Metropolitanism and postcoloniality in Hardt and Negri’s Empire trilogy

Abstract

This article surveys Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire trilogy – Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth – in terms of postcolonialism. As “the Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century”, the trilogy has inspired contemporary leftist debates on transnationalism and shaped critical discourses about biopolitics and immaterial labor. In their manifesto, Hardt and Negri claim that old empires perished long ago, and the postcolonial condition no longer explains the current global order. Yet the trilogy is fraught with localized postcolonial issues, and the trilogy resounds with old national and colonial issues such as nationalism, imperialism and local unrests, the anxieties of which the authors cannot obliterate. By developing these localized postcolonial questions, this article takes issue with the way the trilogy assimilates postcolonial social formations that reside beneath the grand narrative of global Empire.

Keywords:

• Empire trilogy
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
• transnationalism
• biopolitics
• immaterial labor
• postcoloniality

Notes

1. Kevin C. Dunn (2004) has pointed out Hardt and Negri’s “ambiguous utilization of Africa” (143). Mark Driscoll (2010) discusses how Hardt and Negri appropriate the postcolonial legacies developed in Latin America. According to Kam Shapiro (2004), in Hardt and Negri’s description of the current world order, specific geographies are mentioned, but the concrete regional loci always return to “an unmediated confrontation between the liberating power of the multitude and the domination of sovereignty” (296). See also the essay collections edited by Ania Loomba et al. (2005) and Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley (2007), in which contributors such as Pal Ahluwalia (2007) and Vilashini Cooppan (2005) take issue with globalism from the perspective of postcolonialism.

2. For the influence of Schmitt’s thinking on these two critics, see Agamben (1998) and Esposito (2007).

3. Here the name “Gramsci” might be a code word for Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Stuart Hall, who very effectively employ Gramscian legacies for their cultural politics; see Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Hall (1996).

4. Critics often read Negri’s earlier work such as The Politics of Subversion (2005) as an advanced version of Gramscian Marxism, paying attention to the intellectual affinities shared by Negri and Gramsci as Italian critics; see Landy (1994, 72). In their trilogy, Hardt and Negri distance themselves from Gramsci (2000, 233; see also Hardt 1995).

5. For his analysis of the post-Fordist society, see Hardt (1999).

6. For their association of the multitude with monsters in the context of classical allusions, see Hardt and Negri (2004, 138, 194–196, 208–211).