The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism In The Age Of Global Capitalism

269 Pages·1998·35.24 MB·English

by  Arif Dirlik

The Postcolonial Aura:
Third World Criticism in
the Age of Global Capitalism
Arif Dirlik
Westview Press
The Postcolonial Aura
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The Postcolonial Aura
Third World Criticism in the Age
of Global Capitalism
Arif Dirlik
WestviewPress
A!! rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this publication may
be reproduced or transmitted in arty form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, in-
cluding photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing front the publisher,
Copyright © 1997 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Published in 1998 in the United States of America by Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue,
Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877, and in the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 Hid's
Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publkation Data
Dirlik, Arif.
The postcolonial aura : Third World criticism in the age of global
capitalism / Arif Dirlik,
p, cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-3249-4
1, Developing countries—Historiography. 2. Culture—Study and
teaching. I. Title.
D883.D57 1997
306—dc21 96-46800
CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Stan-
dard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Contents
Preface viii
Credits xiii
1 Introduction: Postcoloniality and the Perspective of History i
The Epistemology of Postcolonial Criticism, 5
Postcolonial Criticism in the Perspective of History, 7
Theory, History and Common Sense: Local Movements
and Indigenism as Locations for a New Radicalism, 16
Notes, 18
2 Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating Practice 23
Culturalism and Marxist Cuituralism, 26
Historicism, Structuralism and Hegemony: The Alienation
of Intellectuals and the Abstraction of Society, 34
The Third World Intellectual and Marxist Historicism, 37
Culture, Hegemony and Liberation, 45
Notes, 50
3 The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the
Age of Global Capitalism 52
Postcolonial Intellectuals and Postcolonial Criticism, 54
Global Capitalism and the Condition of Postcoloniality, 69
Notes, 77
4 The Global in the Local 84
Rethinking the Local, 85
"Global Localism," 90
Considerations on the Local as Site of Resistance, 96
Notes, 102
V
vi Contents
5 Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism 105
Orientalism, 105
"The Orientalism of the Orientals," 108
Orientalism Reconsidered, 117
Notes, 124
6 There Is More in the Rim than Meets the Eye;
Thoughts on the "Pacific Idea" 129
The Pacific Rim: EuroAmerican and Asian, 129
The Pacific and EuroAmerican Vision, 130
Glimpses from the Inside, 133
Indigenous Visions/Pacific Rim Discourse, 138
Notes, 142
7 Three Worlds or One, or Many? The Reconfiguration
of Global Relations Under Contemporary Capitalism 146
The Third World in Contemporary Criticism, 147
Global Capitalism and the Question of the Third World, 154
"Reinventing Revolution," 158
Notes, 160
8 Postcolonial or Postrevolutionary? The Problem of
History in Postcolonial Criticism 163
Postcolonial Criticism and History, 165
Postcoloniality and Capitalism, 172
Postcolonialism and Revolution, 177
Notes, 181
9 The Postmodernization of Production and Its
Organization: Flexible Production, Work and Culture 186
Management and Culture: Transnationalism and the
Production of Postmodernity, 190
Postmodernism: With and Without Capitalism, 202
Organizational Postmodernism—And Postmodernism, 210
Notes, 213
10 The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism
in the Perspective ot Indigenous Historicism 220
Cultural Identity and Power, 222
Cultural Identity/Historical Trajectory, 228
Contents, vii
Concluding Remarks, 236
Notes, 239
About the Book and Author 245
Index 247
Preface
The essays in this volume range in coverage from questions of cultural self-
representation in China and problems in the construction of a Pacific region to
more general problems of reconceptualizing global relationships in a way that is
appropriate to contemporary circumstances. They are guided by two primary
motivations. First is to evaluate critically contemporary reconceptualizations of
the post-World War II mapping of global relations in terms of the Three Worlds
idea; especially in the so-called postcolonial criticism that is currently fashion-
able. Second is to formulate alternative modes of analysis that recognize the rad-
ical transformations in global relations, while insisting on the necessity of recall-
ing the political aspirations of earlier radical conceptualizations of global
relations that were embedded in an urge to create alternative modernities, which
are suppressed in much of a cultural criticism dominated by postmodernism and
