Competing Cosmopolitanisms

Abstract

Postcolonial theorists are waking up to the enormous threats posed by the age of exponential globalisation, as well as to the equally sizeable opportunities of a world in which cultures and allegiances are being complicated, mixed and broadened. Popular discourses of hybridity, diaspora, exile and migration constitute not always successful but nonetheless welcome and auspicious attempts to think through a situation in which the globalisation of exploitation and injustice must be matched, as Terry Eagleton has implored, by a comparable and countervailing globalisation of experiences, allegiances and values. What Eagleton puts his finger on in his After Theory (2003) is the incapacity of post-modern, post-structuralist and post-colonial discourses, insofar as the claim to novelty implicit in their shared prefix rests on a common rejection of narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in favour of a fixation with difference and ‘little narratives’, to respond with sufficient ambition and clarity to a situation in which capitalism and all its attendant shortcomings are fully, indeed unprecedentedly, global in scope. With the launch of a new global narrative of capitalism, along with the so-called war on terror, it may well be that the style of thinking known as postmodernism is now approaching an end. It was, after all, the theory which assured us that grand narratives were a thing of the past. Perhaps we will be able to see it, in retrospect, as one of the little narratives of which it has been so fond. This, however, presents cultural theory with a fresh challenge. If it is to engage with an ambitious global history, it must have answerable resources of its own, equal in depth and scope to the situation it confronts. (Eagleton, 2003, 221–2) KeywordsGlobal OrderPostcolonial TheoristPostcolonial StudyColonial EncounterMultipolar WorldThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.