Post-anticolonialism

Extract

In the wake of 9/11, from an already distant moment of globalization (before we even knew words like anthropocene or Facebook), Arif Dirlik asked if postcolonial critique hadn't failed to take the rapidly evolving new modalities of capitalism into account. By foregrounding the experience of colonialism so insistently, postcolonialism risked cultivating “an exaggerated view of the hold of the past over contemporary realities, and an obliviousness to the reconfiguration of past legacies by contemporary restructurations of power” (“Rethinking Colonialism” 429). What it had achieved, however, was an interrogation of “fundamental contradictions in an earlier discourse on colonialism,” whereby the meaning of colonialism had shifted from the post-1945 Manichaean narrative to something far more ambiguous (431). As a consequence, even anticolonial nationalism, which had largely been shaped by native functionaries of colonial rule, came to be understood as a product of colonialism. Frantz Fanon was among the first to confront this problem (119–99). But when his alternative vision of an organic nationhood developing out of the rural peasantry failed to emerge, the intellectual legacies of anticolonialism were, unsurprisingly, subjected to sustained interrogation. Indeed, Dirlik attributes such a reorientation in post-colonial criticism precisely to the failures of postcolonial regimes (“Rethinking Colonialism” 434).