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Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. By DIPESH CHAKRABARTY. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xxiv, 173 pp. $16.00 (paperback).
Eight of the nine essays collected in this volume were published elsewhere, in venues as diverse as the Journal of Human Values and the Economic and Political Weekly. Taken together they represent a distillation of Dipesh Chakrabarty's thought in the 1990s, during which time new forms of fundamentalist governmentality rose to prominence in India and rhetorics of globalization all but saturated the North American academy. Habitations of Modernity addresses both of these phenomena, the first more directly than the second-although globalization, with its universalist roots and its predatory relationship to postcolonialism, is surely entailed in "the wake of subaltern studies." The collection is, equally, a counterpoint to the series of essays which Chakrabarty produced in the 1990s and which eventuated in his 2000 book, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press), itself a challenge to modes of post-Enlightenment history writing and to the discipline of history itself. As with much of his other work, Habitations of Modernity wrestles with the problem of reading specific political formations-primarily modernity and history-off an Indian context that is both a particular but, for Chakrabarty at least, an...