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Arif Dirlik
and the futures to which it may point. At the very least, it is of some help in
explaining a widespread ambivalence regarding the presents relationship
to its past over questions of globalization versus imperialism, a centered
world of Empire versus a decentered world of civilizations in conict, and
issues of domination and hegemony in this world. The globalization of colonial modernity may also help account for a senseshared by some of us
of the immanence of fascism in contemporary global modernity.
Global Modernity
I understand the term global modernity in the singular, as a singular modernity, to use Fredric Jamesons phrase, that is nevertheless productive of contradictory claims on modernity for which it has come to serve
as a site of conict.2 My insistence on the singularity of global modernity
arises out of a recognition of some validity to arguments for globalization
and the global commonalities it implies. At the same time, global modernity
as a concept is intended to overcome a teleological (and ideological) bias
imbedded in the very term globalization: the suggestion of tendencies to
global commonality and homogeneity. It recognizes as equally fundamental tendencies to fragmentation and contradiction that are also products of
globalization and of past legacies that nd exaggerated expression in their
projection upon a global scene. Globalization in this perspective implies not
just some nave expectation of a utopianized global village or, conversely,
an undesirable global hegemony, depending on perspective, but a proliferation of boundaries globally, adding new boundaries to already existing ones
even as modernity is globalized. Notions of multiple or alternative modernities, in rendering into units of modernity traditions that are themselves
the very products of modernity, in fact universalize the claims of moder2. I stress this point in order to distinguish the argument here from approaches to global
modernity in the plural, as in the case of the essays included in the collection Global
Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks,
Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995), or Multiple Modernities, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, special
issue, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (Winter 2000). The former volume renders global modernities
into a stand-in for globalization. The Daedalus volume recognizes the singular origins of
modernity, but some of the contributions nevertheless stress differences based on culture
over the commonalities of modernity. These approaches are problematic, I think, precisely
because of their tendency to sweep under the rug issues of the colonial in modernity in the
name of globalization. For singular modernity, see Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002).
the physical and the social worlds, are still visible in the palimpsest of global
geopolitics. They provide both the context and the horizon of global politics
even as formerly marginalized states and the subalterns of colonial capitalism enter the fray.
The End of Colonialism
Colonialism has become increasingly difcult to speak about even as
the term has moved to the center of critical discourse.7 The difculties of
dealing with colonialism in the present are quite evident in the discussions
provoked by the book Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and their
argument that imperialism has now given way to an abstract Empire, without a clearly identiable center or boundaries, where empire is as much a
condition of everyday life as it is of a legal order that recognizes no outside.8
The thesis is outrageous against the background of a U.S. imperialism that
respects no boundaries except those of practical power and corporate colonization of the world. And yet few have cared to reject the argument out7. Postcolonial criticism has rendered colonialism quite problematic. The concept has
been rendered even more incoherent by the appropriation of paradigmatic postcolonial
concepts (hybridity, borderlands, etc.) for social distinctions that have little to do with colonialism in a strict sense, such as gender, race, ethnicity, etc. The broader the concept
becomes in its compass, the greater the incoherence, and the more remote its relationship to an earlier notion of the postcolonial. The incoherence also has implications for our
understanding of the present. In the works of theorists who are (rightly or wrongly) associated with the emergence of postcolonial criticism, such as Edward Said, Stuart Hall,
or Gayatri Spivak, the postcolonial was of importance because of the relevance of colonialism to understanding the present (the post implying not after but more like produced by). This is visible even in the work of Homi Bhabha, whose deconstructive efforts
would contribute signicantly to rendering the term meaningless. Postcoloniality, Bhabha writes, is a salutary reminder of the persistent neo-colonial relations within the new
world order and the multi-national division of labour (The Location of Culture [London:
Routledge, 1994], 6). Nevertheless, increasingly from the 1990s, the postcolonial has dissipated into areas that had nothing to do with the colonial and has been rendered into a
literary reading strategy rather than a social and political conceptlargely under the inuence of the likes of Bhabha.
