Numero 22 (6° nuova serie), 2/2024 > Ruocco – Visentin

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Giovanni RUOCCO – Stefano VISENTIN

Titolo/Title

Il metodo storico-politico alla prova della critica postcoloniale, 53-75 (PDF)

 

Abstract

This essay provides a reconstruction of the role played by postcolonial criticism in recent decades by revising the categories of political modernity, constructed in Europe as a universal form of the development of reason and the foundations of human institutions. In this sense, the contribution takes a broad view of the postcolonial, including all forms of critical thought that have considered this model of modernity as the product of a colonial and proprietary vision of the world and that read the current global system of inequalities in continuity with that colonial past. This article identifies a fundamental example of this process in the experience of Indian Subaltern Studies. The aim is not only to develop a critique of the past and amend its intellectual categories, but also to reveal the epistemic violence contained in them and attempt to rework them, thereby realising their full emancipatory potential. The process of critical revision, as outlined in the essay, commences with the interrogation of the social and political positioning of subjects, in this case scholars. This interrogation involves a departure from the conventional perspective of their presumed neutrality.

 

Keywords

Postcolonial – Colonialism/Coloniality – Political Thought – Political Modernity – Subaltern Studies

 

BIO

Giovanni RUOCCO is associate professor in History of political thought at Sapienza University of Rome. He published essays on authors of modern and contemporary political thought, such as Montaigne, Rousseau, Sieyès, Mosca, Gramsci, Todorov and on concepts such as Totalitarianism, Modern State, Baroque, Preventive War, Race and Racialisation, Boundaries, Common Goods, Urban Informality, Democracy. He currently studies mainly issues of race, the question of identity construction and the problem of the relationship with the ‘other’.

Stefano VISENTIN is associate professor in History of political thought at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy. His main research interests include early modern political thought, in particular Machiavelli and Spinoza; the 16th-17th century debate on religious tolerance; Marx’s political thought; post-democratic thought between neo-Marxism and populism; the anthropological and political thought of Frantz Fanon; postcolonial studies and subaltern studies.