Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” in Nepantla: Views from the South, 1:1 (2000) 9-32

David Prochaska and Edmumd Burke, “Rethinking the Historical Genealogy of Orientalism,” History and Anthropology, 18:2 (2007) 135-151

As Chakrabarty details, the group of historians around the journal Subaltern Studies addressed both colonialist and nationalist (often Marxist) historiography of India. The Subaltern Studies group was particularly concerned with how ostensibly left leaning national liberation movements oppressed peasants and workers, as well as how nationalist historians’ passed over this dynamic in silence.

Chakrabarty takes pains to refute Arif Dirlik’s charge that Subaltern Studies merely applied insights developed by English Marxists. Chakrabary demonstrates that Subaltern Studies’ Ranajit Guha had a very different assessment of peasants than did the English Marxist Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm saw peasants insurgency as pre-political, a category which Guha attacked theoretically and through carefully archival research demonstrating the political nature of peasants’ collective agency. This is the strongest piece of Chakrabarty’s essay.

Chakrabarty then shifts to defense of the group’s turn
toward more exclusively theoretical concerns like “the critique of the very idea of the subject itself” and the “epistemological grounds” of “even the very possibility of constructing a totalizing national history in narrating the politics of subaltern lives.” (24, 25.) In the end, Chakrabarty distances Subaltern Studies from all Marxism altogether.

While Chakrabarty supports the turn to theory, Burke and Prochaska criticize a similar inaugurated by Edward Said’s Orientalism. In assessing Said they discuss “the state of the critique of colonial forms of knowledge” prior to and largely displaced by Said. (137.) Earlier critics did not criticize “colonialism as a discursive system” or “colonial forms of knowledge.” (140.) These areas are precisely where anti-colonial critics applied themselves after Said, opening important new avenues for scholarly work, but at the cost of historical sensitivity.

Burke and Prochaska laud postcolonial critics’ demonstration of non-Western societies’ heterogeneity, but criticize them for not having a similar understanding of Western societies and intellectual traditions. They attribute this problem to an insufficiently fine-grained historical approach. Ironically, both articles enact this same tendency in miniature.

Burke and Prochaska state that “the critique of imperialism was poorly developed” before the “radicalization of politics and thought” which occurred around 1960s social movements in the U.S. (140.) While they have a point, the authors treat the 1960s as overly discrete, against the trend among historians of social movements in the U.S. toward seeing the events of that decade as part of a longer tradition of freedom struggles and radical ideas. Attention to this work would qualify the link Burke and Prochaska see between the “post-Marxist cultural space of contestation” opened by Said and “intellectual links between feminists and peoples of colour,” a claim which Chakrabarty would likely support. (145.) This claim has merit, but it reads differently when paired with an awareness of other longstanding ties between anti-imperialists, Marxists, feminists, and peoples of color (terms which should be treated neither as necessarily identical nor as necessarily discrete).[1]

Each article presents material which could be read productively alongside material in the other. Burke and Prochaska reference Marxists who criticized Marx and other Marxists for orientalism. Subaltern Studies could be read as a corrective for the overly national orientation for which Burke and Prochaska criticize their Marxists. Similarly, the Marxist critics discussed by Burke and Prochaska demonstrate that the range of Marxist perspectives is broader than that presented by Chakrabarty.

Chakrabarty’s treatment overly and unnecessarily distances Subaltern Studies from people who might be more productively considered in their proximity. Howard Zinn, a Marxist not known for theoretical writing, wrote that “we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest.”[2] This echoes one of key insights of Subaltern Studies, that “[t]here was, in fact, no unitary ‘nation’,” a key part of the “critical stance toward official or statist nationalism and its attendant historiography” which characterized Subaltern Studies. (22.)

The academic Marxists treated by Burke and Prochaska no doubt had serious limitations and we are better off for having moved beyond many of those positions. This is even more the case for the Marxist-Leninists like Hobsbawm and Indian nationalist Marxists criticized by Subaltern Studies. Still, it is a mistake to present these wrongheaded Marxists as representative of Marxism as a homogeneous body of thought.

A sober assessment of what Marxist work is and is not relevant would be well served by the historicizing treatment both articles carry out for their respective objects. The heterogeneous Marxisms left after such a treatment might enrich the project Burke and Prochaska call for, “not better theory but a deeper historicization,” which would move “us away from high theory and toward a more fine-grained, historically situated understanding.” (147, 148.)

Notes
[1]On seeing the 1960s in a longer view, see for example Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, (New York: Norton, 2008). For one treatment of the long history of African American and transnational African intellectual and political engagement with imperialism see Robin D. G. Kelley, “But a Local Phase of a World Problem”: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950.” Journal of American History, 86:3 (1999), 1045-1077.

[2]Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper, 1980).