Looking for Resistance in All the Wrong Places? Chibber, Chakrabarty, and a Tale of Two Histories

Colonial Capitalist Heterochronicity: Socio-Ecological Rhythms of the Sugar Plantation and the Formal Subsumption of Historical and Cultural Difference

“…Y. Mudimbe (1998) calls the colonial library, whereby discursive frames that are grounded in colonial knowledge traditions provide essentialized explanations of ‘Africa’ and its people including their diverse and complex forms of time reckoning. Put differently, it would be inaccurate to reduce all African time orientations to a fixed essence of no-time as this fails to account for interwoven social and non-human times that unfold within an indefinite relationship between the past, present and future in addition to the feelings, attitudes and comportments people embody during their everyday lives (Mudimbe 1998; Murthy, 2015: 129).…”

“…To answer these questions, I will examine two contrasting postcolonial readings of real subsumption and formal subsumption. In doing so, I argue that while colonial capitalism seeks to merge African and Indigenous socio-ecological temporal knowledge into abstract labour, it is never a totalizing process because there are always phenomenological remainders of cultural temporal difference that do not lend themselves to the reproduction of the logic of capital (Murthy, 2015). To this end, we can affirm the existence of multiple, non-linear and eternal forms of time that persist despite their incorporation into capitalist time; however, the extent to which these alternative temporalities destabilize colonial capitalism is uncertain.…”

“…To this end, there are a wide range of possible relations between alternative temporal forms and colonial capitalism, including neutrality, opposition or even reproduction. Accordingly, we can suggest there are multiple alternative temporalities which (a) are indifferent to colonial capitalism, (b) threaten colonial capitalism or (c) help reproduce colonial capitalism (Murthy, 2015: 133).…”

“…In the third section, I emphasize that Indigenous and African conceptions of time are a significant feature of human and cultural difference that have been preserved despite their conflictual incorporation into the colonial capitalist disciplinary tempos of the sugar complex and resulting forms of heterochronicity that emerged in relation to them. To demonstrate this, I highlight two contrasting postcolonial readings of Marx’s notion of real subsumption and formal subsumption, and suggest that the spread of capitalist time does not imply the eradication of cultural remnants from the past (Murthy, 2015: 124). With this, I argue that we can index the existence of a multiplicity of alternative, non-linear and cyclical forms of eternal time that comingle and link past, present and futurity.…”

“…In addition, I emphasize that these diverse Indigenous and African temporalities, which are expressive of what we can broadly call human and cultural difference, are not totally subsumed and converted into an assumed singular and homogeneous temporality of capitalism. In other words, despite all the disciplinary techniques available to capitalism, there are always excess forms of life that are necessary for the spread of capital but cannot be totally incorporated by it (Murthy, 2015: 126). To this end, theories of racial capitalism in addition to the Black and Third World Marxist tradition have demonstrated that colonialism is inseparable from historical accounts of global capitalism.…”