Topic :- Globalisation
and the future of Postcolonial Studies
Name :- Chauhan Sejal
Arunbhai
Subject :- The
Postcolonial Literature.
Paper :- 11
Roll No :-
M.A. PART-II SEM-III
Year- 2013-15
Submitted to :-
Dr.Dilip.Barad
Smt.S.B.Gardi
Department of English
M.K.Bhavnagar
University.
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Globalisation and the future of Postcolonial Studies
As we know that since the
events of 11 September 2001, the so-called global war on terror and the US
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, it is harder than ever to see our world as
simply “postcolonial”. As the new American Empire develops openly and shrilly
advocated by policy- makers, politicians and academics within the Us and
elsewhere, it is more urgent than ever to think about the questions of domination
and resistance that have been raised by anti-colonial movements and
postcolonial studies worldwide. At the same time, these violent events are also
part of the phenomenon we think of as blobalisation, which has provided fresh
grounds for examining the relevance of postcolonial perspectives to the world
which we now inhabit. Globalisation seems to have transformed the world so
radically, many of its advocates and critics suggest that it has rendered
obsolete a critical and analytical perspective which takes the history and
legacy of European colonialism as its focal point. It is meaningless to
continue to define our world in relation to the dynamics of European
colonialism or decolonization. Globalisation, they argue cannot be analyzed
using concepts like margins and centres so central to postcolonial studies.
Today’s economics, politics,
cultures and identities are all better described in terms of transnational
networks, regional and international flows and the dissolution of geographic
and cultural borders, paradigms which are familiar to postcolonial critics but
which are now invoked to suggest a radical break with the narratives of
colonization and anti-colonialism.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s
Empire argues that the contemporary global order has produced a new form of
sovereignty which should be called ‘Empire’ but which is best understood in
contrast to European empires:
In contrast to
imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely
on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing
apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm
within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities ,
flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of
command. The distinct national colors of the imperial map of the world have
merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.
Empire argues that whereas the old
imperial world was marked by competition between different European powers, the
new order is characterized by a
“single power that over determines
them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common
notion of right that is decidedly postcolonialist and postimperialist.”
Hardt and Negri do not identity the
United States as this new power, although they do argue that ‘Empire is born
through the global expansion of the internal US constitutional project’, a
project which sought to include and incorporate minorities into the mainstream
rather simply expel or exclude them. Likewise, contemporary Empire is ‘imperial
and not imperialist’ because it does not consist of powerful nations that aim
to’ invade, destroy and subsume subject countries within its sovereignty’ as
the old powers did but rather to absorb them into a new international network.
Hardt and Negri suggest
that the new Empire is better compared to the Roman Empire rather than to
European colonialism, since imperial Rome also loosely incorporated its subject
states rather than controlling them directly.
Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman
believe that ‘characterizing US political and cultural power as a global
dominants from a more thorough examination of sites and modalities of power in
the global era’; accordingly they celebrate Empire as ‘ Exceptionally helpful
in advancing our capacity to think past the reinscription of globalization as a
centre/ periphery dynamic that produces resistant margins and hegemonic cores’.
In their view it is this
model of margin and which has prevented postcolonial studies from being able to
analyse the operations of contemporary power.
Other critics warn that
geopolitical centres and margins have not simply evaporated and that
globalization has intensified pre-existing global asymmetries, particularly
those that were produced by modern colonialism. Tim Brennan observes that
Empire ‘has almost nothing to say about the actual people and histories the
empires left behind the authors barely nod in the direction of quest worker
systems, uncapitalized agriculture, and the archipelago of maquiladoras at the
heart of globalization’s gulag … the colonized of today are given little place
in the book’s sprawling thesis about multitudes, biopolitical control, and the
creation of alternative values’.
The controversy about
Empire is thus shaped by wider and ongoing debates about the nature and effects
of globalization. Hardt and Negri’s Post Foucaultian emphasis and indeed their
suggestion that global networks have not only changed the nature of repression
but will in fact facilitate resistance by the global ‘multitude’ from diverse
locations all over the world, resonates in disturbing ways with the claims of
globalisation’s neo-liberal advocates who argue that the global mobility of
capital, Industry, workers, goods and consumers dissolves earlier hierarchies
and inequities, democratizes nations and the relations between nations and
creates new opportunities which percolate down in some form or another to every
section of society. These claims are also echoed by many cultural critics for
example, in Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, catalogues of ‘multiple locations’
and new hybridities new forms of communication, new foods, new clothes and
evidence for both the newness and the benefits of globalization.
Such a connection is precisely what
many of the writings on globalization proclaim. Whereas the advocates of globalization
see the new economic order as already having engendered better lives for people,
Hardt and Negri suggest that the new cultural, economic and political flows
offer ‘new possibilities to the forces of liberation’ because global power can
then be challenged from multiple sites by its multiple subjects whom they refer
to as the ‘multitude’.
