The chapatti story: how hybridity as theory displaced Maoism as politics in Subaltern Studies

Abstract

The displacement of concepts is another, sometimes overlooked, mode in the general disorientation of our times that sells us rightwards drift in the guise of a committed politics. My contention is that recent theoretical discussions disconnected from really existing Asias have used that place as a sounding board or punching bag for ever more abstract and unhelpful speculations. In this case, the conceptual theme is ‘hybridity’ and this is examined in relation to the ways that Homi Bhabha has adopted and modified the founding moves of the Subaltern historians. This example abstracts the specificity of Asia under a spuriously celebrated hybridity, and what is displaced is the Marxist–Maoist-anti-imperial project that, for many years, was the only viable version of Asia outside of Orientalism. The fortunes and consequences of this displacement are to be (cautiously) evaluated and displaced yet further into what Cayatri Spivak calls ‘learning to learn from below’ – what may be a reconfigured ‘fieldwork’ for a political anthropology or cultural studies.