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Politics of Time: 'Primitives' and History-writing in a Colonial Society

Online ISBN:
9780199081677
Print ISBN:
9780195681567
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Politics of Time: 'Primitives' and History-writing in a Colonial Society

Prathama Banerjee
Prathama Banerjee
Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi
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Published online:
18 October 2012
Published in print:
27 July 2006
Online ISBN:
9780199081677
Print ISBN:
9780195681567
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book is about the politics of time, the politics through which colonial modern societies attempt to make a time of their own. It is about the predicament of colonial modern practice caught between dreams of modernity and desire for difference. A significant part of the book is an analysis of the various ways, in which the colonized produce themselves as a modern historical nation, in negotiation with the ‘primitive’ within, just as at the same time ‘primitives’ are produced out of certain sections of the colonized population through various colonial modern technologies. The rest of the book analyses the implications of this. It is argued that modernity is determined by the dominance of the history. The mutual articulation of knowledge and monetary rationality in colonial Bengal is described. The book presents the argument that Santal rebellions and narrations are most beneficial when read as moments of practical temporalization. Moreover, it deals with the colonial experience of being penetrated by contradictory times. It illustrates how the colonial production of the ‘primitive’ was not only a concrete process of severing all unmediated relationships between peoples, but also a process of inserting money as the sole mediator between them.

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