Culturalist views of
differences moreover, are for from being entirely new products of
globalization. Balibar himself connects neo-racism to the anti-semitism of the
Renaissance. More recently Lisa Lampert indicates the congruence between Samuel
Huntington’s rhetoric of the ‘clash of civilizations’ and medieval
anti-semitism and Islamophobia. Early modern views of Muslims and Jews are also
important in reminding us that ‘culture’ and ‘biology’ have in fact never been
neatly separable categories and that strategies of inclusion and exclusion have
always worked hand in hand. Thus, it was the mass conversion of Jews and Moors
after they were officially expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492 that
intensified anxieties about Christian identity. It was then that the
Inquisition formulated the ‘pure blood’ laws which engendered pseudo-biological
ideologies of differences (see Friedman 1987; Loomba 2002). On the other hand,
in the heyday of imperialism too, as I have already discussed at some length,
racial ideologies did not work through the ideology of exclusion alone but
always strategically appropriated and included many of its others.
Critics of globalization do
not deny the fact or the transformatory powers of the phenomenon, or the many
ways in which it indeed marks a departure from the old world order. But they
contest its supposedly democratizing effects or radical potential, and point
out that by treating contemporary globalization as if it did not have a history,
its inequities tend to get obscured. There is no doubt that globalization has
made information and technology more widely available and has brought economic
prosperity to certain new sections of the world. However, the mobility of
capital, P.Sainath observes, for from fostering ideological openness, has
resulted in its own fundamentalism, which then catalyses others in reaction:
Market fundamentalism destroys more
human lives than any other simply because it cuts across all national,
cultural, geographic, religious and other boundaries. It’s as much at home in
Moscow as in Mumbai or Minnesota. A South Africa whose advances in the early
1990s thrilled the world moved swiftly from apartheid to neo-liberalism. It
sits as easily in Hindu, Islamic or Christian societies. And it contributes
angry, despairing recruits to the armies of all religious fundamentalisms.
Based on the premise that the market is the solution to all the problems of the
human race, it is too, a very religious fundamentalism. It has its own Gospel:
The Gospel of St.Growth, of St choice…..
Not everyone has
forgotten that legacy of that first global asymmetry upon which ours is built.
Here is a report from The New York Times (Friday October 17, 2003) speaking of
huge demonstrations in La Paz which defied military barricades to protest a
plan to export natural gas to the United States:
‘ Globalization is just another name
for submission and domination’, Nicanor Apaza,46, an unemployed miner, said at
a demonstration this week in which Indian Women…..carried banners denouncing
the International Monetary Fund and demanding the president’s resignation,
‘we’ve had to live with that here for 500 years, and now we want to be our own
masters.’
He and many other
protesters see an unbroken line from this region’s often rapacious colonial
history to the failed economic experiments of the late 20th century,
in which Bolivia was one of the first Latin American Countries to open itself
to the modern global economy. The $5 billion gas pipeline project is only the
latest gambit.
Starting with the end of a military
dictatorship two years ago, Bolivia embraced the free market model. State-owned
companies were sold off Foreign investment was courted Government regulation
was reduced Exports have actually declined compared with their level 25 years
ago. Growth has stalled for the pats few years Unemployment has soared, and
Bolivia remains the poorest country in South America, with a per capita
income….less than it was before the free market reforms.
……In the
colonial era, silver from the mines of Potosi provided Spain with the wealth
that allowed it to forge a global empire, and in modern times, tin made a few
families…….fabulously wealthy.
It is not only the
vulnerable and those at the receiving end who make the connections between past
empires and the global economy. Joseph E Stiglitz ,Noble laureate and once
Chief Economist at the World Bank, also uses the phrase ‘market fundamentalism
‘ in his critique of globalization as it has been imposed upon the world by
institutions like the World Bank and the IMF:
The international financial
institutions have pushed a particular ideology market fundamentalism that is
both bad economics and bad politics: it is based on premises concerning how
markets work that do not hold even for developed countries, much less for developing
countries. The IMF has pushed these economics policies without a broader vision
of society or the role of economics within society. And it has pushed these
politics in ways that have undermined emerging democracies. More generally,
globalization itself has been governed in ways that are undemocratic and have
been disadvantageous to developing countries, especially the poor within those
countries.
Stiglitz connect these developments
to colonialism, suggesting that ‘ the IMF’s approaches to developing countries
has the feel of a colonial ruler.’ And that developing countries dealing with
the IMF have been forced to ask ‘ a very disturbing question: Had things really
changed since the “official” ending of colonialism a half century ago?’