8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2000). I prefer colonial to imperial in this discussion because, in my understanding, while
the two terms share in common the sense of the political control of one society by another,
colonial refers more directly to experiences at the everyday level, including cultural experiences, which are crucial, I think, to grasping the relationship between the present and the
world of colonialism of which it is the product.
right, as I think we are all vaguely aware that something is at work that was
not there before, that this imperialism presupposes a different ordering of
the world than in the days of good old-fashioned imperialism. Thus, James
Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, insistent on the continuity of the present with
the past, nevertheless feel constrained to write:
Using this concept, the network of institutions that dene the structure of the new global economic system is viewed not in structural
terms, but as intentional and contingent, subject to the control of individuals who represent and seek to advance the interests of a new
international capitalist class. This class, it is argued, is formed on
the basis of institutions that include a complex of some 37,000 transnational corporations (TNCs), the operating units of global capitalism, the bearers of capital and technology and the major agents of
the new imperial order. These TNCs are not the only organizational
bases of this order, which include the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund. . . . In addition, the New World Order is made up
of a host of global strategic planning and policy forums. . . . All of
these institutions form an integral part of the new imperialismthe
new system of global governance.9
Contemporary ambivalence about imperialism also has implications
for our understanding of past colonialism. The teleology of globalization is
of crucial importance. Postcolonial discourse in the immediate aftermath of
World War II, driven by goals of national liberation, was led to a seemingly
irrefutable conclusion that, in order to have a serious chance of decolonization, it was necessary for formerly colonial or semi-colonial societies to exit
from, and establish spaces outside of, the capitalist world-system. Whether
we think of globalization as a new kind of imperialism or a postimperialist
stage of modernity, the danger now is in being left out of the world-system,
not in being incorporated into it. This shift also helps account for the differences between postcolonial discourse then and now. Most importantly,
from a perspective of the present, the colonialism of an earlier day appears
not as a subjection of one people by another but as one more stage on the
way to incorporation in globalitywhich is exactly how colonialists viewed
what they were doing when they informed the colonized that they could not
be permitted to stay out of civilized exchanges of commodities or ideas.
9. James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st
Century (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing/ZED Books, 2002), 12.
What the colonialists promoted has become acceptable, it seems, but with
a difference. The formerly colonized, who now wish to join in globalization,
insist on doing it on their own terms rather than be dragged into it as the
objects of colonial power. While there is no shortage in contemporary fundamentalisms of an insistence on native subjectivities that have survived
cultural modernity intact, it is subjectivities hybridized in colonial encounters
that provide the most effective medium for the conjoining of the colonial and
the global. The two most prominent expressions of Third World presence
in globality at the present are postcolonial criticism of intellectuals, especially so-called diasporic intellectuals, and nativist traditionalism, which is
also quite intellectual in its claims but also has broad popularity beyond intellectuals. There are other alternatives that are suppressed or marginalized
by the prominence of these two alternatives. It is important here to underline
how these two alternatives complicate the issue of colonialism.
The novelty of modern colonialism, and its effects on either the colonizer or the colonized, has been in dispute all along. Liberal and conservative development discourses, most notably modernization discourse, have
for the most part dismissed colonialism as an important aspect of modernity; where they have recognized its importance, they have assigned to it
a progressive historical role.10 Marxists have been more ambivalent on the
question. Lenins interpretation of colonialism as an indispensable stage of
capitalism played a crucial part in bringing colonialism into the center of radical politics globally. Still, while mainstream Marxism has condemned colonialism for the oppression and exploitation of the colonized, it, too, often has
identied colonialism with a progressive function in bringing societies vegetating in the teeth of time, in Marxs words, into modernity.11 Third World
Marxists have shared in this ambivalence.12
Nevertheless, if colonialism as a historical phenomenon has always
10. For a recent example of a cavalier dismissal of colonialism, see Gilbert Rozman,
Theories of Modernization and Theories of Revolution: China and Russia, in Institute of
Modern History (Academia Sinica), Zhongguo xiandaihua lunwen ji (Essays on the Modernization of China) (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991), 63346.
