The Human Shore: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Natural Science

Abstract

In the Winter 2009 issue of Critical Inquiry, Dipesh Chakrabarty published an essay entitled “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Widely known as one of the leading postcolonial theorists of his generation, Chakrabarty has earned his reputation over the past two decades by consistently contesting the authority and explanatory power of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies of history, particularly those Hegelian-inspired forms of historical thinking predicated on the progressive, teleological unfolding of a singular, universal history. It comes as no immediate surprise, then, that in his Critical Inquiry essay, Chakrabarty is as much concerned with a historiographic question as he is with a historical problem. And that is because, he argues, “the current planetary crisis of climate change or global warming,” has both effected and demands a collapse of the long-standing division between human and natural history. Where it has been the enduring conviction of the historical profession that the proper study of history begins at precisely the point at which human life organizes and separates itself from animal, natural existence, the planet’s looming ecological catastrophe, Chakrabarty indicates, has made that distinction void. Human history, human culture, and human society have now come to possess a truly geological force, a capacity not only to shape the local environments of forests, river systems, and desert terrain, but to effect, catastrophically, the core geological future of the planet. Coming to terms with that change, he then further suggests, requires a massive reorganization of our scale of historical understanding. It requires us to supplement the register of recorded history (which is a mere fiveto ten-thousand years old) with a conception of “deep history,” to reapprehend recorded human history as belonging only to the final fraction of a multimillion-year, deep history of the planet and the myriad forms of life it has supported. Scaling our conception of history up in this way, has, he then suggests, a number of vital consequences, key among them the need to