Neoliberal Globalization and the future of Postcolonial Studies

Neoliberal Globalization and the future of Postcolonial Studies I certainly think there is a post-post-colonial generation. I'm sure a lot of voices you're seeing coming out now are people who never had a colonial experience. We don't place a burden of guilt on someone who's no longer there. So it's like, what are we doing with where we come from, and how can we address issues here. It's our fault if things aren't going well. That's a very different stance than a lot of what's come before. --------Mohsin Hamid, “The Chronicle Online” Questions about the relevance of the field have plagued postcolonial studies for more than a decade. After its dramatic rise in the ‘cultural turn’ in the 80s, the field came close to, as Chantal Zabus succinctly puts it, a near death experience owing mostly to the field’s allegiance to postmodernism, the rise of globalization studies, postcolonialim’s consequent chasm with the praxis of decolonization and the disenchantment with its theoretical abstruseness in the phase of post-theory (4). The recent years have seen a definite materialist turn in postcolonial studies. While poststructural concerns like liminality, hybridity and multiculturalism reigned postcolonial studies in the 80s and the 90s, recent scholarship in the field testifies a shift in emphasis on the material realities of the postcolonial world in the context of neoliberal globalization. Seminal works like Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Wilson, Sandru, and Lawson’s edited volume Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium edited by (a 2007 conference and a special issue in 2009 in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing had already taken up the same title), Rumina Sethi’s The Politics of Postcolonialism: Empire, Nation and Resistance (2011), Thus, There is an increasing plea for taking the discipline beyond its postmodern leanings, and instead to focus on issues like neocolonialism, transnational capital flow, the restructuring of the nation state, migration of labor, structural marginalization of the poor and the minorities, neoliberal ideologies and policies. The need for the hour is thus to Graham Huggan lists as the three most important characteristics of the new postcolonial critical framework—namely, a renewed vigilance of capitalistic networks, an intersection with other disciplines other than English literary studies and a focus on the questions of marginalization within the context of the nation state (“Interdisciplinary” 241). This essay is an exploration of the global turn in postcolonial studies and the new critical frameworks that address the concerns of the postcolonial nations in the modern day globalized world. The Lacuna of Postcolonialism: The materialist critique of postcolonialism has been a central debate in the field for the last two decades. Materialist critics and postcolonial cultural critics have assumed contrary positions in a long trajectory that dates back to their differential interpretation of the colonial process itself. Again while postcolonialism takes a cultural turn through Edward Said’s Orientalism, the debate between materialist critics and cultural postcolonialists have been invoked in the contrasting positions regarding Fanon vs Aime, between critics Eagleton vs Said, and between Bhabha vs Ahmad. One of the major criticisms of postcolonial theory has been its failure to address the power dynamics of the contemporary globalized world, a critique largely emanating mostly from the Marxist critics of postcoloniality who urge for a materialist reading of the post-colonial condition and globalization, rather than just a cultural interpretation that is primarily reached through the paradigms of poststructuralism. Postcolonialism’s anti-colonial stand, primarily reached through the binaries between the colonizer and the colonized and evident in the early work of Fanon, Memmi and Mannoni, became redundant in later postcolonialism that was deeply influenced by the interrogations of binaries in poststructuralistm. Postcolonialism’s post-structural turn is epitomized by Bhaba’s concept of the hybridity, “‘hybridity' which is commonly defined as “the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization” (Ashcrost, Griffith, Tiffin 118). Thus the binaries of the Self and the Other, the colonizer and the colonized, the oppressor and the oppressed were overshadowed by the concepts of in-betweenness, contact zones, cultural amalgamation, multiculturalism, which distinctly aim more at paradigms of synthesis and exchange rather than polarities. Consequently, this also marks the alienation of postcolonialism from political concerns of anti-colonialism to a cultural concerns of identity and cultural diversity Thus, while the cultural critics of postcolonialism like Bhaba and proponents of cultural globalization like Arjun Appadurai—who is widely cited in postcolonial theory—celebrate the transnational flow of culture and the erasure of boundaries as something emancipatory, the materialist critics argue for a more critical reading of globalization in terms of the capital flow and socio-economic dynamics. Materialist Marxist critics and postcolonial cultural critics have assumed contrary positions in a long trajectory that dates back to their differential interpretation of the colonial process itself. David Murphy succinctly summarizes the long history of materialist critique of postcolonial studies, which he points out, revolves around three major criticisms: Postcolonialism’s deep alliance with poststructuralism that “focuses on textual issues instead of historical issues” and reads colonialism through the paradigm of representation rather than any other form of socio-economic exploitation Postcolonialism’s conceptualization of the migrant as the “archetype of a postcolonial identity” that prioritizes the notions of hybridity, ambivalence and in-betweenness, and is essentially based on the postcolonial elite The temporal ambiguity of postcolonialism that celebrates the contemporary