11. Karl Marx, History of the Opium Trade, in Collected Works, by Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1981), 16:6. It is interesting that in his keywords of modernity, Raymond Williams has no entry for colonialism, although there is one
for imperialism. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
12. See the discussions of capitalism and imperialism by Chinese Marxists in the 1920s
and 1930s in Arif Dirlik, Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China,
19191937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), especially chap. 3.
been in dispute, there was, in an earlier period, some consensus over the
meaning of colonialism.13 Well into the 1970s, colonialism in a strict sense
referred to the political control by one nation of another nation or a society
striving to become a nation. Where a colony had already achieved formal
political independence but still could not claim full autonomy due primarily
to economic but also ideological reasons, the preferred term was neocolonialism. These terms could be broadened in scope to refer also to relationships between regions, as in the colonial or neocolonial subjection of the
Third to the First World. While there was some recognition, moreover, that
colonialism was not a monopoly of capitalism because it could be practiced
by socialist states as well, the ultimate cause of colonial formations was
installed in the structuring of the globe by capitalism, to which socialism itself
was a response. Hence a common assumption that the way out of the legacies of colonialism lay with some form of socialism, which in practice meant
the creation of autonomous and sovereign economies that could escape
structural dependence on advanced capitalist societies and set their own
developmental agenda.
The issue of colonialism, in other words, was subsumed, for the most
part, under questions of capitalism. To be sure, by the 1960s, questions
of the relationship between colonialism and racism were on the agenda of
postcolonial discourses. This Third Worldism may be the most important
source of contemporary postcolonial criticism. But in the immediate context of national liberation struggles, questions of race appeared more often
than not not as problems in and of themselves but as distinguishing features
of capitalism in the setting of colonialism (the form class relations took in
colonial capitalism, so to speak) that could be resolved in the long run only
through the abolition of capitalism. Anticolonial struggles derived their historical meaning primarily from their contribution to the long-term struggle
between capitalism and socialism. Lenin, much more so than Marx, was
13. My description here of the understanding of colonialism that prevailed during the two
to three decades after World War II will be familiar to most who lived through or study
that period. A cogent illustration of the various points I make may be found in the recent
English-language publication of essays on colonialism by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was one
of the preeminent critics of colonialism during the period in question. These essays, mostly
written in the late fties and early sixties, were rst published in French in 1964. See
Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, trans. from the French by Azzedine
Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
Sartres views were informed by, and in some ways are derivative of, the writings of postcolonial intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon, with whom Sartre had an intimate personal
relationship.
the inspiration behind this view of the relationship between capitalism and
colonialism.
As oppression and exploitation marked the political and economic
relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the relationship appeared culturally as a Manichean opposition between the two.14 The opposition did not obviate a recognition of a structural dialectic between the
colonizer and the colonized. Structurally, economic and political colonialism produced new practices and social formations, including class formations, that bound the two together; just as colonialism created a new native
class that drew its sustenance from the colonizer, the task of colonization
was rendered much easier by the collaboration of this class with the colonizers. Even where it was possible to speak of a common culture shared
by the colonizer and the colonized in the contact zones of the colonies,15
this common culture enhanced rather than alleviated the Manichean opposition between the two, expressed most importantly in the language of race,
leaving no doubt as to where each belonged economically, politically, and
culturally. In ideologies of national liberation, native groups and classes that
were economically and culturally entangled with colonialism were viewed
not as elements integral to the constitution of the nation but as intrusions into
the nation of foreign elements that would have to be eliminated in the realization of national sovereignty and autonomy.16 These ideas were spelled
out most forcefully in the work of Frantz Fanon, who stands in many ways
at the origins of a radical, critical, and political postcolonialism.
If we are to imagine how ambiguous the discourse of colonialism may
appear to future generations, we need look no further than postcolonial criticism as it has developed over the last decade or so, bringing to the surface
fundamental contradictions in an earlier discourse on colonialism.17 Contemporary postcolonial criticism is heir to this earlier discourse in reafrming
14. Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial
Difference in Colonialist Literature, Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 5987.
15. I borrow contact zones from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
16. Chinese Marxists, for example, argued that national autonomy and development could
not be achieved without a simultaneous social revolution that would eliminate the classes,
bourgeois or feudal, who were allied to imperialism in their interests. See Arif Dirlik,
National Development and Social Revolution in Early Chinese Marxist Thought, China
Quarterly no. 58 (April/June 1974): 286309.
