Abstract
Autore:
Calchi Novati Gian Paolo
Titolo:
"Oriente senza orientalismo. L’opera storiografica di Giorgio Borsa nella prospettiva del postcolonialismo"
In 2012 the University of Pavia celebrated the centenary of the birth of Giorgio Borsa and the tenth anniversary of his death with a lecture delivered by Gian Paolo Calchi Novati in the frame of the activities of the Centre for Extra-European Countries Studies (CSPE). Borsa was an historian of Eastern Asia. His theory of modernization, partially inspired by historians like Benedetto Croce, Braudel and Toynbee, inaugurated a method that himself named “Copernican” since the centre of his “colonial” history was Asia instead of Europe. His main field of studies, which broke a longstanding tradition of orientalism and eurocentrism, was India in the crucial times of British expansion up to the establishment of the Empire. As a convinced admirer of Europe’s values, Borsa praised the effects of such a contact for the progress of the non-European societies through reformist elites who embraced the lesson of Europe as a key of success as far as institutions and economy. In his view, the Mutiny or the Boxers were mere attempts of the beneficiaries of the old order to hinder the advent of a new system. The author of the lecture and of the present article analyzes the reasons of the unestimable contribution given by Giorgio Borsa to the comprehension of the historical evolution of the colonized peoples. In the same time, with the help of the further innovations introduced by Fanon, Edward Said and the Indian scholars who founded the school of Subaltern Studies, he shows how and why Borsa did underestimate the negative breakthrough of the irruption of an alien power in Africa and Asia that nationalism and decolonization did not succeed to fully repair. The current global system as well reflects the asymmetries rooted in history and in the dominant culture by the colonial experience of the West continuing to penalize the Rest of the world.
