Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, And The Nation

Abstract

This article seeks to view colonialism in a historical perspective, including the perspective of the future. It argues that, in spite of the devastation it has wrought globally, colonialism has transformed the identities of the colonized, so that even claims to precolonial national identities are products of colonialism. Recent postcolonial insistence on the hybridization of identities has revealed the irrelevance of the search for national identity that was prominent in the postcolonial thinking of the 1960s. Nationalism itself, the essay suggests, is a version of colonialism in the suppression and appropriation of local identities for a national identity. All identity, historically speaking, is a product of one or another form of colonialism, and hybridization of identities is an ongoing historical process. What is particular about modern colonialism, the article concludes, is its relationship to capitalism, which a preoccupation with colonialism and national identity has driven to the margins of political and cultural thinking. This relationship, which was central to postcolonial thinking earlier, needs to be foregrounded once again without, however, dissolving colonialism into capitalism.