Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
Published on 12. March 2013
318 pages
978-1-78168-462-7 (ISBN)
Description
Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. He demonstrates that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism.
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.
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Edition
Ebook UK & RoW
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Reflowable
ISBN-13
978-1-78168-462-7 (9781781684627)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
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Vivek Chibber
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
Book
03/2013
Verso Books
€33.00
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Person
Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University and editor of the Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.He is 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.
Content
- Intro
- TITLE PAGE
- DEDICATION
- CONTENTS
- PREFACE
- CHAPTER 1: POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND SUBALTERN STUDIES
- 1.1 Postcolonial Studies as Analysis and Critique
- 1.2 The Rise of Subaltern Studies
- 1.3 Subaltern Studies as Theory
- 1.4 Assessing Subaltern Studies
- 1.5 The Failure of Subaltern Studies
- 1.6 What This Book Is Not
- CHAPTER 2: DOMINANCE WITHOUT HEGEMONY: THE ARGUMENT EXPLAINED
- 2.1 Subaltern Studies in Context
- 2.2 The Roots of the Postcolonial Crisis
- 2.3 The Two Paths to Bourgeois Power
- 2.4 Capital's Universalizing Tendency and the Bourgeois Revolutions
- 2.5 Universalization Abandoned: Capital's Colonial Venture
- 2.6 Conclusion
- CHAPTER 3: DOMINANCE WITHOUT HEGEMONY: THE ARGUMENT ASSESSED
- 3.1 The English Revolution
- 3.2 The French Revolution
- 3.3 Conclusion
- CHAPTER 4: DOMINANCE WITHOUT HEGEMONY: THE ARGUMENT IN CONTEXT
- 4.1 Bourgeois Interests and Land Reform
- 4.2 The Bourgeoisie and Subaltern Classes
- 4.3 The Bourgeoisie and Nation-Building
- 4.4 The Postcolonial Crisis Revisited
- 4.5 Critique or Apologia? Subalternists as the New Whigs
- 4.6 Conclusion
- CHAPTER 5: CAPITAL'S UNIVERSALIZING TENDENCY
- 5.1 What Is at Stake
- 5.2 What Does Capitalism Universalize?
- 5.3 Capital and Power
- 5.4 Conclusion
- 5.5 Postscript: The Bogey of a "Hyperreal Europe"
- CHAPTER 6: CAPITAL, ABSTRACT LABOR, AND DIFFERENCE
- 6.1 The Problem Defined
- 6.2 Capitalism and Abstract Labor
- 6.3 From Socially Necessary Labor to Abstract Labor
- 6.4 Abstract Labor and Social Hierarchies
- 6.5 Capitalism and Social Hierarchies
- 6.6 The Real Engine of Democratization
- 6.7 Conclusion
- CHAPTER 7: CULTURE, INTERESTS, AND AGENCY
- 7.1 Elementary Aspects as History from Below
- 7.2 The Peculiarities of the Indian Peasantry
- 7.3 Peasant Psychology in Elementary Aspects
- 7.4 Individual and Community in Late Colonial Bengal
- 7.5 Chatterjee's Contradictions
- 7.6 Conclusion
- CHAPTER 8: INTERESTS AND THE OTHER UNIVERSALISM
- 8.1 The Conventional Analysis of Worker Consciousness
- 8.2 Chakrabarty's Alternative to the Conventional Analysis
- 8.3 Reasons and Interests
- 8.4 Interests and Culture
- 8.5 The Universal History of Class Struggle
- 8.6 The Other Universalism
- 8.7 Conclusion
- CHAPTER 9: THE (NON)PROBLEM OF HISTORICISM
- 9.1 What Is at Stake
- 9.2 The Two Histories of Capital
- 9.3 The Problem of Historicism
- 9.4 Abstract Categories and the Real History of Capital
- 9.5 Historicism as a Non-Problem
- 9.6 Capitalism and Diversity Revisited
- 9.7 Conclusion
- CHAPTER 10: THE NATION UNMOORED
- 10.1 The Two Dimensions of Anticolonial Nationalism
- 10.2 Nationalism and the Cunning of Reason
- 10.3 Nationalism and the Modernizing Imperative
- 10.4 The Missing Counterfactual
- 10.5 Modernization as Prison House?
- 10.6 The Disappearance of Modernizing Nationalism
- 10.7 Conclusion
- CHAPTER 11: CONCLUSION: SUBALTERN STUDIES AS IDEOLOGY
- 11.1 Obscuring Capitalism
- 11.2 Resurrecting Orientalism
- 11.3 How to Provincialize Europe
- 11.4 Envoi
- INDEX
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- COPYRIGHT
