The postcolonial Orient : the politics of difference and the project of provincialising Europe / by Vasant Kaiwar.

Published in paperback in 2015 by Haymarket Books - t.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [376]-408) and index.

1. Introduction -- A narrative of arrival -- 1989 and all that -- Postcolonial difference -- 2. Situating postcolonial studies -- Definitions : colonialism, for example -- Postcolonial modernisation -- Postcolonial populism -- Subaltern studies -- 3. Colonialism, modernity, postcolonialism -- Colonialism and modernity in a postcolonial framing -- History's ironic reversals -- Who is the 'subaltern' in postcolonial studies? -- 4. Provincialising Europe or exoticising India? Towards a historical and categorial critique of postcolonial studies -- Marx and difference in provincialising Europe -- The not-yet of historicism -- Why historicise? -- Tattooed by the exotic -- Under the sign of Heidegger, I : the woman's question -- Under the sign of Heidegger, II : imagined communities -- Lack/inadequacy or plenitude/creativity? -- Dominance without hegemony : historicism by another name? -- The constituent elements of colonial modernity -- Modernity as class struggle -- Orientalism and nativism -- Bahubol and the Muslim question -- 5. Uses and abuses of Marx -- Abstract labour, difference, history I and II -- The piano maker and the piano player : productive and unproductive labour -- Millennial toil as the 'nightmare of history' -- 'Bourgeois hegemony' and colonial rule -- Modernity in the 'fullest sense' -- Beyond the bourgeois revolution? Hegemony revisited -- The historic moment of colonial dominance in India -- A 'liberation from blinding bondage,' or the question of historicism -- Marxism and historicism -- 6. The postcolonial orient -- The play of difference, the merchandising of the exotic, tradition and neo-traditionalism -- The non-commissioned officers -- The orient as 'vanishing mediator' -- The unrenounceable project -- Provincialising Europe.