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

This two-part article attempts to decipher four different critical strategiesfor decentering Eurocentrist narratives that promoted “the West”simultaneously as an agent, as a goal and as a yardstick for evaluatingmodernization processes across the globe: in the first part, it will examineJack Goody’s interrogation of the alleged European preeminence andexceptionalism and its imposition of value-laden temporal categorieson the non-Western world, as well as Eric Wolff ’s reconstruction ofthe so-called invention of “Eastern Europe” by the Western mindduring the Enlightenment; in the second part, it will take on DipeshChakrabarty’s notion of “provincializing” Western epistemology andJohannes Fabian’s focus on the “denial of coevalness” for non-Westerntemporalities. The article will focus on the analysis these four authorsprovided for the emergence of specific temporal and geographicalsystems that backed the epistemic hegemony of the “West” andreinforced, therefore, its already established political domination. It willalso examine the practice of translating spacial distance in historicaltime and its reverse, both at the core of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment understanding and construction of the cultural andhistorical “other”.