17. For a discussion of the transformation of postcolonial criticism from the 1960s to the
present, see Aijaz Ahmad, The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality, Race and Class 36,
no. 3 (1995): 120.
the centrality of the colonial experience but also parts ways with it in quite
signicant ways that ironically call into question the very meaning of colonialism. There were all along Third World voices who were dissatised with
the containment of the colonial experience within the categories of capitalism and demanded a hearing for the psychological and cultural dimensions
of colonialism to which racism was of fundamental signicance.18 These are
the voices that have come forward over the last two decades, when we have
seen a distinct shift in postcolonial discourse from the economic and political
to the cultural and the personal experiential.
The results where colonialism is concerned are quite contradictory.
The shift in attention to questions of cultural identity in postcolonial discourse has been both a moment in, and a beneciary of, a more general
reorientation in Marxist thinking toward a recognition of at least the partial
autonomy of the cultural from the economic or the political spheres of life.
Introduced into the colonial context, this has resulted in a disassociation of
questions of culture and cultural identity from the structures of capitalism,
shifting the grounds for discourse to the encounter between the colonizer
and the colonized, unmediated by the structures of political economy within
which they had been subsumed earlier. The distancing of questions of colonialism from questions of capitalism has in some measure also made possible the foregrounding of colonialism, rather than capitalism, as the central
datum of modern history.
This centering of colonialism, however, has also rendered the term
increasingly ambiguous and raises serious questions, in particular about
modern colonialism. In many ways, contemporary postcolonial criticism is
most important as a reection on the history of postcolonial discourses
(a self-criticism of the discourse, in other words), bringing to the surface
contradictions that were rendered invisible earlier by barely examined and
fundamentally teleological assumptions concerning capitalism, socialism,
and the nation, but above all by revolutionary national liberation movements against colonialism, the failure of which has done much to provoke
an awareness of these contradictions. Recognition of these contradictions
also renders the concept of colonialism quite problematic. As Robert Young
writes with reference to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Memmi:
Sartres insight that the Manichean system of racism and colonization, apparently dividing colonizer from colonized, in fact generates
18. As Aime Cesaire puts it, Marx is all right, but we need to complete Marx. Quoted in
Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 133.
ently. Robert Rydell describes the coloniale moderne sensibility in earlytwentieth-century universal expositions:
Rooted in the exotic fascination with the Other cultivated at European fairs before the Great War, coloniale modernea conjuncture
of modernistic architectural styles and representations of imperial
policies that stressed the benets of colonialism to colonizer and
colonized alikedeveloped from the desire by European imperial
authorities to decant the old wine of imperialism into new bottles
bearing the modernistic designs of the interwar years. More specically, the coloniale moderne practicehabitus may be a better
expressioncrystallized around efforts by governments to make the
modernistic dream worlds of mass consumption on view at fairs unthinkable apart from the maintenance and extension of empire.26
Colonial modernity, in other words, was marked not only by inequalities in power structurally but also by inequalities in the hybridization of
those who inhabited the contact zones of colonial modernity. The term colonial modernity was used in specically colonial situations, but it may be productive in hindsight to view it as a dening characteristic of modernity in general, even where colonialism, technically speaking, did not exist (as in China
or Turkey, for example). Some of these societies had colonial ambitions of
their own, but efforts to nd some kind of equivalence between these worldempire colonialisms and the colonialism of capitalist or socialist modernity
of the kind associated with actually existing socialisms, with the nation-state
at its center, are not very convincing.27 These were the societies that, following formal decolonization, would be renamed the Third World. Now the
Third World itself has lost much of its meaning, but the global inequalities
that informed the use of the term are still very much with us, even if new
mappings have been superimposed upon earlier delineations of the nations
and regions encompassed by the term.
Aside from the hegemonic relationships produced by Euro-American
26. Robert Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Exhibitions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 62. The participants in the production of various forms of
art identiable as colonial modern included the indigenous people, colonials of European origin, and Europeans inuenced by the exoticism of the colonies. Paul Greenhalgh,
Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and Worlds Fairs,
18511939 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988), 6869.
