All Globalists Now

Scott A. Cohen All Globalists Now (on Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920: Resistance in Interaction [Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002]; and S. Shankar, Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Economy ofthe Text [Albany: SUNY P, 2001]) At the height of British imperialism, Joseph Chamberlain remarked: "We are all Imperialists now; we realize, but do not flinch from, the responsibilities and obligations whidi Imperialismbrings" (Holt 77). Delivered as a fait accompli, the Colonial Secretary's statement was not only a triumphant assessment of Britishglobal hegemony, but a monologic assertion of universal ideology, one designed to effectively fragment and scatter resistance. In many respects, what falls under the inclusive heading of postcolonial and global Anglophone criticism today remains committed to dedphering and pideing up the pieces in the aftermath. How does the nation constitute itself against a legacy of colonial rule? What seen and unseen forms does antiimperial resistance take? How shall we read cosmopolitan urges in literary circles or across disdplinary boundaries? What is the value of the literary, the role of language, and the influence of form on literatures of resistance or domination? How are the works of authors from former colonies received and transmitted? These questions reach from Britain's global colonial system at the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-century decolonization movements, up to the current moment, however we might define it—postcolonial , neocolonial, or global. Those studying the imposing range of cultural and textual production of modernity are not willing to go uncritically into the global realm. Since the ascension of postcolonial cultural theory, a new generation of critics has emerged to explore the theoretical and historical underpinnings of global literary culture. Many of the definitional debates that marked the early days of postcolonial criticism have happily given way to more flexible understandings of postcolonialism in the age of globalization. The time when "postcolonial" could stand solely as code for contemporary, Commonwealth, or world literature is rapidly receding into the past. Injust the past five years, groundbreaking works bike Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's edited volume Postcolonial Middle Ages, Ania Loomba's Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, Srinivas Aravamudan's Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804, Saree Makdisi's Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture ofModernity, and Ian Baucom's Out ofPlace: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations ofIdentity have inspired interest well beyond their immediate fields as they fuse an attention to colonial themes with the theories and politics of postcolonialism. 304 the minnesota review The intertwined fields of global and postcolonial studies have also been enriched by therenewed channeling ofcomparatist impulses, recently articulated by Franco Morretti, Emily Apter, and others. As Apter concisely put it, "in globalizing literary studies there is a selective forgetting of ways in which early comp lit was always and already globalized" (258). These new, broadly-concdved comparative approaches have resulted in much more than a revival of Commonwealth and world literatures (though dearly there are some who relish this possibility). Global comparatism allows for linguistic mingling that challenges both the delimiting and universalizing ambitions of English (as a language and an academic department), effectively "Decolonizing (the) English" to borrow Peter Hitchcock's provocative formulation. The rich potential for ooss-pollination has always represented postcolonial cultural studies' greatest asset and its greatest liability. As temporal restrictions give way, the keywords that have dominated the study of postcoloniality—hybridity, agency, exile, migration, alterity, marginality —carry new inflections. Consequently, recent scholarship unearths a layered archive of colonial and postcolonial interaction, sketching new directions: the voyage in is as important as the voyage out; metropolitan artifacts are on equal footing with indigenous aesthetic production; dass is addressed alongside race and gender; colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism are regarded as graduated labels; and the uses and abuses of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism are subjected to interrogation. Above all, studies exarnining former and emerging examples of oppression and uneven sodai organization focus on the shifting nature of human and spatial relations among métropoles, peripheries, and points in-between. This has deared the way for scholars to "turn to the archives of imperialist governance" in order to rigorously discharge Gayatri Spivak's nearly two-decade-old challenge "to reopen the epistemic fracture of...