1 Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 18, 129.

2 Scott, Darieck, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 151–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Cheah, What Is a World?, chap. 6.

4 Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 85–86.

5 Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 66–67, 259. Scott arrives at Merleau-Ponty through Fanon’s account of “the native’s tensed muscles” in Wretched of the Earth.

6 Cheah, What Is a World?, 179.

7 Cheah, What Is a World?, 171.

8 Santner, Eric, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; LaCapra, Dominick, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

9 For reasons of space, I’m omitted an additional figure—Reinhart Koselleck—who could be shown to belong to this tradition. See his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), chap. 14.

10 For “sensuous human activity,” see the first of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology: Part One: With Selections from Parts Two and Three and Supplementary Texts, ed. Arthur, C. J. (New York: International Press, 1970), 121 Google Scholar. My definition of materialism in relation to practice comes from Roy Bhaskar by way of John Bellamy Foster. Bhaskar distinguishes among three dimensions of a “materialist worldview”: “practical materialism,” which emphasizes the centrality of “transformative human agency” in the making of “social forms”; “ontological materialism,” which posits the priority of matter and physical processes over thought; and “epistemological materialism,” according to which objects of knowledge have a real existence outside of and prior to knowledge itself. Materialists may adhere more or less strongly to one or the other of these elements, though Marx himself subscribed to all of them. See Foster, John Bellamy, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 2.Google Scholar

11 Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 233, 244.Google Scholar

12 Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis and his generalized suspicion of “sexual liberation” have so permeated critical discourse in recent decades that Marcuse’s kind of radical psychoanalysis has fallen into near-total disrepute. (See Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Hurley, Robert [New York: Vintage, 1980]Google Scholar, esp. 1–15 and 157.) Yet scholars have for some time suggested that Foucault misunderstands repression when he criticizes it as purely “negative.” See, for example, Horowitz, Gad, “The Foucauldian Impasse: No Sex, No Self, No Revolution,” Political Theory 15.1 (1987): 61–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Whitebook, Joel, “Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with Psychoanalysis,” The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gutting, Gary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 312–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a different vein, Deborah Cook has argued that Foucault is less hostile to psychoanalysis than is conventionally assumed and that his emphasis on panoptical processes of internalized self-discipline can be read as extending Freud’s description of how normative subjectivity is constituted by the introjection of superegoic functions ( Cook, Deborah, “Foucault, Freud, and the Repressive Hypothesis,” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 45.2 [2014]: 148–61).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Marcuse, Herbert, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955; reprint, Boston: Beacon, 1966), 35.Google Scholar

14 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 35.

15 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 37.

16 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 45–48.

17 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 47.

18 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 47.

19 See Cronan, Todd, “Class into Race: Brecht and the Problem of State Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 44 (2017): 54–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 117.

21 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 231.

22 Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 117.

23 Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 115.

24 Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 259. Scott derives the concept of stretching from Frantz Fanon, who famously declared that Marx’s analysis of class-based oppression must be “stretched” to account for the colonial situation. Scott’s use of this concept, though it produces a far more compelling Fanon than Homi Bhabha’s version of him, seems to me susceptible to the criticism leveled by Ato Sekyi-Otu in Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 45: “Bhabha’s favorite Fanon would … bestow retroactive virtue on an imposed necessity [i.e., on colonial subjection], wrest from the colonized subjects’ abjection the secret of their liberty, and find in the inner divisions inflicted upon them the joyful wisdom of an indeterminate identity… . The result is a Fanon who has no foundational premises from which to rail, yell, and holler—a Fanon who as a consequence has no ideals to realize.”

25 See here the remarkable passage in which Marx describes the aesthetic-sensuous content of human freedom (freedom, for example, as a “complete emancipation of all human senses,” such that “in practice the senses … become direct theoreticians”), “Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. McLellan, David (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 92–93.Google Scholar

26 Benjamin, Walter, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4 (1938-1940), eds. Eiland, Howard and Jennings, Michael W. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 401 Google Scholar. The “Paralipomena” consists of fragments apparently omitted from the draft of “On the Concept of History,” which in its turn remained unpublished at the time of Benjamin’s death in 1940.

