Postcolonial Studies
This blog is based on postcolonial studies and This task was assigned by Dilip Barad sir.
This article argues that contemporary globalization now framed by things like 9/11, the “New American Empire,” the Global War on Terror and the arrival of “Globalization 4.0”/the 4th Industrial Revolution forces postcolonial studies to re-think identity, violence, and power in a world where security, capital flows and new technologies reshape formerly colonized societies.
1) How globalization reshapes postcolonial identities the main mechanisms
1. Deterritorialization & diaspora: people, media and capital move across borders so identities become transnational and lived “in-between” nation-states (hyphenated, diasporic selves) rather than fixed at the nation. That idea (flows of people/media/finance/ideas) is central to Appadurai’s model of global “scapes,” and Barad uses this kind of perspective to show how identity is unmoored by global flows.
2. Hybridity and the ‘third space’: colonial power produced mimicry and hybridity; globalization intensifies this by multiplying contacts between cultures — so postcolonial subjects constantly negotiate hybrid cultural positions (neither wholly “local” nor wholly “global”). Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity/mimicry and “third space” are useful for describing the new, ambivalent subjectivities article discusses.
3. Securitization and racialized identity after 9/11: this article emphasizes that the Global War on Terror re-configures identity politics certain postcolonial populations (especially Muslim diasporas) are re-racialized and surveilled, so global security regimes become a major axis shaping who is “insider” or “outsider.”
4. Platform/tech-mediated subjectivities: the Fourth Industrial Revolution / “Globalization 4.0” (digital platforms, surveillance tech, data flows) shapes how identities are performed and governed new corporate/state architectures influence self-representation and belonging. This article flags these tech-inflected dynamics as a contemporary challenge for postcolonial theory.
2) How global capitalism influences cultural & economic dimensions of postcolonial societies
Neoliberal policy and uneven development. Global capitalism (trade liberalization, IMF/World Bank policies, privatization) restructures postcolonial economies in ways that often deepen inequality, create new elites tied to global markets, and produce precarious labour a central critique in Stiglitz and echoed in this article discussion of economic dimensions.
Commodification of culture & cultural industries. Cultural products (music, film, heritage) become global commodities; this can both enable new cultural circulations and reduce cultures to marketable “brands” or stereotypes. Appadurai’s “mediascapes/financescapes” help explain how cultural images travel and get re-shaped by markets.
New forms of domination framed as ‘imperial’ or ‘Empire’. Hardt & Negri’s idea of a post-state “Empire” governed by global capital and supranational institutions maps onto Dilip Barad’s concern with a “New American Empire” and the ways global power uses economic and military means together. That conjuncture changes how postcolonial peoples experience sovereignty, rights, and resistance.
Labour migration, remittances and subjectivity. Transnational labour markets create subjects whose loyalties and identities are stretched between origin and host societies; remittances reshape local economies while also producing dependence on global wage systems. (Barad treats migration/flows as core to contemporary postcolonial reality.)
3) Films & literature that illustrate these dynamics (short, focused readings)
Below are compact case-studies showing how art maps the theoretical points above.
Mohsin Hamid — The Reluctant Fundamentalist (novel; film adaptation): Changez’s trajectory (Ivy-League/Wall-Street job → fallout after 9/11 → return to Pakistan) is a paradigmatic story of how global capitalism (finance) produces a cosmopolitan subject who is then racialized and securitized after 9/11. The novel stages both the lure of global capital and the identity rupture that securitized geopolitics brings exactly the kind of 9/11/postcolonial crossroads Barad emphasizes.
Mira Nair — Mississippi Masala / The Namesake (films): Nair’s diasporic cinema explores hybridity, race and belonging in transnational contexts: forced migration (Uganda → US) and the inter-generational negotiation of identity (Gogol’s name, cultural belonging). These films show the lived “third space” Bhabha theorizes and the cultural dislocations Appadurai’s scapes predict. They also register how markets, race hierarchies and local economies shape diasporic subjectivity.
Aravind Adiga — The White Tiger (novel) / Slumdog Millionaire (film as comparative lens): both are often read as critiques of neoliberal India where liberalization and global capital create new opportunity alongside extreme corruption and inequality. Adiga’s Balram (self-made entrepreneur/anti-hero) dramatizes how global capitalism produces morally compromised pathways to mobility; Slumdog (and its critiques) shows how global media and prize-economies mythologize neoliberal success while concealing structural violence. These works map neatly onto Barad’s economic critique of globalization.
