Space,subalternity,and critique,or which subaltern studies for which geography?

Given the renewed engagement with the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective in geography, Vivek Chibber’s promise of a ‘devastating critique’ of the collective’s work is of significant interest. ¹ Chibber’s text certainly delivers a veritable blizzard of criticism and invective against the postcolonial project. The book, which has provoked significant discussion and controversy, does not, however, attempt anything like a detailed engagement with the subaltern studies project. Rather than offering a rigorous appraisal of the collective’s many articles, edited volumes, and monographs, the book is based on a polemical engagement with a relatively small selection of texts, most notably Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, and Ranajit Guha’s essay ‘Colonialism in South Asia: A Dominance Without Hegemony and its Historiographies’, first published in Subaltern Studies VI in 1989. ² This review essay assesses Chibber’s arguments and then reflects on their implications for emerging work on subaltern geographies.

Central to Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is the assertion that Subaltern Studies can be taken as emblematic of postcolonial theorizing as a whole and that the intellectual deficiencies of the latter are the result of the problematic intellectual foundations provided by authors such as Ranajit Guha. Indeed, much of the first half of the book pivots on a critical reading of Guha’s influential essay which used the Gramscian theorization of hegemony to understand the failure of British colonialism in India to win the consent of subaltern populations. While Guha uses this position as the basis for a broad critique of the failure of Indian historiography to break with such colonial assumptions, Chibber contends that the essay rests on a problematic construction of the ‘peculiarity of colonial modernity’. He argues that Guha’s essay ‘rests on a deeper claim about the departure of the Indian bourgeois revolution – the struggle for independence from British rule – from the classic experience of early modern Europe’ (p. 54) and that Guha fundamentally misreads such experiences of bourgeois or democratic revolution.

Chibber’s book uses this challenge to Guha’s account of ‘colonial modernity’ as the point of departure for four linked alternative contentions, which taken as a whole provide an alternative framing of the dynamics of capitalist globalization. First, Chibber contends that ‘the universalization of capital is real’ and that the ‘colonies’ political dynamics did not attain a fundamentally different kind of modernity than the Europeans’ (p. 285). Second, he contends that the ‘universalizing drive of capital should not be assumed to homogenize power relations, or the social landscape more generally’ (p. 285). Third, this ‘universalizing drive of capital comes up against some universal facts about human psychology, and these facts are what explains subaltern resistance to capital’s drive to establish exclusionary political orders’. Finally, ‘the universalizing categories of Enlightenment thought are perfectly capable of capturing the consequences of capital’s universalization and the dynamics of political agency – indeed, these categories are essential to their analysis’ (p. 285).

This reassertion of the importance of Enlightenment thought is in part developed through a rehearsal of debates around the French Revolution, which are aggressively marshalled to ‘prove’ not only that Guha’s reading of European history is wrong, but also by implication that the whole Subaltern Studies project rests on shaky intellectual foundations. There is some interesting discussion here, but given that a significant amount of the book is devoted to discussions of these debates, it largely functions as a lengthy digression which allows Chibber to direct the focus primarily toward debates on European history, with heavy citation of Perry Anderson and Ellen Melkins Wood. Indeed, it is remarkable, given that this is a text which is concerned with discussions of colonialism and postcolonialism, that Chibber manages not a single mention of the Haitian Revolution. As C.L.R. James argued back in the 1930s, the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s opened up a set of profound challenges to the ways in which revolutionaries in France and the Americas constructed notions of equality, liberty, and fraternity. ³ The absence of any engagement with James’ work is emblematic of a failure to recognize the significance of anticolonial, political, and intellectual traditions, despite their increasing profile in histories and geographies of intellectual and political movements. It is also indicative of the book’s selective and partial reading of Marxist-inflected intellectual and political traditions.

In this regard, given that Guha’s essay, and the entire Subaltern Studies project, is deeply indebted to Antonio Gramsci, it is surprising to find that Chibber places him outside his critical discussion of the essay. Louis Althusser, whom Subaltern Studies Collective members responded to in very different ways, meets a similar fate (p. 27). His neglect of these theorists means that Chibber abstracts the discussion of the Collective from the contested terrain of New Left and postcolonial engagements with Marxism. It is hard not to conclude that he does this to bolster his fundamental argument that the work of the Collective is somehow un-Marxian. Engaging with the terms on which Guha and Chakrabarty critically intervened in the tradition of Marxist ‘history from below’, for example, might have helped to nuance the discussion. Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency includes both an important critique of Eric Hobsbawm’s account of the ‘pre-political’ and a significant intellectual debt to the open notions of class and peasant struggle that characterized E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters. ⁴ These exchanges with Marxism formed an important intellectual point of departure for the Collective, alongside a significant, and often neglected, engagement with Mao Zedong, reflecting the influence of the Naxalite movement on their early work. ⁵

