Summary
Author of Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1986), whose five questions on thought, culture and power, and whose call for a critique of nationalist discourse connected to “a new universality”, structure the closing argument of essay 36 of Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.399-401).
Details
- Chatterjee’s questions concern the effectiveness of thought as a vehicle of change, thought’s relation to the existing culture’s code of signs and meanings, the implantation of alien frameworks of thought, the changes such frameworks undergo under dominance, and the specific relations between thought and change in colonized countries (notes at PDF p.407, questions quoted PDF p.400).
- Quoted from his final paragraph: “The critique of nationalist discourse must find for itself the ideological means to connect the popular strength of these struggles with the consciousness of a new universality” (PDF p.401).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Human Rights, Benedict Anderson