(Optional) Films addressing securitization: Films such as Khuda Kay Liye (Shoaib Mansoor) and many post-9/11 diasporic novels/films show how security paradigms reshape Muslim identity in the West — a cinematic echo of the article’s 9/11/securitization argument.
4) Short synthesis what this means for analysis / essays / class discussions
This article's piece is urging postcolonial studies to treat globalization not as only a cultural “mixing” but as a political-economic constellation: security regimes, platform technologies, and capital flows form an integrated field that produces new forms of racialization, precarious labour, and cultural commodification. Use Barad as the anchor and bring in Bhabha (hybridity), Appadurai (scapes), and Stiglitz/Hardt & Negri (economic/political critique) to construct an argument that links cultural representation (films/novels) with material structures (capital, policy, surveillance).
1.What the article argues
Globalization and Fiction: Exploring Postcolonial Critique and Literary Representations (October 2022) highlights how contemporary fiction uses literary storytelling to critically examine globalization its economic, cultural, and political ramifications. Barad reads a range of texts (DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, McEwan’s Saturday, Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Adiga’s The White Tiger) to illustrate how novels register globalization both critically and reflectively. He links these fictional narratives to thinkers like Stiglitz and Chomsky to reveal the economic and ideological dimensions of neoliberal global flows. The article emphasizes globalization’s entwining with events like 9/11 and the global War on Terror as key moments it interrogates through fiction .
2. How postcolonial fiction critiques globalization
This article frames literary interventions in three interconnected registers:
Neoliberal economic critique: Novels such as The White Tiger expose how free-market globalization promises progress but thrives on corruption, inequality, and dispossession. Through a narrator from the subaltern, Adiga reveals structural violence beneath the economic “opportunity” façade .
Cultural critique: Fiction captures the ambivalent effects of cultural homogenization via media and soft power. Many works depict local customs eroding or being reshaped as characters negotiate between global imagery and traditional belonging.
Geopolitical/ethical critique: Barad emphasizes how globalization connects to new forms of violence and security especially post-9/11 surveillance, empire, and border regimes which fiction dramatizes in personal trauma and dissident testimony .
3. Literary strategies: resistance, hybridity, identity crisis
Resistance
Subaltern voices and irony: Postcolonial authors frequently employ first-person subaltern narrators who disrupt dominant discourses (e.g. Balram in The White Tiger), using satire and subversive commentary to challenge neoliberal narratives.
Counter-histories: These novels reclaim marginalized histories of dispossession and inequality, contesting global narratives of development and security.
Hybridity
“Third-space” subjectivity: Drawing on Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and mimicry, writers depict characters inhabiting liminal spaces: diasporic, multilingual, culturally mixed identities. This in-between state becomes both creative and unsettling .
Hybrid form: Authors often code-switch, use multilingual diction, fragmented narratives, and non-linear chronologies literary techniques that mirror intercultural collisions.
Identity crisis
Split subjectivity: Globalization renders characters alienated, doubly conscious, uprooted or ambivalent about allegiance. Themes like nostalgia, moral disillusionment, and ethical ambivalence are frequent.
Formal fragmentation and polyphony: Many novels feature multiple voices or interwoven storylines spanning global locales to embody diasporic dispersion.
4. Film example: Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
This screen adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s novel mirrors Barad’s key concerns:
Narrative arc tied to globalization and geopolitics: The protagonist, Changez, is shaped by elite global institutions (Princeton, Wall Street). After 9/11, his aspiration gives way to racialized surveillance, suspicion, and moral rupture personal tragedy that echoes geopolitical hierarchies.
Unpacking neoliberal meritocracy: Changez’s career belief in free‐market success collapses under systemic bias. The film critiques globalization’s promises as contingent and exclusionary.
Hybridity and ambivalence in aesthetics: Nair juxtaposes Wall Street offices with Lahore streets, situating the film in an “in-between” world. Its ambiguous ending refuses easy resolution, echoing postcolonial resistance to fixed identities.
Such narrative and aesthetic moves resonate directly with Barad’s thesis about globalization’s intertwined economic, cultural and political dimensions .
5. Synthesis: what postcolonial fiction (and film) accomplishes
Localizing globalization: Transforming abstract flows into specific lived experiences inequality, exile, xenophobia.
