Dipesh Chakrabarty

Day 1: Conflicts, Crises, and the Politics of Growth

Keynote 1 – 5 November 2021

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, the University of Chicago, Chicago, USA.

Abstract

Museums and the Chronopolitics of the Anthropocene

What role do museums have to play in the chronopolitics of our age? This talk is a historian’s reflection on this question. I take as my point of departure one of the key themes of this session: the unprecedented growth of the human footprint on this planet and its atmosphere during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Earth system scientists and historians of economic growth have named these years “the Great Acceleration” in global history. I will discuss the relationship between this growth and the Anthropocene hypothesis: the idea that we have entered a new geological epoch when humans, with their numbers, growing affluence (of many), and technological capabilities are acting as a geological force affecting the climate system of the planet as a whole. I conclude by focusing on the politics and imaginations of conflicting temporalities that ideas about anthropogenic climate change unleash in human affairs on different, though overlapping, scales.

Biography

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 at the School of Law. His books include Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference published by the Princeton University Press. 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: Explorations in Global and Planetary Histories (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.