Vivek Chibber and the spectre of postcolonial theory

Abstract

In this critical assessment of Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, the author argues that the book contributes appreciably to the materialist critique of postcolonial studies, but that its effect is weakened both by its tone and its failure to identify its object precisely enough. In conflating the historiographic project of ‘Subaltern Studies’ with ‘postcolonial theory’, Chibber misrepresents the histories of each of these formations and also the institutional relationship between them. He is at his most compelling in his commentary on capital’s ‘universalising tendency’, in which he demonstrates that arguments about capitalist globalisation do not require one to anticipate an increased homogenisation of the world or, more narrowly still, the progressive universalisation of ‘western’ norms, values and modes of social life. His critique of the deep-set postcolonialist conviction as to the radical difference and incommensurability between ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ worlds is also very valuable. But because he does not utilise the full resources of Marxist and anti-imperialist theory – above all, the theory of uneven and combined development – Chibber fails to diagnose ‘postcolonial theory’ for what it is: a conjuncturally distinct version of ‘Third Worldism’. He wrongly accuses it, instead, of ‘Eurocentrism’.