The world created by the legacies of empire and colonialism now confronts some deep crises of civility, precipitated by globalization and climate change. In this volume, Dipesh Chakrabarty examines these distinct---but interrelated---issues side by side.
Varied ideas of civilization and humanism have shaped notions of a global humanity in the lingering twilight of the European empires. Detailing these ideas, in the section titled `Global Worlds', Chakrabarty outlines the conflicts and connections that arise from global encounters in our postcolonial age. The second section, `The Planetary Human', on the other hand, explores the significance of planetary climate change for humanistic and postcolonial thought. Chakrabarty argues that such change demands not only critiques of capitalism and inequality, but also new thinking about the human species as a whole---our patterns of justice, writing of history, and relationship with nature in the age of the Anthropocene.
The global is human-centric in construction; the planetary involves many other actors and thus includes the thorny question of how we go beyond the anthropocentric to discuss and conceptualize the agency of the non-human.
`The Crises of Civilization is a marvelous feast ... Challenging, moving, wise, and witty, this work by one of our leading historians is a major event.'
Martha C. Nussbaum, The University of Chicago, USA
`The first serious effort to push the subaltern school of history ... beyond its familiar world of global theoretical and empirical concerns, to open a conversation with planetary history... A call for the emancipation of the discipline of history in India.'
Ashis Nandy, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India
Cover visual: The natural and the human intertwine in a south-to-north perspective on a world that has been labelled north-to-south.
Courtesy: Anna Madeleine. `Get your world out of my head'.
Pigment ink and acrylic on inverted map. 2009.
Oxford University Press