Advocates of the
new American empire simultaneously appropriate the legacy of earlier empires
and claim a radical exceptionalism for a US empire. This strategy is
exemplified by an essay in The Atlantic Montly by Robert D. Kaplan tellingly
entitled ‘supremacy by Stealth; in which he sees no contradiction between
global networks of the kind identified by Hardt and Negri and an American
hegemony:
The historian Erich S. Green has
observed that Rome’s expansion throughout the Meditrranean littoral may well
have been motivated not by an appetite for conquest per se but because it was
thought necessary for the security of the core homeland. The same is true for
the United States worldwide, in an age of collapsed distances. This American
imperium is without colonies, designed for a jet and information age in which
mars movements of people and capital dilute the traditional meaning of sovereignty.
Kalplan
offers ten rules for the US Empire, all of which require him to go back to the
British Empire, but also to America’s own past. Rule No.1, called ‘Manliness’,
invokes the male bonding that supposedly existed between British colonizers and
the more refined of their subjects. Rule No.5, ‘Be Light and Lethal’, asks
imperialists to openly appropriate and rewrite history: ‘although many
journalists and intellectuals have regarded as something to be ashamed of, the
for more significant, operational truth is that it exemplifies how we should
act worldwide in the foreseeable future’.
This rewriting has,
as we all know, begun to happen. The destructive histories of modern empires
are being widely whitewashed. Thus David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism asks us to
believe that there was no racism in the British Empire. Thus too George W Bush
now claims that the United States freed Filipinos instead of colonizing them.
Such whitewashing not only obscures, distorts and ignores anti-colonial and
post=colonial scholarship but also directly attacks it. Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘Two
Cheers for Colonialism’ claims that ‘apologists for terrorism’ such as
‘justification of violence’ rely on a large body of scholarship ‘which goes by
the names of “anti-colonial studies”, “postcolonial studies”, or subaltern
studies”,. Niall Ferguson claims to be disturbed be the fact that the British
Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a generation of ‘postcolonial’
historians anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality is that
the British were significantly more successful at establishing market
economies, the rule of law and the transition to representative government than
the majority of postcolonial governments have been. The policy ‘mix’ favored by
Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the International
Monetary Fund, if not the world Bank: Free trade, balanced budgets, sound
money, the common law, incorrupt administration and investment in
infrastructure financed by international loans. These are precisely the things
the world needs right now.
During the heyday of
the British Empire, the medieval concept of translation imperii,which suggested
that political power or legitimacy ‘translated’ first from Greece to Rome, and
then to Western Europe, was freely invoked as justification of European
imperialism. Today it surfaces again in order to anoint the US as Britain’s
rightful heir:
Winston Churchill saw in the United
States a worthy successor to the British Empire, one that would carry on
Britain’s liberalizing mission. We cannot rest until something emerged that is
just as estimable and concrete or what Churchill saw when he gazed across the
Atlantic. (Kaplan)
And as Paul Johnson fervently puts it
:
Fate, or Divine Providence, has
placed America at this time in the position of sale superpower, with the
consequent duty to uphold global order and to punish, or prevent, the great
crimes of the world…..It must continue to engage the task imposed upon it, not
in any spirit of hubris but in the full and certain knowledge that it is
serving the best and widest interest of humanity.
This is precisely the rhetoric used by the
Bush administration in its invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Hardt and Negri’s
suggestion that the United states acts as an imperial power ‘not as a function
of its own motives but in the name of global right’ thus confuses the
discursive self-promotion of US leaders with the actual dynamics of US military
power today. As the world-wide protests against the war have made clear, neither
people at large nor even most nation-states have given the US the right to act
on their behalf and they certainly regard the US as simultaneously
ultra-nationalist and imperialist.
It is clear, then, that
US nationalism and national interests remain at least as important as the
interests of particular multinational corporations in shaping these and other
conflicts around the globe.
Thus, at the end we can
say that it is not surprising that postcolonial studies should be attacked in
such a situation; I have already mentioned some critiques, and they are
escalating and taking new form every day. Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at Stanford
University Hoover Institution, has urged the US House of Representatives to ensure
that federal funding to ‘area studies’ centres in US universities is linked to
their training studies for careers in national security, defence and intelligence
agencies, and the Foreign service. Such centres have, he says, become
‘anti-American’ under the influence of postcolonial scholarship and especially
Edward Said’s Orientalism:
‘Said equated professors who support
American foreign policy with the 19th century European intellectuals
who propped up racist colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial
theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign
language and cultures at the service of American power (Kurtz).
In fact, one of Edward
Said’s most valuable achievements in Orientalism was not simply to establish
the connection between scholarship and sate power in the colonial period, but
to indicate its afterlife in a ‘post colonial’ global formation with the US at
its epicenter. If universities are to remain sites of dissent and free
intellectual inquiry, if scholarship is not to be at the service of American or
any other power, critiques of past and ongoing empires are going to be more
necessary than ever.
Reference:-
Reference:-
Colonialism/Postcolonialism/Ania
Loomba/The New Critical Idiom pourledge/2005
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