world as an emancipatory space for the free flow of culture and borderless-ness, whereas the materialist critics interpret current globalization through their concerns for neocolonialism (183). The long standing dispute between the two fields has often resulted in fierce critiques and disavowals of each other, with the contestation reaching its peak in the context of contemporary globalization. While neither Marxist materialism nor Postcolonialism is a theoretically flawless, self-sufficient critical framework capable of addressing the various complexities of globalization exclusively on its own, the intersection of the two can lead to a mutual enrichment of both the fields. One of the earliest and significant materialist critiques of postcolonialism comes from Ella Shohat in her seminal essay “Notes on the Postcolonial.” Among Shohat’s many critiques of the term postcolonial, one important issue she raises is that postcolonial scholarship seems to consider colonialism as an event of the past, failing to address the continuing legacy of colonialism through “neocolonial” economic globalization and military occupations of the contemporary day and age. Her impassioned critique is worth quoting at length: As a signifier of a new historical epoch, the term "post-colonial," when compared with neo-colonialism, comes equipped with little evocation of contemporary power relations; it lacks a political content which can account for the eighties and nineties-style U.S. militaristic involvements in Granada, Panama, and Kuwait-Iraq,…The "post-colonial" leaves no space, finally, for the struggles of aboriginals in Australia and indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, in other words, of Fourth World peoples dominated by both First World multi-national corporations and by Third World nation-states. (105) Shohat’s objection against the concept of postcolonialism is primarily a problem of temporality. For Shohat, the notion of the “colonial” in postcolonialism is completely disjoint from the contemporary imperialistic ventures or military interventions of “Anglo-American free-trade hegemony” (104), evident through instances of the U.S militaristic interventions in Iraq, Panama, Granada to protect its oil interests in the Gulf, or the Trade Liberalization Treaty in Mexico—which Shohat identifies as “new forms of colonialism, i.e neocolonialism” (107). Thus, postcolonial studies, as Shohat points out back in 1992, had failed to take into account the forces of transnational capitalism that has started to restructure the world in a way that it can no longer be understood solely through the paradigm of the earlier colonialism. Shohat recounts how conservative members of Shohat’s college curriculum committee at CUNY strongly resisted any language that referred to issues like “imperialism” and “neocolonialism,” they were apparently “visibly relieved at the sight of the word “post-colonial’” (99) which seemed less threatening to the contemporary hegemony. Shohat’s criticism is taken a step further by Arif Dirlik in his famous article “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” whereby he not only asserts, along Shohat’s line, the inadequacy of postcolonial studies in the contemporary context of global capitalism, but goes further to argue that “postcoloniality is the condition of global capitalism” (356). Dirlik strongly contends that the world has moved beyond the conditions of colonialism and transformed into a “global capitalist network” (349) headed by transnational corporations. The changes are more than evident—capitalism has been decentered nationally, production has been transnationalized, and most importantly, “the narrative of contemporary capitalism is no longer historically specific to Europe (350), whereas postcolonial thinking is still centered on Europe as the center of its theorizations. Thus, for Dirlik the Eurocentric model and the paradigm of colonialism that form the crux of postcolonial studies are utterly inadequate to address the workings of the contemporary globalized world. Dirlik’s target is specifically the postcolonial critics in Western academia whose increased visibility and academic respectability, Dirlik asserts , are affirmed precisely because the concepts of postcolonial criticism resonate with the global consciousness of “capitalistic world economy” or “global capitalism”(330). For Dirlik, the primary problem is not only that the postcolonial critics are “silent” in the context of contemporary capitalism (331) but also that postcolonialism, as an academic discipline, plays a proactive role in diverting the attention from contemporary power dynamics of global capitalism. It does so, Dirlik argues ,by “throwing the cover of culture over material relationships”(347) and by constructing a privileged postcolonial identity that rejects class relations and by prioritizing “local interactions” over “global structures” that shape them, thereby proposing the hybridity or “in-betweenness of the postcolonial subject” (Dirlik 336). Consequently, Dirlik argues, postcolonialism itself is a theoretical endeavor to cover up for the crisis of global capitalism: “To put it bluntly, postcoloniality is designed to avoid making sense of the current crisis and, in the process, to cover up the origins of postcolonial intellectuals in a global capitalism of which they are not so much victims as beneficiaries” (353). Dirlik’s claim of the complicity of the postcolonial critics with the forces of global capitalism echoes the famous indictment by A. K. Appiah in his essay "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” where Appiah asserts that “postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery” (348). Taking the case of Nigerian artworks that circulate in the global market, Appiah contends that the postcolonial-postmodern theorization of the global flow of culture as a celebratory process of exchange and dissolution of binaries also signifies how these fields of study “are remarkably insensitive to, not so much dismissive of as blind to, the issue of neocolonial-ism or ‘cultural