Globalization and its postcolonial (dis)contents

Abstract

Whether globalization is a very new phenomenon or a very old one, what is decidedly new about current globalization theory is its postcolonial content: the vocabulary of deterritorialization, difference, and hybridity, the emphasis on the cultural, the use of certain postcolonial cultural products as evidence and exemplars of globalization. This postcolonial content is often strategically marshaled to represent globalization as a deeply disruptive yet ultimately empowering force that unleashes subaltern resistance and enables the production of alternative modernities. This paper proposes to interrogate this metropolitan postcolonial discourse on globalization against a Dalit discourse emerging in the context of caste politics in India. My discussion draws attention to certain critical disjunctures between the two discourses, focusing especially on modernity and mobility. The Dalit relationship to modernity illustrates how contested the category is within those very spaces celebrated in postcolonial theory as locations of alternative modernities. And Dalit literature exposes the limits of postcolonial mobility and hybridity by revealing the tenacious persistence, even exacerbation, of binary forms of identity under conditions of uneven globalization. Emerging at the unstable intersection of the local, the national, and the transnational, Dalit discourse thus enacts a contestatory affirmation that is expressed not in terms of desertion and evasion through mobility but in terms of a grim determination to take responsibility for the given through dwelling.

Keywords:

• globalization
• postcolonial
• modernity
• secularism
• caste
• Dalit

Notes

On Indian cricket see my “The Claims of Globalization Theory”; on Salman Rushdie see my “Mythologies of Migancy”.

Globalization appears to enable “creative adaptations” not only in the cultural arena (Goankar) but in the capitalist marketplace itself. Canclini’s work on peasant markets reinforces this view of capitalism as simultaneously oppressive and enabling.

See my “Mythologies of Migrancy”. For mobility in the Palestinian context see Rajeswari Mohan.

Despite opposition, Dalit groups managed to equate caste with race and put caste on the agenda at the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism.

S.P. Punalekar distinguishes between Dalits who subordinate cultural issues to political and economic ones and those who maintain the primacy of the cultural. Although he places most Dalit writers in the latter category, he singles out Baburao Bagul, Raosaheb Kasbe and Narayan Surve for integrating cultural critique with a critique of global capitalism.

On the category of culture in postcolonial and globalization studies see my “The Criticism of Culture”.