Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans

Nikita Dhawan is Professor of Political Theory and the History of Political Thought at the Institute of Political Science, Technical University Dresden. She is the author of Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence.

“Contending that the Enlightenment needs rescuing from its betrayers, Nikita Dhawan offers an incisive, timely re-assessment of the Enlightenment’s ambivalent legacies that still shape our discussions today as well as a devastating critique of Europe’s cosmopolitanism.”—Tejaswini Niranjana, author of Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context“In this significant book, Nikita Dhawan stages productive dialogues between postcolonial studies and Holocaust studies and between postcolonial and decolonial approaches to outline how normative principles like human rights and democracy can be rethought from the postcolonial world. Aiming to rescue the Enlightenment from its own history, this book will encourage critical engagement and sharp debates.”—Nivedita Menon, author of Secularism as Misdirection: Critical Thought from the Global South

• Introduction. Postcolonial Dilemmas: To Renounce or Rescue the Enlightenment 1Part I. The History of the Present 191. Who Financed the Enlightenment? Colonialism and the Age of Reason 212. The Self-Barbarization of Europe: Enlightenment and Nazism 653. Europe: What Can It Teach Us? 113Part II. Where Does the Future Come From?4. The Nonperformativity of Critique: Protest Politics, State Phobia, and the Erotics of Resistance 1435. Critique of Violence—Violence of Critique 2056. Aesthetic Enlightenment and the Art of Decolonization 262Conclusion. Affirmative Sabotage of the Master’s Tools 288Acknowledgments 311Notes 313References 321Index