imperialism’ ” (348). Most of the criticism against postcolonialism as an ineffective tool to understand globalization stems from this critique of postcolonialism as too deeply entrenched in postmodernism. The crux of the issue lies in postcolonialism’s emphasis on ‘hybridity,’ which is identified as an essentially postmodern concept and celebrated as a condition of globalization. One of the most vocal voices against hybridity has been that of Aijaz Ahmad, who in his famous essay “The Politics Of Literary Postcoloniality” critiques postcolonialism for its insistence on postmodernism—a paradigm he describes as nothing but “apocalyptic anti-Marxism”(110). Ahmad’s objection to the postmodern leanings of postcolonial studies concerns its three major thematic concerns: a) “the theme of ’hybridity’, ’ambivalence’ and ’contingency’, as it surfaces especially in Bhabha’s writing but also much beyond; (b) the theme of the collapse of the nation-state as a horizon of politics; and (c) the theme of globalised, postmodern electronic culture, which is seen at times as a form of global entrapment and at other times as yielding the very pleasures of global hybridity”. Thus, for Ahmad, while the nation state increasingly gains in importance and continues to play a significant role especially in the context of state control over transnational finance, the celebration of globalization of culture through global electronic media is to foreground the “structural offensive of capital,” or “imperialist ideology” the when substantial proportions of the global population” are deprived of “conditions of bare survival, let alone electronic literacy and gadgetry” (13). For Ahmad thus, the postcolonial critic claiming cultural hybridity, which he terms as “carnivalesque” (13), assumes an essentially elite position. Thus, the privileged migrant who can “live a life of constant mobility and surplus pleasure” is totally dissociated from the class struggles and local resistances (13). Ahmad not only declares postcolonialism as incapable of addressing the crisis of contemporary global capitalism, he also echoes in Dirlik’s line of argument, that the postcolonial cultural critics are themselves consumers and producers of interchangeable, commodified cultures that represent the “depthlessness and whimsicality of postmodernism - the cultural logic of Late Capitalism”—in Jameson’s superb phrase”(17). In a similar way, Slavoj Zizek too rejects the critical framework of postcolonialism that seeks to prioritize the question of cultural difference over other material aspects of power hierarchy, whereby “we learn that the root of postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance toward the Other and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance toward the "stranger in Ourselves," in our inability to “confront what we repressed in and of ourselves” (195). Consequently, as Zizek argues, prioritizing this multicultural model transforms the politico-economic struggle into “pseudopsychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas”, an approach that dangerously neglects the “global capitalist coordinates” (195). Again, for many like Lawrence Grossberg, this neglect of global capitalism actually amounts to a complicit alliance with it. As Sabine Milz points out, Grossberg asserts that “the postmodernist faith in difference and hybridity as forms of agency and emancipation may appear ironic precisely because it plays into the power field of neoliberal globalization, whose decentered structures and logics of power deconstruct the very notions of the modern subject and the modern nation-state challenged in postmodern (-postcolonial) critiques” (28). Grossberg’s argument of the implicit connection between multiculturalism and neoliberal ideology is also something that Walter Benn Michaels also points out, asserting that the neoliberal novel diverts the attention from economic issues to issues of cultural difference, asserting cultural equality as the highest form of emancipation: “What the neoliberal novel likes about cultural difference is that it sentimentalizes social conflict, imagining that what people really want is respect for their otherness rather than money for their mortgages”. The eclipsing of the material by the cultural as discursive categories in postcolonialism has been the central critique against the otherwise fecund discipline. However, it is not only the Marxist critics who point out these crucial gaps in postcolonialism as an efficient critical framework for the contemporary world. Postcolonial literary critics and supporters, who emphatically place themselves within the field of postcolonial studies and defend many of its contributions as valuable, also recognize this lack and the need for the consequent revision of the discipline. Thus, though defending postcolonialism against the critiques of Ahmad and Dirlik, they do agree on the fact that the field needs to address its lack in terms of the changing material realities of globalization. For example, as a cultural theorist Stuart Hall defends postcolonialism with the claim that all the recent developments of our modern world—like the power politics of Gulf War—can be understood through the context of colonialism, as a crisis of the struggle for decolonization (244). Hall strongly objects the strict periodization of the post-colonial history into a separate period of global capitalism, that both Shohat and Dirlik seem to argue for, and instead applauds postcolonialism for rupturing the meta-narratives of European modernity through a more radical intervention of colonialism that also offers important insights the moment of current globalization as well. Thus citing Dirlik’s criticism Hall contends that all the contemporary issues of economic globalization that Dirlik lists in his essay as ignored by the postcolonialists —the “new international division of labor,” “de-centering of capitalism nationally,” “the transnationalization of production” (Dirlik 350); “the weakening of boundaries,” the homogenization of culture (Dirlik 353)—are themes that are often dealt