Decolonizing Theory: Thinking across Traditions - Hardcover

Nigam, Aditya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9388630475 ISBN 13: 9789388630474

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic India, 2020

Synopsis

Decolonizing Theory: Thinking across Traditions aims at disentangling theory from its exclusively Western provenance, drawing insights and concepts from other thought traditions, connecting to what it argues is a new global moment in the reconstitution of theory. The key argument, which is the point of departure of the book, is that any serious theorizing in the non-West should be fundamentally suspicious of any theory that only gives you one result-that four-fifths of the world does not and cannot do anything right. Everything in the non-West, from its
modernity and secularism to its democracy and even capitalism, is always seen to be deficient. In other words, all it tells us is that we do not live up to the standards set by Western modernity. From this point of departure, it seeks to create a conceptual space outside (Western) modernity and capitalism, by insisting on a rethink of non-synchronous synchronicities.

The book takes three key themes around which the whole story of modernity can be unraveled, namely the question of the political, capital and historical time, and secularism for a detailed discussion. It does so by bracketing, in a sense, the autobiographical story that Western modernity gives itself. In each case, it tries to show that past forms never simply disappear, without residue, to be fully supplanted by the modern, and merely applying theory produced in one context to another is, therefore, very misleading.

About this title

About the Author

Aditya Nigam is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. His main areas of interest are political philosophy and social theory.
His recent work has been concerned with the decolonization of social and political theory. He has earlier worked on ideological and discursive formations and their relationship to the emergence and constitution of political subjectivities. The engagement with discursive formations has led to the need for greater attentiveness to the actual thought-worlds and imaginations of social agents and the need to step outside theoretical frames provided by standard theory, derived primarily from Western experience.
In particular, Nigam is interested in theorizing the contemporary experience of politics, populism and democracy in the non-West – treating the non-West as the ground for 'doing theory', rather than a field for application or testing of standard frameworks derived from the Western experience.
A parallel and related part of Nigam's work has been concerned with interrogating the received 'philosophical history' of capital, once again from the vantage point of the experiences of India and the non-West.
Aditya Nigam has also been associated with a group of South Asian scholars from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and India, working around the idea of the 'post-national condition'.
He also works with the CSDS's Indian Languages Programme and is on the editorial board of its Hindi journal Pratiman. He comments regularly on contemporary political issues on the blog, kafila.online
He is the author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Utopia: Modernity and Socialism and the Postcolony (2010), and Desire Named Development (2011).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic India
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9388630475
• ISBN 13: 9789388630474
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320