, defied understanding “either as a replication of
the liberal-
bourgeois culture of nineteenth-century Britain or as the mere
survival of
an antecedent pre-capitalist culture.”50 This was capitalism
indeed, but
without bourgeois relations that attain a position of
unchallenged hege-
mony; it was a capitalist dominance without a hegemonic
bourgeois cul-
ture—or, in Guha’s famous terms, “dominance without
hegemony.”
One cannot think of this plural history of power and provide
accounts
of the modern political subject in India without at the same time
radically
questioning the nature of historical time. Imaginations of
socially just

futures for humans usually take the idea of single, homogenous,
and secu-
lar historical time for granted. Modern politics is often justified
as a story
of human sovereignty acted out in the context of a ceaseless
unfolding of
unitary historical time. I argue that this view is not an adequate
intellec-
tual resource for thinking about the conditions for political
modernity in
colonial and postcolonial India. We need to move away from
two of the
ontological assumptions entailed in secular conceptions of the
political
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and the social. The first is that the human exists in a frame of a
single and
secular historical time that envelops other kinds of time. I argue
that the
task of conceptualizing practices of social and political
modernity in
South Asia often requires us to make the opposite assumption:
that histor-
ical time is not integral, that it is out of joint with itself. The
second as-
sumption running through modern European political thought
and the
social sciences is that the human is ontologically singular, that
gods and
spirits are in the end “social facts,” that the social somehow
exists prior
to them. I try, on the other hand, to think without the
assumption of even
a logical priority of the social. One empirically knows of no
society in
which humans have existed without gods and spirits
accompanying them.
Although the God of monotheism may have taken a few
knocks—if not
actually “died”—in the nineteenth-century European story of
“the disen-
chantment of the world,” the gods and other agents inhabiting
practices
of so-called “superstition” have never died anywhere. I take
gods and
spirits to be existentially coeval with the human, and think from
the as-
sumption that the question of being human involves the question

of being
with gods and spirits.51 Being human means, as Ramachandra
Gandhi
puts it, discovering “the possibility of calling upon God [or
gods] without
being under an obligation to first establish his [or their]
reality.”52 And
this is one reason why I deliberately do not reproduce any
sociology of
religion in my analysis.
THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK
As should be clear by now, provincializing Europe is not a
project of
rejecting or discarding European thought. Relating to a body of
thought
to which one largely owes one’s intellectual existence cannot be
a matter
of exacting what Leela Gandhi has aptly called “postcolonial
revenge.”53
European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate
in helping
us to think through the experiences of political modernity in
non-Western
nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of
exploring how
this thought—which is now everybody’s heritage and which
affect us all—
may be renewed from and for the margins.
But, of course, the margins are as plural and diverse as the
centers.
Europe appears different when seen from within the experiences
of coloni-

zation or inferiorization in specific parts of the world.
Postcolonial schol-
ars, speaking from their different geographies of colonialism,
have spoken
of different Europes. The recent critical scholarship of Latin
Americanists
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The post-colonial studies reader
Author(s) Ashcroft, Bill; Griffiths, Gareth; Tiffin, Helen
Imprint Routledge, 1995

Extent 1 online resource (xvii, 526 p.)
ISBN 0203423062, 0415096219, 0415096227
Permalink https://books.scholarsportal.info/en/read?id=/
ebooks/ebooks0/tf/2010-04-28/2/0203423062
Pages 106 to 110
Downloaded from Scholars Portal Books on 2018-07-30
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2010-04-28/2/0203423062
87
12
Orientalism
EDWARD W.SAID*
ON A VISIT to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975–
1976 a French
journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that ‘it
had once
seemed to belong to…the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval’
(Desjardins
1976:14). He was right about the place, of course, especially so
far as a
European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European
invention,
and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings,
haunting

memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was
disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over.
Perhaps it
seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at
stake in the
process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval
Orientals had
lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the
main thing
for the European visitor was a European representation of the
Orient and
its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal
significance for the journalist and his French readers….
The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of
Europe’s
greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its
civilizations and
languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and
most recurring
images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define
Europe (or
the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience. Yet none of
this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part
of European
material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and
represents that
part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse
with supporting
institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even
colonial
bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American
understanding
of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our
recent

Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be
creating a
more sober, more realistic ‘Oriental’ awareness. Moreover, the
vastly
expanded American political and economic role in the Near East
(the Middle
East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.
* From Orientalism New York: Random House, 1978.
EDWARD W.SAID
88
It will be clear to the reader…that by Orientalism I mean
several things,
all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily
accepted
designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the
label still
serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who
teaches, writes
about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the
person is an
anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in
its specific
or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does
is
Orientalism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it
is true that
the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both
because it
is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-
handed executive

attitude of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
European
colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held
with ‘the
Orient’ as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or
old guise as
their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive
as it once
did, Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and
theses
about the Orient and the Oriental.
Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes,
transmigrations,
specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this
study, is a
more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of
thought
based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made
between
‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’ Thus a very
large mass of
writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers,
political theorists,
economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the
basic distinction
between East and West as the starting point for elaborate
theories, epics,
novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning
the Orient, its
people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on. This Orientalism
can
accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl
Marx. A
little later in this introduction I shall deal with the
methodological problems

one encounters in so broadly construed a ‘field’ as this.
The interchange between the academic and the more or less
imaginative
meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late
eighteenth
century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—
perhaps even
regulated—traffic between the two. Here I come to the third
meaning of
Orientalism, which is something more historically and
materially defined
than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century
as a very
roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and
analyzed as
the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing
with it by
making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing
it, by teaching
it, settling it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for
dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. I have found
it useful
here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as
described by him
in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish,
to identify
Orientalism. My contention is that without examining
Orientalism as a
discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously
systematic
discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and
even

ORIENTALISM
89
produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily,
ideologically,
scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment
period.
Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that
I believe no
one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so
without taking
account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by
Orientalism. In
brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a
free subject of
thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism
unilaterally determines
what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole
network of
interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always
involved in)
any occasion when that peculiar entity ‘the Orient’ is in
question. How this
happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to
show that
European culture gained in strength and identity by setting
itself off against
the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self….
I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert
fact of
nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not
just there
either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that

men make their
own history, that what they can know is what they have made,
and extend
it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities—to
say nothing
of historical entities—such locales, regions, geographical
sectors as ‘Orient’
and ‘Occident’ are man-made. Therefore as much as the West
itself, the
Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought,
imagery, and
vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the
West. The
two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect
each other.
Having said that, one must go on to state a number of
reasonable
qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude
that the
Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no
corresponding
reality…. There were—and are—cultures and nations whose
location is in
the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute
reality
obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in
the West.
About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to
contribute,
except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of
Orientalism as I
study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence
between
Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of
Orientalism
and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or

beyond any
correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient….
A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories
cannot
seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more
precisely
their configurations of power, also being studied. To believe
that the Orient
was created—or, as I call it, ‘Orientalized’—and to believe that
such things
happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be
disingenuous. The
relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of
power, of
domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony….
This brings us to a third qualification. One ought never to
assume that
the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of
lies or of
myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would
simply blow
EDWARD W.SAID
90
away. I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly
valuable as a
sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a
veridic
discourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or
scholarly

form, it claims to be)….
In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on
this
flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a
whole series
of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing
him the
relative upper hand. And why should it have been otherwise,
especially
during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from
the late
Renaissance to the present? The scientist, the scholar, the
missionary, the
trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient
because he could
be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on
the Orient’s
part. Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and
within the
umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient during the
period from the
end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient
suitable for
study in the academy, for display in the museum, for
reconstruction in the
colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological,
biological,
linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the
universe, for
instances of economic and sociological theories of development,
revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character.
Additionally, the imaginative examination of things Oriental
was based
more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western
consciousness out of

whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first
according
to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then
according to a
detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a
battery of
desires, repressions, investments, and projections….
Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or
field that
is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions;
nor is it a large
and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it
representative and
expressive of some nefarious ‘Western’ imperialist plot to hold
down the
‘Oriental’ world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical
awareness into
aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and
philological
texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical
distinction (the
world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident)
but also of
a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by such means as scholarly
discovery,
philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape
and
sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains;
it is, rather
than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in
some cases to
control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly
different (or
alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is
by no

means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power
in the raw,
but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with
various kinds
of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power
political (as with
a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as
with reigning
sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the
modern
ORIENTALISM
91
policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and
canons of taste,
texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do
and what
‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do). Indeed, my real
argument is
that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a
considerable
dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such
has less to
do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.
Because Orientalism is a cultural and a political fact, then, it
does not
exist in some archival vacuum; quite the contrary, I think it can
be shown
that what is thought, said, or even done about the Orient follows
(perhaps
occurs within) certain distinct and intellectually knowable lines.

Here too a
considerable degree of nuance and elaboration can be seen
working as
between the broad superstructural pressures and the details of
composition, the facts of textuality. Most humanistic scholars
are, I think,
perfectly happy with the notion that texts exist in contexts, that
there is
such a thing as intertextuality, that the pressures of
conventions,
predecessors, and rhetorical styles limit what Walter Benjamin
once called
the ‘overtaxing of the productive person in the name of…the
principle of
“creativity”,’ in which the poet is believed on his own, and out
of his pure
mind, to have brought forth his work (Benjamin 1973:71). Yet
there is a
reluctance to allow that political, institutional, and ideological
constraints
act in the same manner on the individual author.

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