Globalization Posing Challenges to Examine the Relevance of Postcolonial Criticism in Future

Abstract

It has become very difficult today to assume that we are living in a world which is postcolonial just in the sense that the curse of colonialism is over. The questions of how one nation is dominating the other and how such dominating forces can be resisted have become the salient issues of the anti-colonial movements worldwide. The postcolonial studies are focusing on the contemporary neocolonial tendencies especially after when America has invaded Afghanistan and has also attacked Iraq for building a New American Empire. Globalization seems to have changed the world so radically that it has become meaningless if we try to perceive the world either from the perspectives of how the European colonizers wanted it to be or as totally decolonized from any exploitative networks. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their seminal work, Empire (2000) have argued that they have used the term ‘Empire’ to refer to the emergence of a new sovereign power in the world politics which is predominating over all the other nations in contemporary times. According to them, one can understand this present-day power structure best by comparing it with how the European powers had maintained their sovereignty and empires during the colonial period. Simon Gikandi has accurately observed that, what is very new in globalization is that it has appropriated certain identical postcolonial terms like ‘hybridity’ and concepts like the ‘other’. All these different postcolonial terms and concepts had always been ignored by the former social scientists. This paper will be exploring why it is irrelevant to assume that this new postcolonial globalized culture, as it is reflected in some postcolonial literary images and narratives, does not seem to have any functional impact in changing the socio-cultural relationships of the people of this contemporary global world. This paper will also focus on why in the contemporary globalization the native is found to be contaminated by the west and therefore dangerously ‘un-otherable’ and no longer available as the pure. This paper will also address as to how globalization apart from carrying the overwhelming connotations of cosmopolitanism and evaporating the geo-political centres and margins, is intensifying the pre-existing global asymmetries and pre-empting the postcolonial critics from analyzing the operative networks of the contemporary neoimperial forces.