Chakrabarty’s critique of the implied universalism of English articulations of liberty and popular struggle in the Making of the English Working Class provides an important context for his later attempt to ‘provincialize’ ‘Western universalisms’. ⁶ Through interlocutors such as Vinay Gidwani and Jenny Robinson, Chakrabarty’s work has arguably been among the most influential subalternist work in geography, not least in the way it has been used to critically interrogate the uneven power relations which structure the discipline itself. ⁷ A critical engagement with Provincializing Europe is central to the later chapters in the book. Chibber develops a critique of Chakrabarty’s influential distinction between ‘History 1s’ associated with ‘the reproduction of capital’ and ‘History 2s’, or pasts which are not ‘separate from capital’ but which ‘inhere in capital and yet interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic’. ⁸

Chibber warns that separating the logic of capital and articulations of contingency and the local risks rendering capital as ‘an all-pervasive force’ (p. 221). Chibber’s critique, however, falls back on a sense of universality rooted in ‘basic needs’ with little sense of how political grievances are articulated through specific struggles. This speaks to a flattening logic in his book, such that in the conclusion he notes that the ‘global economic crisis has brought into relief the basic fact that the entire world is now part of the same universal history, subject to the same underlying forces’ (p. 294).

A different take on such questions is provided by Ajay Skaria. In an insightful essay reflecting on the possibility of Dalit articulations of universality, Skaria argues that it is necessary ‘to deepen and transform our understating of classical universals by pointing out the global context in which they arose’ and to assert ‘how they are by no means only European in origin’, but ‘often adapted to local conditions’, hence ‘how practices from the margin are often in forgotten and indeed repressed ways present in what is universal’. ⁹ This approach is shaped by an attentiveness to the geographies of universality which are effaced in Chibber’s book. Chibber’s acceptance of the idea of an overarching ‘universal history’, by contrast, relates to one of the missed opportunities of his text. In line with his critique of accounts which construct capital as all-pervasive, he could have usefully unpacked Chakrabarty and Chatterjee’s reliance on notions of ‘empty homogenous time’. Thus, Chakrabarty notes the importance of ‘the first step we can take toward working the universalist and global archives of capital in such a way as to “blast . . . out of the homogeneous course of history” times that produce cracks in the structure of that homogeneity’. ¹⁰ Both Chakrabarty and Chatterjee, however, are too accepting of the view that capital produces and functions in ‘empty homogenous time’. Similarly, Chatterjee argues in Lineages of Political Society in a critique of Benedict Anderson’s work that ‘politics’ in Anderson’s view ‘inhabits the empty homogenous time of modernity’. ¹¹ Chatterjee contends that this is problematic as homogeneity is ‘only one dimension of the space-time of modern life’. He continues arguing that ‘empty homogenous time is the utopian time of capital’, which ‘linearly connects past, present and future’ while the ‘real space of modern life exists in heterogeneous time’, while ‘space’ here is ‘unevenly dense’. ¹²

As recent debates on the different pathways and articulations of neoliberalism emphasize, it is problematic to try to elevate capital to a different temporal and analytical plane and to ignore its co-articulations and dependencies. ¹³ The conjunctural analysis of neoliberalisms pioneered by figures such as Stuart Hall has emphasized that they function through articulations and relations shaped through situated geographies and diverse connections in ways which would unsettle Chakrabarty’s neat distinction between History 1s and History 2s. ¹⁴ Hall’s approach allows a focus on more differentiated and uneven geographies of capital, universality, and subaltern politics, which can go beyond the broad-brush North/South, East/West divisions which are mapped in some variants of postcolonial studies. This is significant as perhaps the most controversial claim Chibber makes is that the Subaltern Studies project, and particularly Chatterjee’s approach to nationalism, is structured by an internalized Orientalism.

Chibber argues that Chatterjee’s account of Indian nationalism is underpinned by a ‘quite brazenly Orientalist depiction of the East-West divide’ and is ‘the most thoroughly Orientalist of all the arguments we have examined so far’ (p. 250). The basis of Chibber’s critique is that Chatterjee’s argument in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World that elite anticolonial intellectuals such as Gandhi and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhay were ultimately unsuccessful in moving beyond the representational structures and logics of colonialism. Thus, Chatterjee argues that there ‘is consequently an inherent contradictoriness in nationalist thinking because it reasons within a framework of knowledge whose representational structure corresponds to the very structure of power that nationalist thought seeks to repudiate’. ¹⁵ Chatterjee’s contribution here was to signal how nationalist figures like Gandhi remained confined within the terms of such representational structures, an argument which rests on an analysis of how such figures were to some extent trapped within the limits of ‘Orientalist’ categories.

