2 See, for instance, Warren, Rosie, ed., “How Does the Subaltern Speak? An Interview with Vivek Chibber,” in The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2017), 27–28 Google Scholar. I vulgarly tested postcolonial theory’s imputed hegemony by doing keyword searches in flagship humanities and social sciences journals. Between 1985 and now, The American Journal of Sociology returns 1,311 essays that contain “capitalism” at least once, 138 hits for “postcolonial,” and 41 hits for “subaltern.” The American Historical Review returns similar results. A search through Critical Inquiry returns 472 hits for “capitalism,” 212 for “postcolonial,” and 81 “subaltern.” As I said: a vulgar test. Intuitively, though, I would expect postcolonial theory’s interdisciplinary hegemony to look a little more hegemonic.

3 Ahmad, Aijaz, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures (Verso: London, 1992)Google Scholar; Dirlik, Arif, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Parry, Benita, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987): 27–58 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Parry, Benita, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Neil Lazarus suggests that Chibber, on the other hand, seems to be writing for people who have very little familiarity with postcolonial studies (and, for that matter, poststructuralism). I agree.

5 Editor’s Column, “‘The End of Postcolonial Theory?’ A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel,” PMLA 122.3 (2007): 633–651 Google Scholar.

6 See Achin Vanaik, “Introduction: The Chibber Debate,” in The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 1. The “debate” is an edited volume in the world of Marxism, one of the more famous ones being the “Brenner Debate” over the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Chibber draws heavily on the work of Robert Brenner for his understanding of capitalism; the title of “The Chibber Debate” is at once an act of canonization and homage. See Aston, T. H. and Philpin, C.H.E., eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

7 My location of this apparent antinomy is at a greater level of abstraction—or at a lower level of epistemological foundation—than Ho-fung Hung, who suggests, “This debate is, in fact, a continuation of the long-drawn debate between the Marxists and post-structuralists, or the modernists and postmodernists.” I consider this antinomy needless and only merely apparent for the simple reason that I believe both interpretive orientations are regionally valid and that both can be made to enter into a supplementary relation with the other. Ho-fung Hung, “Review Symposium on Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism,” The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 123.

8 Chibber, Vivek, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2013), 17 Google Scholar.

9 I am taking this phrase from Young, Robert, “Postcolonial Remains,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 19–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 On the importance of engagement with emergent social movements for the revitalization of postcolonial theory, see Al-Kassim, Dina, “Introduction” in Postcolonial Reason and Its Critique: Deliberations on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Thoughts, eds. Purushottama Bilimoria and Dina Al-Kassim (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), xi Google Scholar.

11 My point is not, by any means, to celebrate the apparent exhaustion of poststructuralism. It is rather that the exhaustion of this paradigm creates a condition in which we might disarticulate postcolonial studies from poststructuralism—or at least decenter the latter in our broad narratives about the field. Years ago, Ania Loomba argued that abstracted, general debates that pit Marxism against poststructuralism “often reproduce . . . reductive versions of both Marxism and post-structuralism or post-modernism, and, as such, retard . . . the possibility of a more nuanced dialogue” between participants in the debate. It does not seem to me as if the situation has improved very much. Thus, my desire is to compose a field narrative for postcolonial studies in which it is not indexed to poststructuralist theory—or, indeed, to the trio of early postcolonial theorists who, in a pars pro toto kind of way, are made to stand in as postcolonial theory. Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 248 Google Scholar.

12 On Chibber’s tone, see Lazarus, Neil, “Vivek Chibber and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory,” Race and Class 57.3 (2016): 89–92 Google Scholar.

13 As Chibber puts it, “Subaltern Studies was largely seen [after the publication of its earlier volumes] as an innovation within Marxist theory, not as a radical departure from it” (7).

14 William H. Sewell, Jr., “On Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital,” in The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 126.

15 For the best book on the concept, see Davidson, Neil, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012)Google Scholar.

16 Partha Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies and Capital,” in The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 31.

17 For a ranging compendium of various ways Marxist thinkers in the global south have theorized historical unevenness, see Harootunian, Harry, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Sewell, “On Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital,” 129.

19 Sewell, “On Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital,” 129.

20 It is routinely forgotten—especially at a moment in which we are told scholars are rediscovering capitalism and class—that discussing capitalism and class are not per force radical activities, and certainly not per force Marxist in either an epistemological or political sense.

21 Chibber, “Making Sense of Postcolonial Theory,” Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 98.

22 The back and forth between Chibber and Spivak also shows an important difference in disciplinary standards of method, argumentation, and interpretation. Spivak is frequently irritated by Chibber’s assertion that one or another thinker is simply “wrong,” a positivist impulse amplified by the fact that Chibber is interpreting theory, which humanists tend to relate to outside of a paradigm of falsifiability and verifiability. Chibber responds that he is theorizing for the “empirical disciplines,” which presumably entails a different methodological orientation. Again, for Chibber, literary and cultural studies are not really in the picture. The problem—and the point at which the necessary epistemic generosity required for interdisciplinary work breaks down—is that he is allergic to those modes of study in general. This allergen is named “post-structuralism.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital,” in The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 72–75.