by the ‘distinct’ theoretical paradigm of postcolonial studies. In spite of his impassioned advocacy for postcolonialism, Hall too asserts that traditional postcolonialism has failed to address the issues of the contemporary world. However for Hall, the problem with postcolonialism is not so much its cultural framework as it is a question of restricted temporality—since in spite of being theoretically sophisticated to potentially address the crisis of the contemporary world, postcolonialism has been undermined by the shortsightedness of the postcolonial intellectuals who have mostly restricted themselves to the historical period of colonialism in their writings, instead of exploring the ideas of postcolonialism in other contemporary contexts. For Hall, this has been “seriously damaging” (257) for the field, and he asserts that Dirlik is justified to call for a critical assessment in postcolonial studies as a “genuine theoretical need” (258). A seminal postcolonialist, Ania Loomba follows Hall’s line of argument in defending the importance of postcolonial discourses. Arguing that subaltern discourses, narratives of colonized people, women and other minorities “revise our understanding” of the grand narratives of “colonialism, capitalism and modernity” (249), Ania Loomba asserts that “capitalism, as it was theorized by traditional Marxism” alone cannot be an adequate model for explaining the complexities of colonialism (249). Loomba then asserts, contrary to Dirlick’s plea for a critical framework based on capitalism, the importance of postcolonialism as an intervention to understand the peripheries of the non-Western world. Echoing Hall’s indictment that the postcolonial marks a critical interruption into the grand narratives of Europe, including Marxism, Loomba asserts that “global narratives” seem to swallow the complexities while postcolonialism offers an understanding of the same narratives though the context of the “local and the marginalised”(249). However, having said that, Loomba also articulates the need of situating postcolonial discourse in the current context of globalization. Loomba agrees with Dirlik on the point that postcolonial intellectuals do not pay serious attention to the operations of global capitalism today (250) and asserts that “whether this neglect is due to disciplinary training and affiliations of postcolonial critics…there is no doubt that neither local nor global cultures, neither nation nor hybridity, can be thought about seriously without considering how they are shaped by economic systems” (250). Thus Loomba emphatically asserts that if postcolonial studies has “to survive in a meaningful way it needs to absorb itself far more deeply in the contemporary world and the local circumstances within which colonial institutions are being moulded into the disparate cultural and socio-economic practices which define our contemporary ‘globality’ ” (257). In another defense of postcolonialism, Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks critiques Ahmad’s criticism for its contradictory arguments and its reductive assessment of postcolonialism. Arguing that a stability of class and national identities, that Ahmad seems to urge for, might not be possible in this “age of total capitalist penetration” (62), Crooks commends postcolonial studies for its very “amorphousness that permits it to be simultaneously self-critical and oppositional”(66). Simultaneously, she rejects Marxism as a self-sufficient discipline with “some sort of ready-made grid that can be imposed upon social realities” (65). Thus for Crooks, the crisis of postcolonial studies (she does admit that there is a melancholy and incoherence from within the field) is not a question of its amorphousness but rather an inability to theorize on the notion of the marginality, which misleadingly aligns postcolonialism with the project of multiculturalism and concerns of cultural marginality, instead of a socio-political one—“it is imperative to see how the agenda of postmodern criticism again embarrasses “postcoloniality” by once more characterizing it as the discourse of the margin (as the space of otherness), by placing it at the vanguard of cultural and political critique” (53). However, most other postcolonial critics concur with the materialist critics in reproving postcolonialism’s too deep entrenchment with postmodernism, which renders postcolonialism an ineffective framework to conceptualize globalization. Milz rightly notes that other notable essays such as Simon Gikandi’s “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality” and Simon During's “Postcolonialism and Globalization: Towards a Historicization of Their Inter-relation” attest to the same ideas that “while globalization and postcoloniality have become two major paradigms for expounding the global spread of capitalist culture, the relationship between the two has remained unclear and ineffectual, mostly because of first world postcolonial study's postmodernist penchants”. Citing the case of two Guinean boys whose dead bodies were found in a cargo plane when they were trying to flee away to Europe, Gikandi comments that concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘difference,’ that “comes directly from the grammar book of postcolonial theory,” (628) project a celebratory narrative of globalization that is different from the dystopic “material experiences of everyday life and survival” (632) of the poor in the poorer nations. Thus as Gikandi points out, the postcolonial celebration of cultural hybridity through the figure of the comprador “émigré elite” (644) eludes the more critical crisis of globalization for the common, marginalized poor—“the globalization that they had in mind when they became stowaways on the European plane was different from that espoused by postcolonial theorists. The boys were neither seeking cultural hybridity nor ontological difference. Their quest was for a modern life in the European sense of the world; their risky journey from Africa was an attempt to escape both poverty and alterity” (631). Thus for Gikandi, it