27. For one such effort, see Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and
Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
The history of capitalism is in many ways coeval with the history of colonialism, which, as Fernand Braudel has argued, included the colonization
of Europe itself by a world economy expanding from the Mediterranean in
all directions of the globe. In the uncompromising words of Gayatri Spivak:
In the earlier stages of industrial capitalism, the colonies provided
the raw materials so that the colonizing countries could develop
their manufacturing industrial base. Indigenous production was thus
crippled and destroyed. To minimize circulation time, industrial capitalism needed to establish due process, and such civilizing instruments as railways, postal services, and a uniformly graded system of
education. This, together with the labor movements in the First World
and the mechanisms of the welfare state, slowly made it imperative that manufacturing itself be carried out on the soil of the Third
World, where labor can make fewer demands, and the governments
are mortgaged.31
We may have come full circle at present, when it is possible to speak
of the structures and the de-structurationscultural as well as material
generated by the colonial past in their deterritorialization from the nationstate, where motions of capital, commodities, peoples, and cultures have
in turn put into motion national or civilizational claims on modernity, giving
global modernity its uid appearance. Colonial modernity is still visible not
only in the unevenness of modernity as it appears in static mappings of
the world but also in the persistence of colonial spaces and the power relations that direct global ows. Capital and production are in the process of
being exported to the Third World, completing the task of economic colonization, now in the name of development and globalization. There is an
apparent redistribution of wealth among the laboring populations even as it
is concentrated simultaneously in the hands of a global elite cutting across
national, regional, or other boundaries of First, Second, and Third Worlds.
The jobs of blue- and white-collar workers are exported from the First to
the Third World, even as former colonials travel home to mother in the colonial spaces that refuse to vanish with talk about globalization. If so-called
globalization does not look like the colonialism of old, it is because the
unevenness and inequality created by colonialisms globally is deterritorialized from the nation, and wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of
31. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and
London: Methuen, 1987), 90.
character were the result of the clash with and suppression of colonial barbarians; interestingly, howeverand embarrassingly for the
Britishthese colonial products were not all simply left to cope with
their own problems in their Third World countries following decolonisation, but some of them reversed the colonial migratory movement and, as a result of the form decolonisation assumed (British
attempts to cling to the spoils of Empire through the Commonwealth),
re-appeared on the British scene as immigrants, would-be settlers
and British nationals.33
Conclusion
In addressing the relationship between capitalism, colonialism, the
nation-state, and cultural modernity, among other things, it makes some
sense to keep these concepts separate analytically while recognizing their
entanglement in the processes that we have come to encapsulate under the
term modernity. It is possible to suggest that colonialism in a trivial sense
is as old as the history of humankind. What distinguishes modern colonialism from earlier colonialisms is its relationship to capitalism and nationalism, which also guarantees its persistence even after colonialism as a formal
system of international relations has come to an endwith the important
exception of indigenous peoples around the world, who serve as a constant
reminder of the persistence of colonialism.34 The culture of modernity, too,
may be incomprehensible without reference to colonialism, both in its formation and in its diffusion over the world, which were part and parcel of the
same process.
The totality created by these relations needs to be kept in mind in any
serious critique of colonialism. Modernity, as I understand it, is the name we
33. Ulf Hedetoft, British Imperialism and Modern Identity (Aalborg, Denmark: Institut for
Uddannelse og Socialisering, AUC, 1985), 2. Colonialism transformed both the colonizer
and the colonized, Hedetoft shows, but did so in unequal ways that now persist in English
attitudes toward immigrantsthe formerly colonized coming home to mother, in other
words. See also the essays collected in Alec G. Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, eds.,
Post-colonial Cultures in France (London: Routledge, 1997), especially the editors introduction, 325. These essays deal with the colonial transformation of French and Maghrebi
cultures, the persistence of colonial difference and inequality after decolonization, and the
relocation of Maghrebis in France, attesting to the persistence of colonial modernity in the
very context that invented the term and the idea.