Chatterjee arguably overplays the significance of such alignments of anticolonial nationalism and European Orientalism. But to accuse him of being Orientalist in turn, as Chibber does, is to ignore the way that Chatterjee’s work seeks to trace exactly how Orientalist logics were mobilized by nationalist political discourse in the first place. It does not imply that Chatterjee accepts these Orientalist categories himself. Indeed, his work actively seeks to deconstruct them. Neither is Chibber new in probing some of the tensioned geographies that have shaped postcolonial theorizing. ¹⁶ In the early 1990s, for example, Aijaz Ahmad had critiqued the tendency of some postcolonial theorists, notably Edward Said, to collapse different authors into homogenous geographical categories. ¹⁷ As Neil Lazarus notes, Chibber’s intervention is distinguished by the vehemence and insistence with which he makes his charges. ¹⁸ The vitriol and partial reading at work here underlines that this is an attempt at demolition rather than a careful reading. This ultimately forecloses a generative critique of the postcolonial project. The readings developed in Chibber’s book are not contextualized within the broader political and intellectual concerns of the project, but indeed are often abstracted from the work and broader milieu of the collective. As Tim Brennan has argued in the New Left Review, this restricted approach risks neglecting some of the Subaltern Studies Collective’s best work. ¹⁹ Chibber’s text also rather neglects the terms of debate of the voluminous critical scholarship on the Collective. Thus, there is no sustained engagement with the work of members turned critics, such as Sumit Sarkar.

Arguably, a more generative critique for geography emerges through Priya Gopal’s critical engagement with Chatterjee’s take on Indian nationalism. Gopal contends that ‘Chatterjee’s analysis of the trajectory of nationalism and the transition to postcolonial statehood in India fails to give sufficient importance to the complexities of each historical conjuncture (‘moment’) that he analyses’. ²⁰ Furthermore, she notes that ‘the subaltern classes often undertook appropriations of their own’. In this regard, Gopal’s account of the Progressive Writers Association by drawing attention to the diverse trajectories of nationalist politics and some of the dynamics of subaltern appropriation of discourse demonstrates the contested character of nationalist identities and the geographies they shaped. This involves unsettling some of the spatialities framing the subaltern project, at least in an Indian context, where as Partha Chatterjee has noted, subaltern histories have tended to prioritize engagements with ‘the ethnographic, the practical, the everyday and the local’. ²¹ Vasant Kaiwar, in more critical vein, notes that Guha’s stress on ‘peasant autonomy’ led to a ‘claustrophobically enclosed model’ which shut off ‘the whole field of external structural interaction and determination’. ²²

One possible productive route for subaltern geographies, in this regard, is to engage with emerging critical historiographies of South Asia which are beginning to articulate subalternity in more explicitly translocal terms. Thus, Maia Ramnath and Benjamin Zachariah have both drawn attention to the diverse routes and trajectories that constituted different nationalist movements. Ramnath’s fine monograph Haj to Utopia traces the diverse trajectories and relations shaped through the Ghadar movement, uncovering the solidarities forged with Egyptian, Moroccan, and Irish revolutionaries in the process. ²³ Zachariah draws attention to the relations between the League Against Imperialism, Indian exiles in Berlin and emergent anti-fascist networks. He notes that there were ‘various political tendencies among the group of Indian exiles who were to bring down the British Empire during the First World War’, and these shaped different attitudes to fascism and anti-fascism. For example, a ‘central element was composed of communist sympathizers such as Virendranath Chattopahyay [. . . ] who was one of the main organizers, along with Willi Münzenberg, of the Conference of Oppressed Peoples and Nationalities in Brussels in 1927’. ²⁴

In more explicitly subaltern vein, Gopalan Balachandran’s work on Indian seafarers in the early to mid-20th century has recovered forms of organizing which shaped both ‘individual and collective’ forms of ‘networked subaltern agency’. ²⁵ Balachandran’s book is part of a broader set of interventions at the intersection of maritime scholarship and subaltern studies. Thus, Clare Anderson develops an engagement with these kinds of articulations of subaltern agency through positioning ‘marginality as a contingent process’ and by drawing attention to the ‘multiple articulations between race, criminality, class and gender’. ²⁶ Similar concerns shape Andy Davies, who has engaged with the political identities forged through the Royal Indian Naval Mutiny, and in a different geographical context, Robbie Shilliam, who has reconstructed the trajectories and circulations which forged what he terms ‘the Black Pacific’. ²⁷

This recent scholarship is distinguished by its direct engagement with subaltern trajectories and agency that have often been effaced by the re-articulation of subalternity as what Sharad Chari describes as an ‘atavistic space of doubt’. ²⁸ It also breaks with earlier constructions of subalternity as an ‘autonomous domain’. Indeed, some of these writers, like Balachandran and Anderson, explicitly foreground the production of subalternity in relation to heterogeneous social and spatial relations. Such work emphasizes that while there is plenty to critique and argue with in the diverse and multifaceted corpus of Subaltern Studies, it is necessary to acknowledge the diverse takes such projects have, especially perhaps on questions relating to space, place, and relationality. In this regard, Chibber’s terms of engagement ultimately close down the possibility of differentiating between different approaches to subalternity and subaltern politics. To take subaltern geographies forward, it is necessary to develop critique in more nuanced register, and to reassert the importance of engaging with situated trajectories and agentic practices.