23 See Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

24 Butler, Judith, “Merely Cultural,” New Left Review I/227 (January–February 1998): 33–44 Google Scholar.

25 Shohat, Ella, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’ ” Social Text 31/2 (1992): 100 Google Scholar.

26 McClintock, Anne, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’ ” Social Text 31/2 (1992): 84–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Lazarus, Neil, The Postcolonial Unconscious (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 12.

29 In his critique of postcolonial studies’ reception of Frederic Jameson, for instance, Neil Lazarus urges us to “Third-worldness . . . as a regulative ideal,” an ideal “born of anticolonialist and anti-imperialist struggle.” In his classic critique of Jameson, Ahmad queries Jameson’s use of the term “Third World” by wondering, “Has that [i.e., the Second World and its attendant “socialist and/or communist culture”] vanished from our discourse altogether, even as the name of a desire?” I am, of course, entirely in favor of intellectuals’ desiring communism. I do not think that such communist desires—much less one articulated through a kind of Kantianism!—ground cultural analysis sufficiently in a Marxist epistemology. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 106; Ahmad, In Theory, 101.

30 Scott, David, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 For a good overview, see Palumbo-Liu, David, Tanoukhi, Nirvana, Robbins, Bruce, eds., Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Chee Dimock, Wai, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

33 Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

34 See, for instance, Anievas, Alex and Nişancıoğlu, Kerem, West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The classic work on Trotsky’s concept is Löwy, Michael, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (London: Verso, 1987)Google Scholar.

35 Moretti, Franco, “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20 (2003): 77–78 Google Scholar. See also Moretti, Franco, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996)Google Scholar.

36 Cheah, Pheng, What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Another way of putting this point is that the world in world literature—particularly when thinking of historical world literary systems—is not identical to the world of the capitalist world-system. On non-Euro-centered literary systems and their relationship to “world literature,” among many others, see Pollock, Sheldon, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar; al-Musawi, Muhsin, “The Republic of Letters: Arab Modernity?” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1.2 (2014): 265–280 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; al-Musawi, Muhsin, “The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters as World Model,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2.2 (2015): 281–285 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Orsini, Francesca, “Whose Amnesia? Literary Modernity in Multilingual South Asia,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2.2 (2015): 266–272 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Allan, Michael, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

38 Sarah Brouillette, “UNESCO and the World-Literary System in Crisis,” Amodern (December 2015), http://amodern.net/article/unesco-brouillette/. See also Brouillette, Sarah, “UNESCO and the Book in the Developing World,” Representations 127 (Summer 2014): 33–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Mufti, Aamir, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Moore, Jason, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015)Google Scholar.

41 See, for instance, Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on “planetarity” in Death of a Discipline (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2003).

42 See Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (Winter 2009): 197–222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43.1 (Winter 2012): 1–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41.1 (Autumn 2014): 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 On the Capitalocene, see Moore, Jason, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

44 Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

45 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and Handley, George B., “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth,” Postcolonial Ecologies Literatures of the Environment, eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Postmentier, Sonya, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

46 Pablo Mukherjee, Upamanyu, Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (London, England: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010): 59–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Campbell, Chris and Niblett, Michael, “Critical Environments: World-Ecology, World Literature, and the Caribbean,” The Caribbean: Aesthetics, World-Ecology, Politics, eds. Chris Campbell and Michael Niblett (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; italics in original.

48 Campbell and Niblett, “Critical Environments,” 8.

49 Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007)Google Scholar; Denning, Michael, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review 66 (2010): 79–97 Google Scholar.

50 For a neat reading of these dynamics, see Clover, Joshua, Riot. Strike. Riot. (London: Verso, 2016)Google Scholar. Clover’s book is largely centered on the global north, but I believe it has important implications for figurations (and disfigurations) of labor in the postcolonial world.

51 Mezzadra, Sandro and Nielson, Brett, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the figure of the contemporary refugee, see Naimou, Angela, ed., “Dossier on Contemporary Refugee Timespaces,” Humanity 8.3 (2017)Google Scholar.

52 Kumar Malreddy, Pavan, “Introduction” in Reworking Postcolonialism Globalization, Labour and Rights, eds. Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Birte Heidemann, Ole Birk Laursen, and Janet Wilson (Houndmills, Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 9 Google Scholar. For another good take on disposability, globalization, and the postcolony, see Tadiar, Neferti X. M., Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 See, for instance, Ikyo Day’s work on the interplay among settler colonialism, Asian racialization, and “alien capital” in Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).