34. For further discussion, see Arif Dirlik, Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and the Nation, Interventions 4, no. 3 (2002): 42848.
have given to the historically changing totality that is the product of these
relationships. An analytical separation of the various moments that have
gone into its making is crucial, nevertheless, to grasping these relationships
as contradictionsrelationships of unity as well as opposition. If colonialism
has undermined the best ideals of an Enlightenment utopianismincluding
the ideal of cosmopolitan coexistenceby mobilizing them in the service of
world conquest, the same ideals have inspired struggles against colonialism at home and abroad, not to speak of the critical perspectives we bring
to the appreciation of modernity. Those struggles, too, are by now part of an
unfolding modernity.35
There is a great deal to be said for recognizing colonial history as
history, rather than as history gone underground (as in nationalist historiography), which indeed may be crucial to understanding colonialism not simply
as a structural concomitant of capitalism or nationalism but as a condition of
everyday life. It is also necessary to recognize the ways in which the colonial
encounters with native societies have produced not only alternative modernities but alternative modernities that have produced their own colonialisms
if only in the form of nation-states. The janus-face of the nation-state may
be most clearly visible in colonial states where the nation is indispensable in
warding off one kind of colonialism while it seeks to make possible its resistance by a colonial appropriation of local differences.36 The nation-state, in
other words, did not put an end to colonial history but inaugurated a new
phase within it, playing a crucial role in its globalizationby which I mean,
as I noted above, the proliferation of those participating in colonial activity
who, if they do not form a transnational class, nevertheless share a certain
outlook on the world in common, as may be perceived in the rapid global
spread in the use of terror to curtail democracy and social justice.37
35. For a study of anti-imperialist thinking during the Enlightenment (France and Germany), see Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). Indeed, as anti-Eurocentrism has become fashionable, and less and
less discriminating in its condemnations, we have lost sight of how much contemporary
critiques of colonialism owe to the complex legacies of the Enlightenment, including their
permutations in other modernities. A cogent example is provided by Dipesh Chakrabartys
inuential Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). This work, often cited as an alibi for antiEurocentrism, explicitly acknowledges the authors debt to Marx and Martin Heidegger,
two outstanding heirs to Enlightenment modernity.
36. We owe the term janus-faced to Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and NeoNationalism (London: Verso, 1981).
37. The British sociologist Leslie Sklair has been the foremost advocate and analyst of the
The concept of class has gone out of fashion these days, partly because of the failures of class politics but also because the concept has been
the object of systematic forgetting, not just in conservative circles but among
radicals preoccupied with other concerns such as gender and race. Conditions of globality also challenge the idea of class, as they challenge all
similar concepts that found expression within the context of national politics and nationally oriented social science. We might want to remember,
however, that in its original formulation, at least in Marxist theory, class was
intended to be an inter- or transnational concept. I think it is important presently to devote closer attention to the transnationalization of class interests,
so long as we remember that, like any other concept, whether at the national
or transnational level, class is marked by heterogeneity and contradiction,
which express its overdetermination by other categories, from the social
categories of class and gender to spatial categories of place and nation.
National leaderships, otherwise at odds with one another, may nevertheless
share common interests in legitimizing internal colonialism or in labeling
as terror any serious political opposition. Transnational elites, at odds with
the nation-state in their activities and ideologies, may share with national
leaderships common interests in the promotion of ideologies of globalization. The turn from radical opposition to colonialism and neocolonialism to
accommodation of colonial practices has found expression over the last
decade in the appropriation by new transnational classes of critical efforts to
deal with the historical problems presented by colonialism, resulting in the
dissolution of problems of inequality, injustice, and destructive oppression
into textual ambivalence over colonialism, and the celebration of hybridities that in some usages does away with even the ability to distinguish the
colonizer from the colonized. Peter van der Veer writes of the work of one
celebrated and widely inuential (mostly in First World intellectual circles)
postcolonial intellectual, Homi Bhabha, Bhabha does not nd a contramodernity, but precisely a modernity that invites intellectuals from the postcolony not only to receive and imbibe it as in a Macaulayan project of eduidea of a transnational capitalist class for over a decade, most recently in The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). His contributions in this regard
would be greatly enriched if he were to attend more closely to the increased (and increasingly important) participation in this class of personnelincluding intellectual and cultural
personnelfrom outside of Euro-America and outside of corporate structures alone. Such
participation also points to the contradictions within this class and the way culture has
become a medium for their articulation.
