Events

Universal History as Global Thought

Based on her recent book Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss will discuss the connection between global thought and concepts of universal history. David Scott will introduce the lecture, and Partha Chatterjee will respond in this public conversation.

Susan Buck-Morss is Jan Rock Zubrow '77 Professor of Social Sciences, and professor of political philosophy and social theory in the Deparment of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left; Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West; The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project; and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute.

Partha Chatterjee is a Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and a Professor of Political Science at the Center for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, India, where he served as Director from 1997-2007. The main focus of Chatterjee’s studies is nationalism and its connections with colonialism, post-colonialism, modernity and other related concepts. Chatterjee looks skeptically on the idea of nation-state, arguing that, as a Western idea, the nation-state paradigm may be unsuitable for all states. He was a founding member of the Sublatern Studies Group—a group of scholars who believe that the study of Indian history had over-emphasized nationalism, thereby neglecting groups of people outside the centers of power. Chatterjee is a member of the Committee on Global Thought.

David Scott is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality and Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. He edits the journal Small Axe.

For more on Susan Buck-Morss: http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/sbm5/Buck-Morss.html

For more on Partha Chatterjee: http://www.cssscal.org/Partha_Chatterjee.html

For more on David Scott: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/anthropology/fac-bios/scott/faculty.html