is these lived material realities of globalization that postcolonialism fails to take into account in its exclusive quest for non-binary, transnational, postmodern cultural identities. While Gikandi credits the likes of Bhaba and Appadurai for constituting a cultural practice based on difference and hybridity that undermines the grand narrative of European modernity (633), he points out the glaring flaws of postcolonialism in its exclusive over-emphasis on literary and artistic images rather than on other socio-economic parameters of understanding globalization: As long as globalization is conceived as a cultural rather than a structural experience, it functions as what Roland Robertson has called ‘‘a site of social theoretical interests, interpretative indulgence, or the display of world-ideological preferences’’; considered as an aggregate of local experiences in displacement rather than a structure patterned by causal relationships, the culture of globalization cannot account for ‘‘the global-human condition (644) Similarly, discussing postcolonialism under the two contrary rubrics of “critical postcolonialism” and “reconciliatory postcolonialism,” (385) Simon During asserts that by setting out notions like “hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence” that intermingle the colonized into colonizing cultures, postcolonialism has become more “reconciliatory rather than a critical, anti-colonialist category”(386). During distinguishes between critical and reconciliatory postcolonialisms, asserting “that the former seeks radical alternatives to modernity based on non-Western traditions and lifeways, while the latter works to reconcile colonized peoples to colonialism”(385) During critiques the naïve assumptions of postcolonial approach to celebrate the flow of culture as a resistive and emancipatory process, asserting the deep nexus between culture, capital, the global market and “economically-directed political interests” (388), whereby culture itself becomes a commodity, as well as an ideological tool of interpellation into the global economy. For During, the question is less about cultures being in mélange, but rather about the political economy behind the flow of cultures: “under what structures and pressures are cultural agents all around the world making choices what to communicate or export, what to import and graft, when to shift cross-border allegiances and target new markets/audiences, and when to reshuffle their own cultural repertoire to exploit, bolster, shrink or transform their traditions and heritages?” (388). During thus completely rejects the “reconciliatory postcolonialism” of the canonical postcolonial literary critics—caustically assaulting it for assuming a position that seems to portray colonialism with a “happy ending,” where the world has supposedly been unified and de-spatialized and colonial repression has become obsolete (392). Rather, During focuses on “critical cosmopolitanism”—which though in some ways is reductive in its conceptualization of a fixed “West” that no longer exists in the age of transnational capitalism—nevertheless recognizes that globalization does not put an end to local ethnic and colonialist struggles but rather continually re-articulates and re-places them in a more dispersed world system (402). Among many other critics who seek an amendment of traditional postcolonialism through materialist revisions, Benita Parry constitutes another important name. Parry avowedly places herself within the field of postcolonial studies and assigns considerable importance to the reading of the literary texts along with the theoretical discussions. Parry’s major contribution to the field, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, argues for a materialist revision of the “myopic perspective of postcolonial studies” (3) into an inclusion of social and experiential paradigms of contemporary globalization. Like most materialist critics, Parry reproaches the linguistic and cultural turn in postcolonial studies that alienated the discipline from the historical, political and social interpretation of colonialism and its concomitant aftereffects. Parry’s critique is chiefly directed towards the trend of colonial discourse analysis and the triumvirate of postcolonial theory—Said, Bhaba and Spivak—who by rejecting the binary oppositions of power between the colonizer and the colonized project only a discursive and representational mode of resistance reached through a deconstructivist reading of the text. Thus for Bhabha, Parry points out, the ‘hybrid moment’ is reached only through the deconstructivist act of locating ambivalence and disjunctures of the colonialist text which displaces the ‘authorizing presence’ (“Signs taken for Wonders” 25); while for Spivak (“Can the Subaltern Speak?”) the colonized subaltern is subjected to an epistemic violence and forever relegated to silence, who again can be retrieved only through an deconstructivist reading. Parry argues that these approaches of prioritizing the discursive paradigm over the material undermine the social praxis of people who are still engaged in “colonial struggles against contemporary forms of neocolonialism” (26). Projecting an alternative practice of approaching literature, Parry thus refers to Abdul Jan Mohamed’s essay “The Economy of Manichean Allegory” for its reading of colonial literature in an alternative way—whereby it serves “a necessary reminder that colonialism was a protean phenomenon and its discursive violence inseparable from material and institutional force”(28).Simultaneously, asserting that Marxism is not necessarily at tandem with questions of culture, Parry calls for a model of critical framework, borrowing from Jameson, that seeks to “grasp culture in and for itself, but also in relationship to its outside, its content, its context, and its space of intervention and of effectivity” (Jameson 47, qtd in Parry 5). The materialist critiques and reconsiderations of postcolonialism thus claim that though postcolonialism has made valuable contributions in theorizing the cultural dynamics