cating the natives, but to become agents in its reproduction after the demise
of the colony-metropole divide. 38
In real borders, rather than the abstract borderlands of postcolonial
criticism, oppression and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, class,
and Third Worldliness refuse to go away. Indeed, class and Third World
origin may be more signicant than ever under the circumstances of transnational capitalism. As the author of a recent study comparing the U.S.Canadian vs. the U.S.-Mexican border writes,
Similar to developments in other parts of the world, U.S. conditions
for entry are thus becoming increasingly formalized into citizenship
criteria that divide contemporary immigrants into several, hierarchically dened groups. In comparison to nineteenth-century U.S. law
which openly excluded immigrants on the basis of ethnic and national
origin by barring entire groups of people, todays immigration policies
(with certain exceptions) stratify migrants according to class, educational and social background as well as the kind of classed position
into which they will eventually be inserted in the United States.39
38. Peter van der Veer, Cosmopolitan Options, in Worlds on the Move: Globalization,
Migration, and Cultural Security, ed. Jonathan Friedman and Shalini Randeria (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2004), 16778, esp. 171. Bhabha is the foremost (and popular) advocate of
ambivalence at the site of the colonial. He himself confesses to a taste for in-between
states and moments of hybridity, which no doubt endears him to power-holders who would
rather take colonialism out of the picture both in history and in contemporary globalization. Bhabhas contributions to the erasure of colonialism, one suspects, played a crucial
part in earning him a place at the pinnacle of globalizers at the World Economic Forum,
convened in Davos in 2003. For his taste, see Bhabha, Location of Culture (London:
Routledge, 1994), 208. For his participation in Davos, see the Web page for the World
Economic Forum, 2003, http://www.weforum.org.
39. Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Reading Across Diaspora: Chinese and Mexican Undocumented Immigration Across U.S. Land Borders, in Globalization on the Line: Culture,
Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 6997, esp. 79. This article also shows, without stressing the point, that the
differences between the First World boundary between the United States and Canada,
and the FirstThird World boundary between the United States and Mexico has been
attenuated considerably, especially since 9/11, as Canada has appeared increasingly as
a First World conduit for Third Worlders headed for the United States. The importance of
class for understanding contemporary migration is very much in evidence in the case of
Chinese (or East Indian migrants, among others). While those with wealth and prestige
may enjoy the benets of exible citizenship (in Aihwa Ongs term), those who hail from
the lower social ranks drown at sea, perish in containers, or languish in prisons as they
seek to get smuggled into the United States and Europe. See Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizen-
tells the reporter, In Chinese culture, we dont have all these iconic names
that symbolize prosperity, describing Park Avenue in particular as fashionable, and the pinnacle of civilization. 41 Both pieces, each in its own way,
point eloquently to the persistence of colonialism, the one in attesting to the
continued colonization and mistreatment of indigenous people, the other in
showing with eloquent simplicity the limitations on the imagination of civilization in minds colonized by capitalist modernity. These limitations, if anything, have become more visible with the end of formal colonialism and the
globalization of capital.
The recognition of the persistence of the legacies and structures of
the colonial past makes the task of overcoming colonial modernity a far more
difcult undertaking than the anticolonial struggles of a generation ago. The
call for such struggle itself seems much less attractive given the experiences with earlier anticolonial struggles and the headlong rush to the lures
of global markets and a global consumption society. What necessitates it
is the economic, cultural, and political violence inicted daily on countless
numbers in the name of development and democracy, with disastrous consequences not only for democracy and social justice but for the very conditions of life and livelihood. The recovery of those conditions presents itself
as a task of the highest priority against a contemporary preoccupation with
political and cultural identity that perpetuates the problems it sets out to
resolve. If we are to nd our way out of a now globalized colonial modernity, we rst need to recognize that it is indeed our historically given point of
departure.
41. The articles, respectively, are Jane Perlez (for the New York Times), Australia Said
to Push Aborigines Plight Aside; and Ted Anthony (for the Associated Press), A Brand
New Start of It in China, Register-Guard (Eugene, Oreg.), Sunday, April 18, 2004, A17.