Dall’eurocentrismo alla provincializzazione dell’Europa. Gli studi postcoloniali e la storia

This article deals with the interdisciplinarity through the lens of the critique of Eurocentrism, around which in the last decades, also thanks to the global turn, a lively debate has developed involving different scholars of various backgrounds and geographical origins. Focusing on postcolonial studies, starting from Edward Said’s well-known book Orientalism (1978), the author highlights that the attack on Eurocentrism has been associated with the questioning of the same tree of Western knowledge and its branching into disciplines. Attentive to the reconstruction of the centuries of the early modern age (XV-XVIII), the article shows how the analysis of Eurocentrism within postcolonial studies, especially in some recent developments, has been accompanied by a marginalization of the historical perspective. The risk is to flatten the history of Europe and the West in a reconstruction in which everything seems the same in space and time: a world in which moments of fracture (many and strong) and internal conflicts (bitter and continue), are sacrificed in the name of the idea of a compact civilization.