Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin-Americanist and Postcolonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies

In“MarxismAfterMarx:History,Subalternity, and Difference” (1996), the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty provides a subalternist reading of the historicity of capital. Just as his Subaltern Studies colleague Ranajit Guha (1983) recovers the trace of subaltern agency in the historical narratives of the colonial and postcolonial Indian states, Chakrabarty here reflects also on the coexistence of different temporalities within the time of capital: the temporality of commodified abstract labor that, in his view, underpins imperial history writing, and the heterogeneous temporalities of subaltern “real” labor 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, precapitalist from the point of view of capital’s self-narration in a Eurocentered historicism—in Chakrabarty’s words, “secular History”—and its