its "off-EuroAmerican" offshoot, postcolonialism. In the process, I seek to place
the idea of postcoloniality in historical perspective, to bring into relief its intel-
lectual and political implications, which resonate with the ideology of a transna-
tional capitalism.
Against the repudiation in postcolonial criticism of global or translocal struc-
tures and metanarratives in the name of localized encounters and the politics of
identity, I insist that attention to structural context, especially the context of a
globalized capitalism, is necessary not just to grasp contemporary global rela-
tions, but the very phenomenon of postcolonial criticism, with its insistence on
the autonomy of culture and the priority it gives to questions of ethnicity and
culture over earlier concerns with class and gender. Postcolonial criticism is vague
in compass; in current usage, "postcolonial critics" occupy a broad political spec-
trum, from Marxist-feminists such as Gayatri Spivak to Stuart Hall and Paul
Gilroy, who seek to ground the politics of identity in the material circumstances
of capitalism, to idealist constructionists such as Horni Bhabha, whose intellec-
tual stances suggest but a leftish libertarianism. It may not be too surprising that
the version of "postcolonial criticism" that has exerted the greatest influence in
American universities is that which has foregrounded the politics of identity
against questions of structure and totality, that finds in "hybridity," "heterogene-
ity," and "in-betweenness" (terms that Bhabha has done much to popularize) keys
to the resolution of problems that plague contemporary societies.
via
Preface ix
Postcolonial criticism provides an example of how cultural criticism, through
an inflation of its claims or an unbridled expansion of its scope, may dissipate its
critical energies to end up in an uncritical, and narcissistic, celebration of its own
novelty. Like its progenitor, postmodernism, postcolonialisni has its intellectual
origins in the poststructwalist revolt against the very real limitations of Euro-
centric modernity (in both its liberal and Marxist versions), and has answered a
very real critical need: not only in calling into question the obliviousness to the
local of generalized notions of modernity, but also in calling attention to prob-
lems of a novel nature that have emerged with recent transformation in global
political and social relations. The former includes, in addition to the homogeniz-
ing claims of modernity, its oppositional by-products that reify collective identi-
ties of one kind or another, with consequences that are often divisive, at times
genocidal. The latter entails both the structural transformations that have
attended the globalization of capitalism, and the related reconfiguration of
post—World War II economic and political boundaries with the emergence of new
social forces that find in the scrambling of reified identities outlets for expressing
their own desires for liberation.
Postcolonial criticism has quickly spent its critical power, however, as its ques-
tioning of totalizing solutions has turned into exclusion from criticism of the
historical and the structural contexts for the local, without reference to which
criticism itself is deprived of critical self-consciousness and, as it celebrates itself,
knowingly or unknowingly also celebrates the conditions that produced it.
Whether postcolonial criticism has been appropriated by those who did not
share its initial critical, intentions is a moot question, as its methodological
denial of structures and its methodological individualism have facilitated such
appropriation.
Rather than a critique of earlier radicalisms from the inside as initially in-
tended, postcolonialism in its unfolding has turned into a repudiation of the pos-
sibility of radical challenges to the existing system of social and political relations.
Its preoccupation with local encounters and the politics of identity rules out a
thoroughgoing critique of the structures of capitalism, or of other structurally
shaped modes of exploitation and oppression, while also legitimizing arguments
against collective identities that are necessary to struggles against domination and
hegemony. Ironically, the call for attention to "difference" has ended up rendering
"difference" itself into a metahistorical principle, making it nearly impossible to
distinguish one kind of "difference" from another politically. The repudiation of
teleology in postcolonial criticism (and postmodernism in general) has created
intellectual spaces for the voicing of alternatives to a Eurocentric modernity,
allowing significant speech to those silenced earlier, or disdained as castaways
from history. On the other hand, the same postcolonialism is quick to undermine
such alternatives by denying the possibility of authenticity of claims to collective
identity. What theory giveth, theory taketh away, almost as soon as it has been