Future of Postcolonial Studies

Hello, I am Emisha Ravani. Writing this blog for the essays “Future of Post-Colonial Studies”. Which is given by Dr.Pro. Dilip Barad sir for the unit 4. Here we have to discuss the essays summaries and all the things. 

1.Conclusion: Globalisation and The Future of Postcolonial Studies

This book ‘Colonialism and Postcolonialism’ is by Ania Loomba. In this book she has discussed many things like, key features of the ideologies and history of colonialism, the relationship of colonial discourse to literature, challenges to colonialism, including anticolonial discourses, recent developments in postcolonial theories and histories, issues of sexuality and colonialism, and the intersection of feminist and postcolonial thought, debates about Globalisation and postcolonialism. Postcolonial scholarship now has an even more urgent role to play in making these links visible in the contemporary world.

The conclusion of the book is start like this,

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’. Like the wild tone of Globalisation Ania Loomba has given here. And she has mentioned many names of the critics who is related to the Globalisation.

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. (Hardt and Negri 2000: xiii–xiii)

By this argument one can get the understanding of 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 according to Hardt and Negri.

Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large,

catalogues of ‘multiple locations’ and new hybridities, new forms of communication, new foods, new clothes and new patterns of consumption are offered as evidence for both the newness and the benefits of globalisation.

Simon Gikandi gave the terms of postcolonial studies such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘difference’,

‘It is premature to argue that the images and narratives that denote the new global culture are connected to a global structure or that they are disconnected from earlier or older forms of identity. In other words, there is no reason to suppose that the global flow in images has a homological connection to transformation in social or cultural relationships’ (Gikandi 2001: 632; emphasis added).

Atienne Balibar - Racism and Nationalism

For Balibar, the new racial ideologies are not less rigid simply because they invoke culture instead of nature; rather, we see today that ‘culture can also function like a nature’ and can be equally pernicious (Balibar 1991a: 22). Phobia about Arabs today, he writes, ‘carries with it an image of Islam as a “conception of the world” which is incompatible with Europeanness’ (24)

Samuel Huntington - Clash of Civilization

Here they talk about the Jews and Muslim people or countries. it is no accident that it is Muslims who are regarded as barbaric and given to acts of violence and Asians who are seen as diligent but attached to their own rules of business and family, both modes of being which are seen as differently incommensurate with the Western world.

P. Sainath – ‘And then there was the market’

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… (2001: n.p.)

An Indian research group’s argument

The great range of actual measures carried on under the label of globalization … were not those of integration and development. Rather they were the processes of imposition, disintegration, underdevelopment and appropriation. They were of continued extraction of debt servicing payments of the third world; depression of the prices of raw materials exported by the same countries; removal of tariff protection for their vulnerable productive sectors; removal of restraints on foreign direct investment, allowing giant foreign corporations to grab larger sectors of the third world’s economies; removal of restraints on the entry and exit of massive flows of speculative international capital, allowing their movements to dictate economic life; reduction of State spending on productive activity, development and welfare; privatization of activities, assets and natural resources, sharp increases in the cost of essential services and goods such as electricity, fuel, health care, education, transport, and food (accompanied by the harsher depression of women’s consumption within each family’s declining consumption); withdrawal of subsidized credit earlier directed to starved sectors; dismantling of workers’ security of employment; reduction of the share of wages in the social product; suppression of domestic industry in the third world and closures of manufacturing firms on a massive scale; ruination of independent small industries; ruination of the handicrafts/handloom sector; replacement of subsistence crops with cash crops; destruction of food security. (Research Unit for Political Economy, 2003: n.p.)

Point can be noted that globalisation has given new divisions as well as new opportunities to the global level.

‘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.’

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.

Joseph E Stiglitz, has point out that how the idea of ‘Market Fundamentalism’ is working in a way. The words are here,

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 economic policies without a broader vision of society or the role of economics within society. And it has pushed these policies 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. (2002: n.p.)

Also, here we find the problematic tone of imperialists,

Niall Ferguson proclaims that he has been openly championing the idea of a US empire for many years now, because ‘capitalism and democracy are not naturally occurring but require strong institutional foundations of law and order. The proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary … by military force.’