Chakrabarty (C) in his essay "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts" puts forth interesting and intriguing thoughts concerning the relationship between European ideological, political, economic notions of development, citizenship, modernization and the corresponding influence these positions, lines maintain upon "third world" areas such as the Indian Subcontinent.

Through outlining various points C puts forth an assertion of an interpretation of history that sees the world as radically heterogeneous. Further, his article is situated in a larger context that argues of an interconnection between "History" as an academic subject, and its influence upon "real" life. This argument puts us into a conversation that coincides with the understanding that the development of philosophy as an academic subject has and continues to develop in such an isolated manner. C's fundamental dissagreement that the development of academic subjects occurs within a self-contained geographic environment ties to his assertion of an "honest" history. History may be honest in the recognition that themes, and trends are inherently oppressive, informative, and subjective toward other histories. This is outlined in Hutcheon's essay we read earlier in the year, along with Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak', and even is connected to Norris' article concerning the political power and swayance of the academic field of Postmodernism. I quote C at length to illustrate this connection:

"Histories that aim to displace a hyperreal Europe from the center toward which all historical imagination currently gravitates will have to seek out relentlessly this connection between violence and idealism that lies at the heart of the process by which the narrative of citizenship and modernity come to find a natural home in "History." I register a fundamental disagreement here with a position taken by Richard Rorty in an exchange with Jurgen Habermas. Rorty criticizes Habermas for the latter's conviction "that the story of modern philosophy is an important part of the story of the democratic societies' attempts at self-reassurance." Rorty's statement follows the practice of many Europeanistis who speak of the histories of these "democratic societies" as if these were self-contained histories complete in themselves, as if the self-fashioning of the West were something that occurred only within its self-assigned geographical boundaries. At the very least Rorty ignores the role that the "colonial theater" (both external and internal)--where the theme of "freedom" as defined by modern political philosophy was constantly invoked in aid of the ideas of "civilization," "progress," and latterly "development"--played in the process of engendering this "reassurance." This task, as i see it, will be to wrestle ideas that legitimize the modern state and its attendant institutions, in order to return to political philosophy--in the same way as suspect coins returned to their owners in an Indian bazaar-- its categories whose global currency can no longer be taken for granted. "

Much of this argument pivots on the understanding of a transition narrative that C understands, roughly, as a schema that encompasses the political, social, economic, historical situation of "modern" India. Within this transition narrative there are specific themes that guide and inform the manner in which persons are to "develop," "modernize," and most importantly act as "citizens." Further, this transition narrative and the themes mentioned are guided by a sort of bourgeois domesticity and public behavior, position. The division of the bourgeois public and private is pivotal for C. in this article primarily because of the connection between economic, political, historical, ideological narratives provided through this division of the bourgeois public and private. C. demonstrates this connection through a closer look at the familial structures in Bengal:

"What the Bengali literature on women's education played out was a battle between a nationalist construction of a cultural norm of the patriarchal, patri-local, patrilineal, extended family and the ideal of the patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family that was implicit in the European/imperialist/universalist discourse on the "freedoms" of individualism, citizenship, and civil society."

Here, C demonstrates how the bourgeois division between public and private is intimately connected to specific definitions of "citizenship," "modern," and so on. This argument is further stressed in previous essays we've encountered last semester concerning the collective groupings of the third world female by first world feminists, along with accounts given concerning the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in Africa, and finally, and in a more nuanced manner, the relationship (informing politics, ideology, history, position and development toward modernity) between the colonizer and the colonized as demonstrated in Bhabha's hybridity and mimesis.

C's essay is intelligent, well written and addresses important and logical issues. Those issues include the historical development of a geographic locations "modernizing" and the assertion and adoption of certain definitions of "citizenship" and family and the manner in which the public and private is guided and informed.

C's final point in worth noting and attempting to connect to our readings of the Shadow Lines and Pterodactyl.

"I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own representative strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narrative of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity. The politics of despair will requires of such history that it lays bare to its readers the reasons why such a predicament is necessarily inescapable. This is a history that will attempt the impossible: to look toward its own death by tracing that which resist and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous."

This new history is most obviously seen as being denied within Pterodactyl. Further, within The Shadow Lines, the method of story telling: one that breaks conventional narrative, that jumps in time, location, and demonstrates differing motivations and points (at points seeming like series of vignettes that are disjointedly connected) coincides well with C's proposal. Most obviously, the Shadow lines, defeats itself as a typical novel, story. It turns itself inside and out, and questions the narrative truth. In a larger sense, C's new history is violent unto itself and is created in such a way as to destroy itself: as noted by C, the possibility of creating such a history in the academic environment is impossible, primarily due to the inability to "provincialize" europe and disconnect informative, influential lines of politics, economics, history, and ideology.