Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Specter of Universalism

Abstract

Following recent debates between Vivek Chibber and leading postcolonial theorists, I probe into what is missing in these exchanges. I focus on the figure of the ‘tribal’ in modern India in Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India and Alpa Shah’s In the Shadows of the State, both of which claim to offer emic perspectives on subaltern politics and history. Yet both works, despite their undeniable differences, display a striking universalism that puts them, paradoxically, in the company of Chibber. This universalism, which we may call the resisting subject, is about the Other and about us simultaneously, the former constituted by the latter as an abstract object of analysis and as a key symbol of intellectual vanguardism. Are we not better off abandoning such universalisms and searching for ways in which Marxist theories of culture can be melded with postcolonial theories of capitalism?