Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478010906)

In Elementary Aspects of the Political Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal.

Author: Prathama Banerjee
ISBN-10: 1478010908
ISBN-13: 9781478010906
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 12/18/2020
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.60d