CI Moments

Dipesh Chakrabarty

Critical Inquiry is fifty! I am sure there have been journals that have lasted longer. But what is remarkable is that CI – not the mouthpiece of a professional association but an in-house journal run by colleagues at the University of Chicago – has managed to retain its position as a leading journal of the humanities continuously for decades. CI came into my life late. Throughout the 1970s, I trained to be a social-scientific historian of South Asia and even tried my hand at using some tools of econometrics only to realize that my passions lay elsewhere. The historian Ranajit Guha and the historiographical project named Subaltern Studies that he led through the 1980s introduced me and my cohorts to structuralism and the proverbial “linguistic turn” it inspired. But CI was not a part of my endeavors until I got my first academic position as a lecturer in Indian and Indonesian Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, towards the end of 1984 and befriended Simon During and David Bennett, colleagues in Melbourne’s English department. It was Simon who first spoke to me of the work of being published in CI, of the postcolonial criticism that Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak (whom I came to know through Subaltern Studies) spearheaded and drew my attention to the eye-opening issue of 1985 on “Race, Writing, and Difference” that Henry Louis Gates guest edited. Excited by the ideas I encountered on the pages of CI, I soon joined Simon and David in waiting with eagerness for the arrival of the latest issue of the journal in the University library.

One of the secrets of the success of CI must be that while it has always been associated with “theory,” it never espoused any particular variety of it as an orthodoxy. Its commitment was to remain a forum for discussing all issues of interest to the academic left generally. The credit for this must go to my colleagues who ran the journal and to Tom Mitchell, its longest-serving editor. These colleagues, incredible intellectuals themselves, steered the journal through the changing seas of academic fashions, especially through the stormy 1980s and ‘90s when “Theory” came to be charged with so much intellectual enthusiasm and ferment, all deployed in service of necessarily unruly and utopian desires for human futures beyond the limits of Western liberalism, colonial and racist domination, gender inequalities, and neoliberal globalization of economies and cultures.

I had the privilege of serving on the editorial committee of CI sometime in the early decades of this century, and what a privilege it was! To be in the presence of my colleagues Tom Mitchell, Bill Brown, the late Lauren Berlant, Arnold Davidson, Joel Snyder, Françoise Meltzer, Richard Neer, and Beth Helsinger discussing, debating, and evaluating a submission with no other interest in mind than a good argument, a new insight, a novel twist in thinking, was both thrilling and uplifting. It made you see in action what Hannah Arendt once famously called “the life of the mind.” These formidable intellectuals had managed, over the years, to develop a collective culture of nurturing and curating new points of view or new movements of critical thought in the humanities. There were arguments aplenty in these editorial meetings – often passionate, sometimes partisan, but seldom angry. What they looked for in every article was something new and persuasive – a new thought, a new question, a new analytical twist, something to keep the intellectual world, the world of ideas, from turning stale.

I was myself a beneficiary of this culture when I began my work on climate change that resulted in the publication in 2021 of my book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. My personal experience of some horrible Australian wildfires in 2003 stoked my early interests in the phenomenon of global warming. But unlike in the case of my other book projects, there was no model to follow for a humanist historian wanting to work on climate change. As I began to read into the scientific literature explaining the anthropogenic nature of this planetary warming and came across the idea of “the Anthropocene,” I developed a sense that scientists’ claim about human institutions and technologies having become a geological force challenged one of the most profound and dearly held assumptions of my own discipline: that human history and natural history belonged to separate realms of knowledge. Natural history, to put it in nineteenth-century terms, was the realm of necessity while human history was a realm of both necessity and freedom. Indeed, the very idea of “freedom,” I thought, was being challenged by the scientific understanding of this crisis. And as I thought through the significance of this collapsing distinction between nature and history, certain other propositions followed. The subject was huge, and I did not know how I, as someone interested in South Asian history and postcolonial theory, might handle it. I published my first speculations in the form of four theses in an essay in 2008 in a Bengali journal published from Calcutta. Unfortunately, none of my Bengali readers were interested. The experience reminded me of what my friend, the historian Greg Dening, would often say of academic writings: it was like dropping a feather into a deep well and waiting for the echoes to come back!

Completely by chance, Tom Mitchell asked me soon after this Bengali essay was published if I had something I might want to submit to the journal. I expanded my Bengali essay and wrote it up in English in the form of the same four theses I had advanced in the original. Both Tom and Bill Brown gave it a close reading. I still remember discussing a draft with Bill over cups of coffee in the University’s bookshop on Ellis. I don’t remember what I called that essay originally though it did have the expression “Four Theses” in it. I was trying to explain to Bill my argument that the science of climate change was going to change the academic climate of my own discipline when Bill made the brilliant suggestion that I call the article “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Thus was born one of the most significant essays I have written in my life. But without the title that Bill thought up for that piece, I don’t think it would have delivered any of its punches.

“The Climate of History” was a controversial essay. But CI nurtured the debate and made room for my ongoing work allowing me to develop conversations with colleagues elsewhere. One such interlocutor was Bruno Latour, a regular and esteemed contributor to the journal who, sadly, is no longer with us. When The Climate of History in a Planetary Age came out, I retained Bill’s original phrase in the title of the book, both for its pithiness and for the irrevocable connection it made between CI and my academic work at the University of Chicago.

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Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He is also a consulting editor for Critical Inquiry. “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009) is one of the most popular essays ever published in the journal.