In the year 2026, the Benjamin Chair at the Centre will be held by the internationally recognized historian, Dipesh Chakrabarty. A quarter of a century after the publication of his seminal work, Provincializing Europe, the author will pose the question of whether the multiple ecological catastrophes that have befallen the planet necessitate the provincialization of humanity itself.
The Benjamin Lectures 2026 are organised in cooperation with Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
Topic
The rise of authoritarian tendencies and xenophobic cultures in the democracies of the world, the transformation of China into a technological and economic power-house, and global forms of terrorism are often seen as successive tipping points in a long-term narrative – available in a variety of forms since at least Oswald Spengler’s magisterial formulation of it – of the “decline” of the West. When we add to these factors the uncertainties associated with various environmental problems of a planetary scale, unprecedented developments in technology, and demographic prospects of humanity, the acceleration of modernization seems at last to be at odds with the values of modernity. The metaphor of decline of one civilization that yields place to another seems all too inadequate to capture the sense of crisis that seems not to be a matter of one civilization alone.
This series of lectures explores the meaning of the multiple challenges faced by humanity by revisiting the project of provincializing Europe that I once essayed twenty-five years ago. Would the renewal of the aspiration to emancipatory human futures that was once a flawed, contested, but universal legacy of Europe’s colonization of other peoples’ lives and lands, now require us to provincialize America or even humanity itself?
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Few contemporary thinkers have changed our understanding of history and the modern world as deeply as Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and a founding editor of Postcolonial Studies. Connecting postcolonial and planetary perspectives, his work has transformed the way we make sense of our present. Chakrabartyʼs books greatly illuminate how so-called global modernity emerged through entanglements of empire, labor, and ecological processes. By bringing in philosophical insights and experiences of the Global South, Dipesh Chakrabarty reveals that the Eurocentric narrative of progress and emancipation never described a self-contained process. He opens up a planetary perspective sensitive to the effects of capital and colonial power. More recently, Chakrabarty has argued that humanity, differentiated by culture and global power relations, has profoundly impacted planetary conditions in ways to perdure the present for a long time. Drawing on Earth system science, he decenters the role of human agency in history and invites us to rethink politics, responsibility, and freedom from beyond the human vantage point. For Chakrabarty, planetary awareness reveals the limits of the nation-state and the ambivalent role of modern technology.
For his outstanding contributions, Chakrabarty has received the Toynbee Prize, honorary doctorates from the Universities of London and Antwerp, and from the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Among his most important books are Rethinking Working-Class History (Princeton 1989), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton 2000), The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories (Oxford 2018), The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago 2021), and One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (2023).
Programme
23 June 2026, Lecture 1: The Between and Betwixt Nature of Our Times
Some Spenglerian apprehensions hover over contemporary discussions in all democracies of the world. The various uncertainties we face – climate, the future of work, human demographic transition, erosion of democracy, geopolitical wars that marginalize the UN – prompt many to ask if we are witnessing the passing of the international order that was established after the Second World War. What was heralded as the new and gilded age of “globalization” in the early 1990s is now lined with anxieties about human futures. While we cannot simply repeat Spengler’s concerns today, our times are full of forebodings and questions of decline reminiscent of Spenglerian tropes.
Yet we are not the first in modern history to live with the feeling of passing through strange and transitional times. One is reminded of several German – and Jewish-German – thinkers of the twentieth century who theorized their own times as suspended between the two senses of the “no longer” and the “not yet.”
My first lecture will focus on the in-between nature of our present that is suspended between a declining sense of the global, that, though by no means exhausted, no longer seems adequate for addressing human futures; and an incipient planetary awareness that, while indispensable, is not yet available or operative as a human-political category.
24 June 2026, Lecture 2: Globalization and the Politics of Provincializing Europe
When did the historical process of “the Europeanization of the Earth” begin to end? Carl Schmitt dated the process from the US’s Monroe Doctrine of 1823, while Franz Fanon dated it from the 1960s. Was Globalization yet another point on this long calendar of the various endings of the process of Europeanization-of-the-earth? Fukuyama was wrong in thinking that Globalization would usher in “the last man.”
The project of provincializing Europe was a critical response to Globalization. It arose from the ruins of decades of Third-World debates on human futures in terms of two opposed and originally European ideas that had become hegemonic: capitalism and socialism. The idea of a common, shared, and emancipatory future for humanity was one of the strongest global legacies of imperial Europe, a legacy that is still alive but threatened. At the same time, the global world was built on the backs of indigenous and enslaved peoples who were rendered homeless by the expansion of Europe. Many anticolonial struggles sought to combine principles of internationalism with an ambivalent relationship to the nation-form as a form of dwelling.
Can one feel emancipated in a state of homelessness? What is the relationship between loss and liberty? To provincialize Europe in a global age was to ask these questions that will be the staple of this lecture.
25 June 2026, Lecture 3: Indigeneity as Planetarity: Provincializing America?
If the Indigenous peoples of settler-colonial societies were a group permanently denied the idea of an autonomous Future, a “gift” wrested out of the hands of a once-imperial Europe by anticolonial leaders and thinkers in other contexts, the planetary climate crisis and its attendant phenomena render the Indigenous condition universal in two senses, Human futures may be shorter and more fragmented than we imagine; and the global quest for sustainable futures will have much to learn from Indigenous ways of caring for land and biodiversity.
The most powerful nation has walked out of all climate negotiations and thereby left the issue of leadership on planetary questions to marketplace and to techno-fixes like carbon capture and sequestration and geo-engineering.
This lecture will develop a critique of what I see as an “engineering” approach to global warming and discuss why and how this approach may be thought of as a “provincial” response by the world’s privileged to the universal challenge of global warming. Would “provincializing America” be in principle a different project today from what provincializing Europe meant when becoming global was our only concern?
FAQ
Will the Benjamin Lectures be recorded or broadcast live?
The lectures will be recorded and then published on our YouTube channel and this website. There is no live broadcast.
Do I need to register to attend the lectures?
Admission is free and registration is not required. The number of seats in the Miriam Makeba Auditorium is limited to 950.
In which language will the lectures be held? Will simultaneous translation be provided?
The lectures will be held in English. There will be simultaneous translation.
Is the venue barrier-free?
There are some seats for wheelchair users in the Miriam Makeba Auditorium, so please register at philohsc(at)hu-berlin.de.
Can individual lectures also be attended?
The lectures build on each other. Nevertheless, each lecture can also be attended without the others.
Further events with Dipesh Chakrabarty in Berlin
4th June 2026, 16:30 – 18:30
Panel Crisis and (Concept of) History (in English only)
Part of the international conference “Crisis and Transformation”, organised by the Centre for Social Critique at HU Berlin
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rahel Jaeggi and Philipp Staab, moderated by Robin Celikates
Location:Auditorium, Grimm-Zentrum, Geschwister-Scholl-Str.1-3, 10117 Berlin
https://criticaltheoryinberlin.de/en/event/crisis-and-transformation/
1st July 2026, 18:30 – 20:30
Planetary Politics in the Age of Climate Change (in English with simultaneous German translation)
Discussion with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Eva von Redecker and Violetta Bock, moderated by Britta Petersen
Location: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Mathilde-Jacob-Saal, Straße der Pariser Kommune 8A, 10243 Berlin (registration required)/ available also as a livestream (without registration)
https://www.rosalux.de/en/event/es_detail/4TPOS
