Strategies for Decentering the Narratives of Modernity: Goody, Wolff, Chakrabarty and Fabian – Part 1

Abstract

This two-part article attempts to decipher four different critical strategies
for decentering Eurocentrist narratives that promoted “the West”
simultaneously as an agent, as a goal and as a yardstick for evaluating
modernization processes across the globe: in the first part, it will examine
Jack Goody’s interrogation of the alleged European preeminence and
exceptionalism and its imposition of value-laden temporal categories
on the non-Western world, as well as Eric Wolff ’s reconstruction of
the so-called invention of “Eastern Europe” by the Western mind
during the Enlightenment; in the second part, it will take on Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s notion of “provincializing” Western epistemology and
Johannes Fabian’s focus on the “denial of coevalness” for non-Western
temporalities. The article will focus on the analysis these four authors
provided for the emergence of specific temporal and geographical
systems that backed the epistemic hegemony of the “West” and
reinforced, therefore, its already established political domination. It will
also examine the practice of translating spacial distance in historical
time and its reverse, both at the core of Enlightenment and post-
Enlightenment understanding and construction of the cultural and
historical “other”.