of the colonizing process; in positing a critical framework that transcends the grand Eurocentric narratives and in proposing a more nuanced notion of non-binary identities, the field of postcolonial studies has failed to recognize the influence of the global circulation of capital power. This however does not spell the end of postcolonialism as a relevant field of critical enquiry. Not only is postcolonialism indispensible in addressing the complexities of the non-Western, erstwhile colonies that cannot be effectively theorized solely by the related fields of culture studies, area studies or Marxism, postcolonialism has been one of the most intellectually fecund fields that has constantly questioned itself as a discipline, embraced a wide variety of concerns and that which refuses to impose a strict, reductive methodological framework on the reading of the texts. It is its very amorphousness and broad scope to address multiple issues concerning power, in manifold variety of ways that makes postcolonialism a discipline with immense potential to address the crisis of contemporary globalisation. Works like Postcolonial Studies and Beyond by Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul and et all, strongly proclaim the immense possibilities of critical explorations and interdisciplinary work one can explore through postcolonialism. As one of the essays in the volume by O’Brien And Imre Szeman boldly asserts—“no other critical practice has foregrounded the links between cultural forms and geopolitics to the degree that postcolonial studies has over the past four decades” (8). Subsequently, the editors of the volume sends out a clarion call for a new turn in postcolonial studies to make it more relevant as a critical field in the contemporary era of globalization. The editors see postcolonial studies reasserting its vocation through an exploration of the “contemporary shape of neoliberal global institutions” and an understanding of “the wide ideological and intellectual spectrum that has begun—very recently—to align itself with the global juggernaut” (13) mainly by shifting the attention to the USA model of neoliberal globalization. Simultaneously, they remind us that postcolonial studies, along with its focus on a decentralized network of capital and power, also needs to maintain its “historical awareness of imperialism” (14), which can contribute valuable insights into analyzing the processes of neocolonialism. The future of postcolonial studies is thus not of obsolescence but rather of a revised and more sentient critical thinking grounded both in the dynamics of culture as well as the materialist concerns of lived experiences. It is also important to mention here that a materialist turn in postcolonialism does not necessarily imply: a) a total rejection of the cultural, experiential and ideological dimensions of the literary text; nor does it suggest b) a rejection of literary approaches by strictly applying the methodologies of other disciplines like economics or sociology or political science; nor seeks to c) overlook the politics and questions of representation in the texts. Imre Szeman very aptly addresses this fear against materialist criticism and points out that materialist cultural and literary criticism has often been fraught with several “misunderstandings”—either it is conceived in utterly reductive forms or has been “identified with the glum vocabulary of an older, parodic version of Marxist criticism” (2). I concur with Szeman who points out that materialist criticism is primarily “interested in the study of context or the historical situation or situatedness” (2), and cannot be totally conflated with either Marxist criticism or New Historicist criticism, though it does borrow from those fields. In its very simplistic conception, the new postcolonialism is a syncretistic discipline, which in Milz’s words, “excludes neither the study of the interiority of literary texts (traditional textual analysis) nor the study of "literature's relation to the processes of globalization as they manifest themselves in a variety of historical periods” (Jay 35). But what are the broad tropes through which a more materialistic postcolonial literary analysis can be reached in the context of globalization? What specific revisions or disciplinary turns do the new literary postcolonialism can envision? In this article, I propose four main paradigms through which postcolonialism can be thought out as an effective critical framework for literary analysis in the era of globalization: One of the ways through which the new postcolonial readings of contemporary literature can address the material conditions of globalization is through an understanding of the politics of production, dissemination and reception of the postcolonial texts as cultural commodities in the global literary market. Taking cues from the enquiries of the new historicists, it is important that postcolonialism also explores the historical context of the production of the text and its role as an ideological artifact in the way it responds to the tenets of neoliberal globalization. Thus, the new interventions in postcolonial literary studies, Milz argues, should not merely focus on texts that thematize the socio-economic-political realities of globalization but must go beyond the content of the text and rather understand “the relationship between literature and globalization within the larger context of contemporary power relations between nation-states, institutions, corporations, global markets, international trade and policy instruments (e.g. the World Bank, WTO, IMF, TRIPS, GATS), and so on. Thus, with the production and consumption of the contemporary postcolonial novel inextricably tied with its commercial gains in the book market, the involvement of the international publishing houses, the corporate methods of publicity, and the marketability of the writer himself/herself, it has become increasing imperative to analyze the postcolonial texts as cultural products circulating in the global literary market. Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic and Bishnupriya Ghosh’s When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics are both important interventions in situating postcolonial literature in the context of the politics of global culture flow. Consequently it is also important to see how the postcolonial text embodies an ‘ideology’ in the Marxist sense of the term and the particular ideas it disseminates as either tool of or a resistance to the ‘hegemony’ of global capitalism. Since neoliberalism permeates into every sphere of one’s lived experience, the ideological underpinnings and the cultural apparatus of neoliberalism seek sufficient attention. Consequently, since postcolonialism has already been one of the most productive fields to theorize on the ideological import of imperialism of colonial and postcolonial literature, new postcolonialism can also be an effective critical framework to explore the complex relationship between the text and the dominant hegemony of the new context—the globalized world. Thus when encountering a text like Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, a postcolonial critic needs to look beyond the narrative of the novel, deeper into the specific ideological paean it projects for neoliberalism and the politics of its marketing and reception in the global literary market. Thus, current literature needs to be interpreted as a cultural commodity and ideological construct of globalization. A second method of addressing the material contexts of neoliberal globalization is through analyzing the way these issues are thematized in the new texts. Reading postcolonial literature of a contemporary globalized world does not solely refer to an extra-literary reading of the text as a cultural and ideological product representing the socio-economic history of the era; it also entails an understanding of the narrative and themes of the text through the material contexts encompassed in the text. Postcolonial literature post-globalization, as Paul Jay points out, is often “demonstratably different from what we might call the classic postcolonial texts, for, while they all allude in some way to the legacy of colonialism, they pay more attention to the contemporary effects of globalization than they do to the imperatives of postcolonial state making and the construction of specifically postcolonial identities and subjectivities” (95-96). Consequently, the various dynamics of what Mohsin Hamid calls as “the post-postcolonial fiction” ( qtd Jay 91), which he conceptualizes as embodying a marked disjuncture between the period of colonialization and the period of contemporary globalization, needs to be studied within the changing contexts of the erstwhile postcolonial worlds and its people. Not only are the traditional postcolonial literary tropes of colonialism, diaspora, and nationalism insufficient to understand many of the new fictions like the post 9/11 world of Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist or the world of the unskilled illegal immigrants in Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, the crisis of the postcolonial migrants in these novels hardly arise from their split postcolonial psyches or from the conflicts of their cultural identity. The issues that they face, and the world that they live in, have been vigorously restructured by new social and economic changes that determine and shape their existence. Thus to read the literature of the contemporary world, one must understand the material realities of the contemporary world itself. What constitutes those material realities? Jameson’s list might be helpful: the international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship…computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World Areas…and gentrification of a now-global scale. (xix) Subsequently, new postcolonial literary criticism needs to actively engage with interdisciplinary endeavors, especially with the social sciences which have been proactive in theorizing on the various impacts of neoliberal globalization. The need is not to dismiss the literary for the material, but rather to enrich our understanding of the text through the insights of the other disciplines—exploring how the social, economic and political realities of contemporary postcolonial nations are conceived and projected in the cultural spheres. The literary representations of a rapidly changing Delhi in Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins or the dynamics of Chandra’s modernized Mumbai cannot be fully grasped without the various insights about neoliberal cities from the urban geographers. Similarly, the resistive potential of a novel like Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People can be fully understood only with a perception of the economics of transnational corporatization and the social activism of grass root protests. An interdisciplinary approach does not necessarily place the literary text within the trajectory of extra-literary documents, but enriches our understanding of the situatedness of the postcolonial text in the context it seeks to represent. Thirdly, we need to reassess postcolonial marginality in the context of neoliberal globalization. Along with focusing on the materiality of the text and reassessing the notion of culture in the context of globalization, postcolonial criticism also requires to re-conceptualize another of its seminal, and highly debated, concept—the notion of the marginal. The figure of the postcolonial marginal often forms the central point where the discourses of globalization and anti-globalization converge and contest, making the marginal a significant figure in the literature of globalization. Thus while the rhetoric of globalization particularly focus on the marginal groups and communities, extolling them as the target for globalization’s boons, anti-globalization protests too revolve around the repression and exploitation of the marginal in the global economy. The postcolonial marginal, as critics like Spivak and Sheshadri Crooks point out, cannot be theorized by disciplines like minority studies or race