07.07.2021 | 18-20 Uhr | Anmeldung per Mail

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. Climate change, Chakrabarty argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization, and confronts humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider – from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals. We must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. Whereas the globe is a human-centric construction, a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human.

In an exchange with Dipesh Chakrabarty, this event aims to discuss the questions that Chakrabarty’s new book puts on the agenda of the human and social sciences.

In conversation: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Eleonora Rohland, Angelika Epple, Mathias Albert, and Zoltán Boldizsár Simon (moderator).

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College at the University of Chicago. He holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Law. His books include Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000; 2008). He is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, which is given to a distinguished practitioner of global history, and the 2019 West Bengal Government's Tagore Memorial Prize for his book, The Crises of Civilization (2018). His most recent book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, was published in March 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. He currently serves as the Faculty Director for the University’s Center in Delhi.

Poster