The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism Arif Dirlik Westview Press The Postcolonial Aura This page intentionally left blank 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