Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

This is one of the most exciting and interesting political books I have ever read. I very much enjoyed Chibber's previous book  Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India , but he has taken it to a new level. Not only did I get a devastating critique of Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory, but I got a great history lesson about the English and French revolutions, and also the capitalist development of India. Don't listen to the haters who say this book isn't really directed at post-colonial studies because Chibber didn't specifically discuss their favorite academic crackpot. Any possible theoretical contribution that the postcolonial academic enterprise has produced is annihilated in great detail. All the stuff about East and West, and paying attention to difference and the marginal, and how Marxism is Eurocentric, etc. Chibber is lot nicer than I'm being and I think is very fair to the people he critiques. OK I'm biased but read it for yourself. I have read and listened to the responses of many his critics. Bottom line is they can't attack him on the actual evidence. Chibber is easily the most important voice to have emerged on the academic left in some time. He is a great writer and speaker and this book is his latest, but I'm sure not last, tour-de-force.

Chibber makes a compelling case that much of Subaltern Studies purveys Orientalist ideology (whether wittingly or not). The book takes its subject seriously. It is written with critical, and devastating, respect. It pushes Marxist analysis back to its roots and in new directions. I am very glad I read it.

Bruce Robbins has a review on n+1:The target of Chibber's polemic is not postcolonial theory as a whole, about which he says almost nothing. (Verso should have asked him to drop the portentously inaccurate title.) His target is Subaltern Studies, the field created by a group of left-wing historians of South Asia who began publishing in the early 1980s. The Subalterns--represented in Chibber's book by Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Partha Chatterjee, and who also include David Arnold, Gyanendra Pandey, and Shahid Amin, among others (Gayatri Spivak is a sort of fellow traveler)--wrote from within Marxism but against what Chakrabarty called the "deep-seated, crude materialism of the `matter over mind' variety" implicitly attributed to orthodox Marxism. Crude materialism, these historians argued, did not give enough credit to the culture, consciousness, or experience of India's poorest. There was also an immediate political context that spurred the historiographic question. In the late 1960s and '70s, India's most oppressed had risen up in what came to be known as the Naxalite insurgency, and received less than full-throated support from the established Marxist parties. When Guha and Chatterjee researched peasant revolts against colonial officials and landlords or strikes in Calcutta's jute mills, they were calling attention to a resistant agency for which even the anticolonial left seemed unable or unwilling to find a proper place.read the whole thing here.......[...]

Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is a superb and devastating critique of postcolonial studies (postmodernism applied to the global south) and an equally brilliant defense of the radical enlightenment tradition. A model of rigorous reasoning, Chibber slogs through the obscurantism of the subaltern school, distilling its core propositions and in the process systematically exposing the weak and ultimately unsustainable foundations - both logical and historical - on which it has been constructed. If the book were only a critique of postcolonial studies, on that basis alone it should be considered must reading. But it also offers a highly lucid, and indeed far more promising, approach to the study of capitalist social and economic development - one that is both universally applicable and yet attentive to the distinct experiences of the global north and the global south. For anyone interested in understanding the demise of radical thought in the academy and hoping to see it resurrected, I highly recommend this book. It is truly a tour de force.

I am familiar with Chibber's work so I have been anticipating this book for some time. It did not disappoint. It is a brilliant demonstration of critical and materialist reasoning by one of the sharpest minds of our times. The argument is airtight; the evidence is conclusive. The writing is crystal clear, much like the thinking. The demolition of postcolonial or subaltern theory was well and good, but since I have little interest in those areas it was not the reason I read the book. Instead, for me, the value in the book was laying out an understanding of class, politics and history that is applicable to our times. And it may well be the most devastating demolition of evidence-light academic fads I have ever seen.This is a book that will stand the test of time and be the benchmark for a good generation. For social theorists it is going to be mandatory reading.

In the film Avengers there is a scene where the villain, Loki, faces the Hulk and does not come out well in the encounter. In irritation he puffs up his chest and shouts, "Enough! I am a God!" Hulk picks up Loki by his feet and smashes him all over the place like a rag doll and leaves him lying helpless in a pile of rubble and sniffs, "Puny God!"Vivek Chibber does a Hulk on the Subaltern School (SS).I was a little ambivalent to the SS as I viewed it as part of the History From Below project. I liked the agenda spelt out by Ranajit Guha in the first volume and for long harboured under the illusion that this was a school that had gone astray from its own manifesto. Vivek's book exposed for me that the SS scholars actually shared the Stalinist concept of bourgeois democracy.The book has a lot more to offer, but for me this is what made the SS irrelevant in terms of having any theoretical insight to offer. I would continue to read select articles for their reportage and descriptions but nothing else.

Great - essential for anyone on the left who wants to understand Indian politics

Read only first 60 pages, early on author makes it very clear that Ranajit Guha is right, so probably I might not read it further. A good introduction to the subject. There are few typos like it is difficult to define Hegemony, slippery slope etc., but in next few pages it is clearly defined at least what Ranajit Guha means by it.

Great, well documented and objective. I recommend this text to all students of British colonialism of India and other colonized countries.

Great insight.