Decolonizing theory
Subtitle: thinking across traditions
By: Aditya Nigam
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, and imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 2020
Place of publication: London; Oxford; New York; New Delhi; Sydney
Language: eng
Number of pages: 276
ISBN-13: 9789388630481; 9789388630467
Subjects: Decolonization; Social aspects; Postcolonialism; Philosophy; Modern Civilization
Description: "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"--Abstract
Notes: "First published in India 2020. This edition published in 2020."

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Doing Theory: The Point is to Change it; title: Chapter 1: Theoretical Decolonization: A New Conjuncture; title: Chapter 2: Modernity and Coloniality: Beyond Kaviraj's Revisionist Theory; title: Chapter 3: Marxism and Non-Western Thought: Apropos a Debate on Slavoj Zizek; title: Chapter 4: Theorizing the Political: Mandala and the Idea of Social Polity; title: Chapter 5: Secularism and Subalternity: The Paramodern and the Puranic; title: Chapter 6: Capital and Historical Time: Synchronicity of the Non-synchronous; title: Chapter 7: Conclusion.