Postcolonial Discourse in the Age of Globalization

Abstract

In the 1980s, the academy witnessed the advent of postcolonial discourse. Numerous academic conferences, books and journals on postcolonialism appeared one after another. In the academic periphery, many viewed postcolonial discourse as a site of resistance against Western cultural hegemony. With the rise of the discourse of globalization in the 1990s, postcolonial discourse, no longer riding on the whitecaps of the latest critical wave, seemed to have lost much of its currency and critical energy. On the face of it, many central issues of postcolonial discourse, such as colonizer/colonized, East/West and center/margin turned out to be no longer applicable to the global era, when national borders blurred. yet in the new global/local paradigm, the above binaries continued to cast a shadowy specter.