Il metodo storico-politico alla prova della critica postcoloniale

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.

Il saggio definisce, in senso ampio, il campo d'indagine critico postcoloniale, ricostruendone i fondamenti epistemici.