Review Article: The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (2018) by Dipesh Chakrabarty

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Publisher: Oxford University Press (2018). Language: English

ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-948673-1. ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-948673-5

Reviewed by

Shikha Vats

Doctoral Fellow and Teaching Assistant, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi. Email: shikhavats.iitd@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.25

W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) had famously said that the problem of the twentieth century “is the problem of the color-line” (p. 13). Dipesh Chakrabarty declares, in this new volume, that the question of the twenty-first century will be that of climate crisis. The major events of the twentieth century, including the processes of imperialism, colonization, and globalization led to widespread migration of people all across the globe framing new intersubjective equations such as oppressor-oppressed, privileged-marginalized, mostly along what Du Bois called ‘the color-line’. The major fallout of this colonial and capitalist project in the last century has been global warming which is set to affect the entire planet and hence needs to be at the forefront of all policy decisions in the twenty-first century. In order to grapple with this new age of the Anthropocene, whereby human beings have become a geophysical force capable of altering the course of the planet, Chakrabarty urges a rethinking and reformulation of the discipline of history…Full Text PDF