27 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol 4, 391–92.

28 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391.

29 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 394–95.

30 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390, 395, 397.

31 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396.

32 Buck-Morss has developed the most trenchant arguments for the necessity of thinking theological messianism together with Benjamin’s materialism (Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 242–43, 339). For an insightful treatment of Benjamin as proto-deconstructionist, see Levine, Michael G., A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida, and Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. Derrida himself feels to me more astute when he notes, in his response to critics of Specters of Marx, that his thought resembles Benjamin’s on some points but parts company on the question of utopian futurity (“Marx & Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker [London: Verso, 1999], 248–50).

33 Buck-Morss puts it this way: “The present as the moment of revolutionary possibility acts as a lodestar for the assembly of historical fragments … The present as ‘now-time’ keeps the historical materialist on course. Without its power of alignment, the possibilities for reconstructing the past are infinite and arbitrary” (Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 338–39).

34 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 397.

35 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396.

36 On this absence of pre-predication, see the following from the “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’”: “Whoever wishes to know what the situation of a ‘redeemed humanity’ might actually be, what conditions are required for the development of such a situation, and when this development can be expected to occur, poses questions to which there are no answers” (402).

37 This formal inventiveness is both an effect of the influence of surrealism on Benjamin and a stylistic inflection of his long-term preoccupations with ruins, fragments, quotations, collectibles, and allegorical representation. All of these are sites in his thought for congealing a knowledge at once deracinated from organic continuity and condensing the hidden form of some other, determining totality.

38 The quoted words in this sentence are all from Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396.

39 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

40 See Chibber, Vivek, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013)Google Scholar, and Kaiwar, Vasant, The Postcolonial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project of Provincializing Europe (Chicago: Haymarket, 2015).Google Scholar

41 Chibber and Kaiwar both construe this postcolonial antihistoricism as the misguided solution to a false problem. The problem combines two claims that, according to these critics, are broadly shared by postcolonial thinkers: that the Marxist understanding of capitalism’s global diffusion homogenizes capital as a unitary phenomenon that absorbs all difference into itself; and that this understanding misses the modes of domination and resistance that characterize the (post)colonies and lie “athwart” the totalizing ambitions of capital. (For Ranajit Guha, this difference takes the form of a “dominance without hegemony”; for Chakrabarty, it inheres in the distinction I shall discuss between History 1 and History 2.) Chibber and Kaiwar counter that capitalism does not require the absorption of differences (indeed, it thrives on the heterogeneous and not-yet-assimilated) and that the postcolonial effort to supplement Marxism in response to its purported historicism is really a new form of Orientalism: it treats “Eastern” paradigms of thought and feeling as insusceptible to the rationalist categories of the “West,” and hence “resurrects the worst instances of Orientalist mythology … by assigning science, rationality, objectivity … to the West, thereby justifying an exoticization of the East” (Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 288–89).

These objections sound a useful note of caution against knee-jerk anti-universalisms that hypostatize cultural differences. Yet Chibber is especially misleading in his insistence that Provincializing Europe is unremittingly hostile to universalizing reason and European models of thought, including Marxism. In fact, Chakrabarty’s book argues for the indispensability of Marx’s account of capital as a universalizing phenomenon that requires universalist concepts for its critique, and he concludes with the admonition that “at the end of European imperialism, European thought is a gift to us all. We can talk of provincializing it only in an anticolonial spirit of gratitude” (255). Kaiwar at least acknowledges these latter statements. He treats them, however, primarily as contributions to what he too considers Chakrabarty’s covert(?) Orientalism (see Kaiwar, The Postcolonial Orient, xv, 185–86, and 320–22).

For a convincing rebuttal to this charge of Orientalism, see Cumings, Bruce, “Back to Basics? The Recurrence of the Same in Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital ,” The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, ed. Warren, Rosie (London: Verso, 2017), 136 Google Scholar; for a nuanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Chibber’s critique and Chakrabarty’s arguments, see Viren Murthy’s “Looking for Resistance in All the Wrong Places? Chibber, Chakrabarty, and a Tale of Two Histories,” in the same volume, 215–55.

