Showing posts with label Vivek Chibber. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vivek Chibber. Show all posts
Wednesday, 25 September 2013
Sunday, 14 July 2013
Tuesday, 7 May 2013
Friday, 3 May 2013
On the Decline of Class Analysis in South Asian Studies
by Vivek Chibber, 2006
The decline of class analysis has been pervasive across the
intellectual landscape in recent years. But South Asian studies stands
out in the severity with which it has been hit by this phenomenon. It also is the
field where the influence of post-structuralism has been most pronounced in the wake of
Marxism’s decline. This essay offers an explanation for both the decline of
class analysis and the ascendance of post-structuralism in South Asian studies as practiced in
the United States. I suggest that the decline of class theorizing was a
predictable and natural result of the decline of working-class politics in the United States.
But the severity of its decline in South Asian studies in particular was a symptom of its
never having made much of a dent on the field in the first place. This left
unchallenged the traditional, Indological approach, which was heavily oriented toward
culturalism. This in turn made the field a hospitable ground for the entrance of
post-structuralism, which, like mainstream Indology, not only eschews materialist
analysis, but is largely hostile to class. South Asian studies is thus one of the few fields
in which traditional scholars and younger ones are both able to agree on their
hostility to class analysis. Finally, I argue that the decline of class is now visible in
Indian universities too, and this is largely caused by the overwhelming influence that
U.S. universities have come to exercise over Indian elite academic culture.
Tuesday, 23 April 2013
How Does the Subaltern Speak?
by Vivek Chibber, The Jacobin
Postcolonial theory discounts the enduring value of
Enlightenment universalism at its own peril.
In recent decades, postcolonial theory has largely displaced
Marxism as the dominant perspective among intellectuals engaged in the project
of critically examining the relationship between the Western and non-Western
worlds. Originating in the humanities, postcolonial theory has subsequently
become increasingly influential in history, anthropology, and the social
sciences. Its rejection of the universalisms and meta-narratives associated
with Enlightenment thought dovetailed with the broader turn of the intellectual
left during the 1980s and 1990s.
Monday, 8 April 2013
Demolition Job
 |
| Postcolonial Theory & the Specter of Capital |
Book: Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of
Capital
Author: Vivek Chibber
Publisher: Navayana
Price: Rs 450
Pages: 306
Vivek Chibber does not like the Subaltern Studies
historians, and his mission in this book is to tear down the early theories of,
in his order of importance, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha
Chatterjee. What these historians have influentially said seems to him to be
simply wrong-headed and methodologically dubious; his favourite descriptions of
them here are as "cultural essentialists" and
"Orientalists" (the latter without reference to Edward Said, who is
mentioned only once on page eight). Culture, in fact, is a bad word for him in
general, and one of his main objections to the Subalternists is the primacy
they choose to give to cultural locations.
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