Hybridity in a transnational frame: Latin-Americanist and post-colonial perspectives on cultural studies

Abstract

Other times In ‘Marxism after Marx: History, Subalternity, and Difference’, the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty provides a subalternist reading of the historicity of capital. Just as his Subaltern Studies colleague Ranajit Guha recovers the trace of subaltern agency in the historical narratives of the colonial and post-colonial Indian states, Chakrabarty here reflects also on the coexistence of different temporalities within the time of capital: the temporality of commodified abstract labour that, in his view, underpins imperial history-writing, and the heterogeneous temporalities of subaltern ‘real’ labour that capital subsumes and overcodes, but which it cannot quite contain. ‘If “real” labor . . . belongs to a world of heterogeneity whose various temporalities cannot be enclosed in the sign History’, he suggests, ‘ . . . then it can find a place in a historical narrative of capitalist transition (or commodity production) only as a Derridean trace of something that cannot be enclosed, an element that constantly challenges from within capital’s and commodity’s – and by implication History’s – claim to unity and universality’ (Chakrabarty 1996: 60). Such heterogeneous social forms (‘worlds’) are thus only ever, for example, pre-capitalist from the point of view of capital’s selfnarration in a Euro-centred historicism – in Chakrabarty’s words: ‘secular History’ – and its nation-based teleologies of progress (be they evolutionary or developmental) as they are imposed through colonialism. From a subalternist point of view, however, they mark the place of what Guha calls a ‘semiotic break’ (Guha 1983: 36) with such disciplinary history, and of alternative memories and non-secular temporalisations of experience, as well as alternative futures too: Subaltern histories are therefore [continues Chakrabarty] constructed within a particular kind of historicized memory, one that remembers History itself as a violation, an imperious code that accompanied the civilizing process [here: the de-differentiation of labour1] that the European Enlightenment inaugurated in the eighteenth century as a world historical task. It is not enough, however, to historicize History, the discipline, for that only uncritically perpetuates the temporal code which enables us to historicize. The point is to ask how this imperious, seemingly all-embracing code might be deployed or thought so that we have at least a glimpse of its own finitude, a vision of which might constitute an ‘outside’ to it. To hold history, the discipline, and other forms of memory together so that they can help in the interrogation of each other.

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