The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

by Vivek Chibber

Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital was hailed on publication as “without any doubt … a bomb,” and “the most substantive effort to dismantle the field through historical reasoning published to date.” It immediately unleashed one of the most important recent debates in social theory, ranging across the humanities and social sciences, on the status of postcolonial studies, modernity, and much else. This book brings together major critics of Chibber’s work to assess the adequacy of his argument from differing perspectives. Also included are Chibber’s own spirited responses and reformulations in light of these criticisms. With contributions by Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Bruce Robbins, Ho-fung Hung, William H. Sewell, Bruce Cumings, George Steinmetz, Michael Schwartz, David Pederson, Stein Sundstol Eriksen, and Achin Vanaik.

Genres: Theory, Politics, Essays, Nonfiction, History

304 pages, Paperback

Published December 8, 2016

About the author

Vivek Chibber is Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India, which won the Barrington Moore, Jr. Prize. He has contributed to, among others, the Socialist Register, American Journal of Sociology, Boston Review and New Left Review.

Reviews

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly a mixed bag. Chibber sounds tad too defensive in his ripostes. I'm still starting with his book that inspired this volume but Chibber's Marxism appears closer to the pre-Lenin Second International's privileging of economic interests as the locus of workers' struggles. He also seems to brush off real differences in the rise of capitalism in its centers and peripheries, something that Subaltern Studies at least engaged with in a right step but towards the wrong direction of cultural essentialism

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set of responses to Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital in which Chibber took a subset of critics, sociologists anthropologist academics working within a big tent of cultural studies / critical theory - then in the process of adapting or moving beyond Marxist categories without any sense of historical necessity (whether from a class or national perspective) to decidedly mixed results - and told them all they were useless.

Brennan is by far and away the best of them here. He knows everyone's philosophical and ideological horizons better than they do and is a voice in the wilderness in alerting them to the existence to a substantial body of work which is a lot more advanced in negotiating cultural politics / particularity in colonial versus metropolitan settings and that the people who wrote these books actually did revolutions. It's kind of amazing how there's no-one here to say: 'here is 'uneven and combined development', an idea Trotsky derived from Parvus who derived from Marx to the effect that 'it's complicated', which we can use to understand why class formation happens in different places in different ways at different rates.

Almost everyone else - apart from Spivak, whose contribution is very amusing - agrees that Chibber has a point.

Those who register disagreements note his dependence on a marginalism and a static idea of material interest. Chibbers rebuttals do not concede a millimetre, and amount to sharp restatements, which is a shame. I think the Anderson Thompson Brenner v everyone spats point to great stuff which can arise if you move off your initial terrain a bit. I really like books like this. Mamdani's Da mentioned

[Mateusz Kasprowicz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of an important theoretical debate. There is a lot going on in these pages, enough to connect and engage most people broadly interested in social sciences or post structuralism. Highly recommend.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Noteworthy for hilariously haughty response from Spivak and genuinely very good and thoughtful Timothy Brennan essay.