Hello! This blog is a response to the task assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad. In this blog I am going to summarize two articles from Ania Loomba's book "Colonialism and Postcolonialism" about postcolonial studies, Conclusion: Globalization and the future of postcolonial studies and Conclusion: The future of postcolonial studies.
Globalization and Postcolonialism
What is Post- Colonial Studies?
Postcolonial studies is the critical analysis of the history, culture, Literature and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, France, Spain and other European imperial powers. Postcolonial studies have focused on the third world countries in Caribbean Islands, Asia, South America and Africa.
CONCLUSION: GLOBALIZATION AND THE FUTURE OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
The Article begins with the description of the events of 11 September 2001 ( 9/11), the so-called Global War on terror and the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. li which makes it harder to see our world as post colonial, at the same time these all events can be considered as a part of globalization.
Globalization seems to have transformed the world so radically that many of its advocates and critics suggest that there is no longer need to have a critical and analytical perspective which takes the history and Legacy of European colonialism at the focal point. Globalization cannot be analyzed using the concept of margin and centers today it is better to be described in the term of transnational network, regional and international flows and The dissolution of Geographic and cultural borders, paradigm which are familiar to post colonial critic but we can now invoked to suggest a radical break with the narratives of colonialism and anti colonialism.
Book 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 umpires.
In contrast to imperialism, the Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentralized 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-xii)
Hardt and Negri, do not identify the United States as this new power, they argue that the Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal US constitutional project- a project which sought to include and incorporate minorities into mainstream rather than simply expel and exclude them.
Hardt and Negari suggested the new Empire is better compared to the Roman empire rather than to European colonialism, Imperial Rome also loosely incorporated subject state rather than controlling them directly.
The controversy about the Empire is shaped by a wider and ongoing debate about the nature and effects of globalization. Tim Brennan observes that the Empire has almost nothing to say about the actual peoples and histories that the Empire left behind… The colonization of today is given little place in a book’s sprawling thesis about multitudes, biopolitical control and the creation of alternative value.
The Global mobility of capital, industry, workers, goods and consumers dissolves earlier hierarchies and inequities, democratizes nation and the relations between nations, and creates new opportunities which percolate down in some form or another to every section of society.
Lists down ‘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 globalization.
Simon Gikandi in his work "Globalization and the claim of Postcoloniality" observes that despite the fact that globalization is so often seem to have made redundant the terms of postcolonial critique, the radical newness of globalization is in fact asserted by appropriating key terms of postcolonial studies such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘difference’.
Etienne Balibar connects neo- racism to the anti- semitism. According to Baibar, the new racial ideologies are not less rigid simply because they invoke culture instead of nature. Phobai about Arabs carries with it at image of Islam as a ‘conception of the world’ which is incompatible with Europeanness. Thus Muslims are regarded as people who can never successfully assimilate into western societies, or who are culturally conditioned to be violent, ideas that dominated the media coverage of Islam after the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon in the US on 11 September 2001.
Some forms of post colonial critique have already detached culture from its social and economic moorings, and these tendencies are exaggerated in accounts of endlessly mobile and hybrid Global identities. but it is also worth remembering that on the whole no other critical practice has foregrounded the link between cultural forms and geopolitics to the degree that postcolonial studies has over the past four decades. It is not an accident that Muslims are regarded as barbaric and given to acts of violence and Asians are seen as diligent but attached to their own rules of Business and family, both modes of being we are seen as differently in relation with the western world. These views were not only applicable in the older colonial views about Muslims as despotic and intractable and Asian as incredible and hard working but speak to contemporary Global economic and political libraries.
Conflicts are we supposed to read in literature as postcolonialism critics in the times of 'Capitalize controlled Globalization'?
Postcolonialism scholarship must engage with new socio-economic realities and thus, it is necessary to keep pace with newer developments 'without being in thrall to the cultural kaleidoscope of contemporary world capitalism'. None of the traditional or modern or postmodern conflicts in literature will help us in identifying the dynamics of 'Capitalist controlled Globalization'.
- Man vs Market Fundamentalism (which is even more dangerous than Religious Fundamentalisms)
-Man vs Nexus between Private Corporations and Democratically Elected Politicians
- Man vs Private Companies
-Man vs Multinational Companies (MNCs)
Critics of globalization have not denied fact or doubt the transformative power of the phenomenon of globalization or the ways in which it marks a departure from the old world order. But they oppose its supposedly democratizing effects or radical potential and point out that treating contemporary globalization as if it does not have any history is unfair. There is no doubt that globalization has made Information and Technology more widely available and has brought economic prosperity to new sections of the world.
P. Sainath observes that the mobility of capital far from fostering ideological openness has resulted in its own fundamentalism (strict adherence to the basic principle of any subject or discipline).
‘Market fundamentalism destroys more human life than any other simply because it cuts across all national, cultural, Geography, religious, and other boundaries.It's as much at home in Moscow as in Mumbai or Minnesota, 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…’
Globalization carries an overwhelming connotation of cosmopolitanism (belief that all people are entitled to equal respect and consideration), of The dissolution of national boundaries, of the free flow of capital labor and benefits across the confines of locally vested interest.
Indian Research group has recently argued that
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.)
If the earlier period of colonial globalization, integrated the world into a single economic system and divided it more deeply into the haves and the have nots. The new Empire both facilitates global connections and creates new opportunities and entrenches disparities and new divisions.
the World bank statistics concedes that the number of poor worldwide has grown during the 1990s. A third of the world's labor force is unemployed and underemployed.
