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

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”.