42 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7–8.

43 Cheah, What Is a World?, 204–05.

44 The remainder of this paragraph and the entirety of the following one reprise while recontextualizing my discussion of Chakrabarty in Forter, Greg, Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction: Atlantic and Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), chap. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 63. The internal quotations are from Marx, Theories of Surplus Value.

46 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 64.

47 Chakrabarty’s proposal to place Heidegger and Marx into dialogue downplays the extent to which earlier materialists had staged such a dialogue and risks, at times, suggesting that the book’s main innovation lies in this juxtaposition. My claim is that a postcolonial rerouting of Benjamin’s insights is Provincializing Europe’s most significant achievement.

48 Compare the following from Chakrabarty with my earlier discussion of Marcuse: the “vital forces” of the body are in Marx “the ground of resistance to capital. They are abstract living labor—a sum of muscles, nerves, and consciousness/will—which … capital … always needs but can never quite control or domesticate” (Provincializing Europe, 60).

49 There are by now a number of excellent articles and book chapters on Wicomb’s novel. I’ve been especially influenced by Graham, Shane, “‘This Text Deletes Itself’: Traumatic Memory and Space-Time in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story ,” Studies in the Novel 40.1–2 (2008): 127–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giffel, Kaelie, “Historical Violence and Modernist Form in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story ,” Twentieth-Century Literature 64.1 (2018): 53–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baiada, Christa, “On Women, Bodies, and Nation: Feminist Critique and Revision in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story ,” African Studies 67.1 (2008): 33–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Daas, Minesh, “‘Amanuensis’ and ‘Steatopygia’: The Complexity of ‘Telling the Tale’ in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story ,” English in Africa 38.2 (2011): 45–60.Google Scholar

50 “MK” abbreviates the Nguni phrase “Umkhonto we sizwe” or “spear of the nation,” the secret military wing of the ANC.

51 Wicomb, Zoë, David’s Story (New York: Feminist Press, 2000), 1 Google Scholar. Future refences will appear parenthetically in the article’s body.

52 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 397.

53 Hutcheon, Linda, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), chap. 7.Google Scholar

54 Giffel, “Historical Violence and Modernist Form in Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story.”

55 I differ here with Daas’s otherwise illuminating analysis, which views the unrepresentable in David’s Story—what Daas terms “silence”—as the symptom of a Derridean truth about the generalized impossibility of reference and full speech. Daas’s argument in this sense reprises the general problematic with which my article is concerned: the conflation of historically induced injuries and silences with structural or hauntological ones. See Daas, “‘Amanuensis’ and ‘Steatopygia,’” 53–58.

56 Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” 401. I stress that this critique of South Africa’s impending “victors” comes from the feminist-materialist left of the ANC.

57 See here Ronnie Kasrils, “How the ANC’s Faustian Pact Sold Out South Africa’s Poorest,” The Guardian, 24 June 2013 (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/anc-faustian-pact-mandela-fatal-error), and Parry, Benita, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004), 190–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hassim, Shireen, ANC Women’s League: Sex, Gender, and Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015)Google Scholar offers a judicious account of the strengths, limits, and historical shifts in the ANC’s feminist wing. On land theft as capital’s primal crime in the colonized world, see Fredric Jameson’s controversial but still generative essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 84.

58 For a related reading of the novel’s temporal dislocations that mines them for their queer significance, see van der Vlies, Andrew, Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 Wicomb highlights the steatopygia not only of Dulcie, but of Rachael Susanna (le Fleur’s wife); of the so-called “Rain Sisters” whom le Fleur recruits in an effort to make one of his prophecies come true; of David’s wife, Sally, his grandmother, Ragel, and his great-grandmother Antje; and of the unnamed narrator/amanuensis.

60 As a Bantu people, the Venda are unlikely to be steatopygous.