studies. The notion of marginality, especially in the context of South Asia, in postcolonial criticism invokes a complex web of caste, class, religious, racial, ethnic, gender and colonial paradigms of hierarchy which makes it completely distinct from minoritization in other contexts like the Western/European societies. As Spivak points out “the stories of the postcolonial world are not necessarily the same as the stories coming from ‘internal colonization,’ the way the metropolitan countries discriminate against disenfranchised groups in their midst” (“Who claims” 274). Simultaneously, it is also true that as the postcolonial nations take up economic liberalization with increasing frequency, the postcolonial critics need to revise the earlier notions of marginality in the context of the power structures of neoliberal globalization and may benefit from the insights on the marginalization based on the tenets of neoliberal ideology and policies that seem to be projecting another dimension to our current understanding of the classic postcolonial marginal. New postcolonial criticism thus needs to consider the Third World marginal in the new context of globalization. It is against this notion of the new globalized era that Spivak theorizes on the new subaltern. Spivak asserts in “A New Subaltern” that “Today the ‘subaltern’ must be rethought. S/he is no longer cut off from lines of access to the center. Spivak mocks at herself for the irony of her position: “Today’s program of global financialization carries on that relay. Bhubaneswari had fought for national liberation. Her great-grandniece works for the New Empire. This too is a historical silencing of the subaltern. (311) The center as represented by the Bretton Woods agencies and the World Trade center, is altogether interested in the rural and indigenous subaltern” (326). Thus, the penetration of global capitalism –the New Empire— in the guise of the World Trade Organization, NGOs, bio-research companies, UN Development projects and human rights organizations – into the lowest levels of society is responsible for producing what Spivak terms the ‘new subaltern’ (276). This new subaltern, caught between global capitalism/development and tradition/culturalism, is now completely co-opted as her body is rendered data and she is sought after as intellectual property. Not only is the subaltern rendered as the site for global exploitation, the discourse of the concrete experience of the subaltern is constructed as a rationalization for globalization. Since the figure of the marginal embodies the crucial rhetoric, conflicts as well as resistive tropes of globalization, the new direction of postcolonialism, thus can be reached, as Sheshadri Crooks argues, through the “exploration of postcoloniality from the point of view of the margin (as the excluded and the limit)”(66). The focus thus needs to be on how post-liberalization has changed economically, politically, socially and geographically; and how the changing dynamics of a neoliberal world order has affected those on the margins. Finally, new postcolonial literary analysis needs to concentrate on a continued focus on the nation state in the context of globalization. Along with the figure of the marginal, new postcolonial criticism also needs to re-assess another of the central concepts of postcolonial theory—the role of the nation state. As materialist critiques of postcolonialism point out, it is too premature to proclaim the decimation of the nation state and myopic to celebrate the cultural carnival of a borderless world, when the nation state continues to play a significant role in the global world. Like the figure of the marginal, the concept of the nation state too becomes central to both pro-globalization and anti-globalization discourses. Thus, while on the one hand scholars like David Harvey asserts that though globalization creates the facade of the permeation of the borders of the nation state, it plays a central role in neoliberal globalization and has not been rendered as an obsolete structure in global politics. Simultaneously, Jameson asserts that the “nation state remains the only concrete terrain and framework for political struggle” (65) and is echoed by Timothy Brennan emphasizing the importance of the nation state as a sight of resistance “to secure respect for weaker societies or people” (42) who might be completely annihilated if left at the mercy of the neoliberal juggernaut. Thus Ania Loomba points out that contemporary postcolonial criticism must engage with a “more detailed, more patient, more accurate representation of the reciprocal flow of power (economic, social and cultural) between nation states and globalized capitalism” (21). The nation state very much exists and postcolonial criticism needs to continue its vigilance of the nation state and its new role in the era of globalization. Consequently, a vigilance of the nation state and an exploration of new notions of marginalization require postcolonial criticism to divert its focus on the literature of the ‘local’. The exploration of the phenomenon of globalization in new postcolonial criticism needs to shift its attention from primarily focusing on the literatures of the diaspora and the migrant elite, so rigorously projected through the migrant authors and the migrant protagonists in exile of many of the well known novels of Rushdie, Bharti Mukherjee, Michale Ondatje, Sashi Tharoor, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh, that come to represent the canonical postcolonial literature of India. To understand globalization through postcolonial literature, we must also focus on the literatures by resident Indians and the regional literatures who capture the repercussions of globalization on in the local context of India--for the effects of globalization are not only experienced only by the diasporic migrants but also by the local, static subjects whose lives are altered by the forces of globalization though they might not step out of their native places throughout their lives. 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