Decentering Globalization: World-Literature, Terror, and The Postcolonial

Abstract

The visibility of globalization as a bundle of social, economic, political, cultural, ideological, and epistemological processes as well as military practices has not only recalibrated postcolonial critical and theoretical positions, but also has redefined its parameters for reading the history of ideas and power. The endless wealth and plenitude this critical trajectory carries for postcolonial studies is resourced by a whole set of new critical practices which look into the productive forces shaping the dynamics of human history. This critical reformulation and recalibration of postcolonial cultural politics of engaging the violent histories of western imperialism and colonialism will be discursively explored through a critical focus on the link between postcolonial studies, globalization, world-literature, and terrorism. The contention is to redirect the interpretive horizon of such postcolonial critical parameters as history, ideology, culture, nation, race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, etc. from mere discursive constructions entertaining a sense of epistemological primacy or precedence over the laws of historical evolution into “modalities of existence,” whose material conditions of possibility and rules of formation are conditioned by the power of economy not only to inflect the dissemination and productions of human knowledge, but also to govern the forces which shape the evolution of human history.