“Globalization is just another name for submission and domination” (Nicanor Apaza, 46, an unemployed minor)
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and once Chief Economist at the World Bank, uses 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.’
Stiglitz connects these developments to colonialism, suggesting that ‘the IMF’s approach to developing countries has the feels 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?”
Hardt and Negri’s suggestion that United States acts as an Imperial power ‘not as a function of his own motives but in the name of global right’. as the worldwide protest against the war have made it clear, neither people at large not 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 that US nationalism and National interest remain at least as important as the interest of particular multinational corporations in shaping these and other conflicts around the globe. Instead of countposing the new global order against nation and nationalist ideologies it is better to see them as both forming new alliances and also engaging in new conflict.
North Korea and India's nuclear program were developed in disobedience to the US, but nuclear proliferation can hardly be seen as a progressive in any way. At the same time India state is repressive towards its own subjects especially in Kashmir and North Eastern states and it collaborates with multinationals whenever it can. religious, linguistic or ethnic nationalism have also escalated in the last decades. They can also fuel assistance movements against multinational as well as movements which may be anti us but are politically socially and ideological backward.
Is radical change at all possible? According to Hardt and Negri, the Empire can be challenged from multiple sites and is vulnerable to all manner of rebellion. resistance is more than the simple effect of dominate. The resistance of globalization takes a very local shape and involves the struggle against the national authorities as that is an example of the case of Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) in India.
Narmada Bachao Andolan was a protest against project Narmada Valley development, to build large dams across central India, Dams which were not only unsustainable in themselves but which could cause the displacement of thousands of tribal people all across the Narmada Valley. The project was funded by multinational as well as indigenous capital following a long and systematic struggle led by the NBA, the World bank pulled out of the project in 1993. Palit discusses the way in which and they developed new forms of resistance by drawing on a rich experience of the local people and their knowledge of the let there practice the methods of Gandhian anti-colonial struggle and gather enormous effort from the women's group, Trade Union and left parties in the countries and from diverse movements internationally. Although at this point and be has not managed to stop the building of the terms it has politicized and galvanized millions of people and exposed one signal instance of the Nexus of local and global economic and political power.
ROLE OF UNIVERSITIES
The new imperialism directly implicates educational institutions. Niall Fergusson suggested that the US must learn from Britain and send its best and the brightest students from its leading universities on the Imperial mission. but how will the best students be prepared to do so?
In the report called Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can be Done About it, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) suggests that universities are not up to this task because, unlike the rest of the country, large numbers of American academics and students are critical of US policies. On US campuses, it has become commonplace to suggest that Western civilization is the primary source of the world's ills even though it gave us the ideals of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance'. After 9/11, the report went on to complain, instead of ensuring that students understand the unique contributions of America and Western civilization-the civilization under attack-universities are rushing to add courses on Islamic and Asian cultures'
Those who do teach Western history and literature are not exempt from critique; in an earlier report, ACTA had complained not only that Shakespeare was being dropped from required courses but that Shakespeare and Renaissance classes were being polluted by a focus on social issues such as poverty and sexuality.
The core premise of postcolonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and Cultures at the service of American power.
If universities are to remain sites of dissent and free intellectual inquiry, if scholarship is not to be at the service of America Or any other power, critiques of the past and ongoing empires are going to be more necessary than ever.
SOME EXAMPLES OF GLOBALIZATION
Looking at the contemporary examples of Globalization, we get a strike of reliance companies. Which has turned into a threat to various other companies like Vodafone, Idea, Airtel etc. There was a time where BSNL was considered to be the best but this globalization and privatization failed BSNL. Recently, Vodafone and Idea had to merge together for their existence. Vodafone-Idea merger: A telecom giant is born amid Reliance Jio threat
Examples from the Bollywood
Ghayal Once Again
the conflict of youngsters who witnessed Murder of RTI activist against multi-business owner Bansal (represents Ambani's)
Reluctant Fundamentalist
the conflict between market fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism in the aftermath of 9/11
Zee5 Original Web-movie 'Tigers'
based on a Pakistani salesman's conflict with giant MNC Nestle
Madaari
The conflict between common man (father whose child died in bridge crash) and nexus between construction company and politicians
Sonali Cable
conflict between a girl who runs local tv/internet cable service vs giant company 'Shining' which started providing broadband
Rang De Basanti
A nexus between politician and businessman vs young college boys (one them has to murder his own father who was corrupt businessman before murdering the politician)
Real incidents
The Nestlé boycott can be seen as special in a sense that it linked human rights regulations and humanitarian activism with corporate responsibility and market capitalism. Consumers were basically acting as global citizens by aiding people in need outside their close communities – mothers in developing countries –, “using the marketplace not as a way of generating revenue, but rather as a space for protest”.
But in 2015, Maggi was also at the center of a massive food safety scandal, during which the noodles allegedly tested positive for high lead content, and the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India issued a brief, nationwide ban on all Maggi products.
Pesticide residue was 24 times above limits set by the Bureau of Indian Standards in 57 samples tested, the report said. In one bottle of Coca-Cola bought in Calcutta, the level of the carcinogenic pesticide Lindane exceeded the bureau's standards by 140 times.
The blog is quite lengthy, I have tried to give the overall idea presented in the essay. I hope it will be useful. Thank you.
[Words- 2700]
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