Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality

Globalization and postcoloniality are perhaps two of the most important terms in social and cultural theory today. Since the 1980s, they have functioned as two of the dominant paradigms for explaining the transformation of political and economic relationships in a world that seems to become increasingly interdependent with the passing of time, with boundaries that once defined national cultures becoming fuzzy. The debates on globalization and postcolonialism are now so universal in character, and the literature on these topics is so extensive, that they are difficult to summarize or categorize. And to the extent that it dominates most debates on the nature of society and economy in the social sciences, globalization must be considered one of the constitutive elements of disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. Similarly, it is difficult to conceive an area of literary studies, from medievalism to postmodernism, that is not affected by debates on postcolonial theory and postcoloniality. While diverse writers on globalization and postcolonialism might have differing interpretations of the exact meaning of these categories, or their long-term effect on the institutions of knowledge production in the modern world, they have at least two important things in common: they are concerned with explaining forms of social and cultural organization whose ambition is to transcend the boundaries of the nation-state, and they seek to provide new vistas for understanding cultural flows that can no longer be explained by a homogenous Eurocentric narrative of development and social change. For scholars trying to understand cultural and social production in the new millennium, globalization is attractive both because of its implicit universalism and its ability to reconcile local and global interests. Furthermore, globalization is appealing to social analysts because of what is perceived as its conjunctive and disjunctive form and function. In the first regard, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse has noted, globalization brings the universal and the local together in a moment of conceptual renewal and "momentum of newness." ¹ In the second instance, what Arjun Appadurai calls global mediascapes and ideoscapes have become the site of tension between "cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization." ² In both cases, the language that enables conjuncture or disjuncture—hybridity and cultural transition, for example—comes directly from the grammar book of postcolonial theory. In this sense, one could argue that what makes current theories of globalization different from earlier ones, let's say those associated with modernization in the 1950s and 1960s, is their strategic deployment of postcolonial theory.

Besides their shared cultural grammar, however, the relationship between globalization and postcoloniality is not clear; neither are their respective meanings or implications. Is postcoloniality a consequence of the globalization of culture? Do the key terms in both categories describe a general state of cultural transformation in a world where the authority of the nation-state has collapsed or are they codes for explaining a set of amorphous images and a conflicting set of social conditions? The discourse of globalization is surrounded by a rhetoric of newness, but what exactly are the new vistas that these terms provide analysts of societies and cultures that have acquired a transnational character? Is globalization a real or virtual phenomenon? Where do we locate postcoloniality—in the spaces between and across cultures and traditions or in national states, which, in spite of a certain crisis of legitimacy, still continue to demand affiliation from their citizens and subjects? These questions are made even more urgent by the realization that while we live in a world defined by cultural and economic flows across formally entrenched national boundaries, the world continues to be divided, in stark terms, between its "developed" and "underdeveloped" sectors. It is precisely because of the starkness of this division that the discourse of globalization seems to be perpetually caught between two competing narratives, one of celebration, the other of crisis.

From one perspective, globalization appears to be a sign of the coming into being of a cultural world order that questions the imperial cartography...