Dissonating mainstream globalization rhetoric: Fiction unsettles propagandist narratives of progress by exposing dispossession, cultural erasure, moral compromise.
Performing hybridity: Both formally and thematically, fiction enacts cultural mixing allowing characters to reimagine identity while resisting essentialism.
Ethical politization: Characters become witnesses to global injustice, prompting reader reflection on complicity and global morality.
The article Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future (Barad, 2022) highlights how postcolonial studies and environmentalism intersect in the age of the Anthropocene. Postcolonial critique, which traditionally focused on histories of empire, race, and culture, now confronts the global ecological crisis that disproportionately affects formerly colonized societies. As Vandana Shiva and Dipesh Chakrabarty argue, colonial exploitation was not just cultural but ecological: colonialism destroyed biodiversity, displaced indigenous knowledge systems, and laid the foundations for contemporary climate injustice. Today, transnational corporations perpetuate these dynamics, reinforcing what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.”
Colonized and formerly colonized peoples bear the heaviest burdens of climate change and ecological degradation. Rising sea levels threaten island nations in the Global South, droughts devastate subsistence farming, and deforestation displaces indigenous tribes. Rob Nixon’s idea of “slow violence” and “spatial amnesia” explains how the suffering of these communities often remains invisible in mainstream discourses dominated by Western perspectives. For instance, when conservation is framed as wilderness preservation, it erases indigenous histories, leading to further marginalization. These dynamics show that climate change is not only a scientific crisis but also a deeply political and postcolonial issue.
Film provides a powerful lens to examine this intersection. A striking example is Avatar (2009), which, while fictional, allegorizes colonial exploitation of land and people. The destruction of Pandora’s environment mirrors extractive industries in the Niger Delta or India’s Narmada Valley, where local communities are displaced for dams, mining, or oil. Similarly, Indian films like Kaala (2018) and documentaries on the Narmada Bachao Andolan dramatize how marginalized communities resist environmental destruction driven by both state and corporate powers. These narratives resonate with the struggles of Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria, whose fight against Shell highlighted the ecological devastation wrought by oil capitalism in postcolonial contexts.
By engaging with such films, postcolonial environmental critique underscores that the Anthropocene is unevenly experienced. While wealthy nations often contribute most to emissions, the cost is borne by vulnerable, historically colonized populations. This aligns with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for “species thinking” and a new universalism that sees humanity as a geological agent but still attends to inequalities within it. Only by bridging postcolonial critique and environmental studies can we address both ecological sustainability and social justice.
Hollywood, as the article Heroes or Hegemons? The Celluloid Empire of Rambo and Bond in America's Geopolitical Narrative suggests, has long served as a soft-power instrument of U.S. hegemony
Ramboand Bondin Americas Geopoliti…. Through franchises like Rambo and James Bond, films project the United States (and its Western allies) as defenders of freedom, justice, and democracy. For instance, Rambo: First Blood Part II rewrites the trauma of the Vietnam War by transforming American defeat into redemption, while Rambo III casts the U.S. as a benevolent supporter of Afghan rebels. Similarly, The Living Daylights positions Bond as an ally of Mujahideen fighters, reinforcing Cold War narratives of the West as liberators. These narratives normalize American dominance by embedding ideology into spectacle.
From a postcolonial perspective, such films are not neutral entertainment but cultural texts that reproduce colonial binaries: West vs. East, civilized vs. barbaric, freedom vs. tyranny. Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism helps us see how the “Other” be it Soviet, Vietnamese, or Middle Eastern is depicted as threatening, backward, or corrupt, requiring intervention by a superior Western hero. The cinematic spectacle masks structural violence, presenting U.S. military interventions as moral imperatives rather than geopolitical strategies. Thus, Hollywood’s hegemonic storytelling works as a continuation of imperial discourses by other means.
Beyond Rambo and Bond, many Hollywood productions perpetuate similar hegemonic ideals. TV series like 24 and films like Zero Dark Thirty frame American counterterrorism as justifiable and heroic, even when engaging in torture or extrajudicial killings. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, though often cloaked in fantasy, frequently reproduces the trope of American superheroes saving the world, subtly equating American exceptionalism with global security. These narratives erase local agency and cast the U.S. as the singular guarantor of order, echoing what Gayatri Spivak might call the “white man saving brown women from brown men” logic of imperial justification.
Postcolonial critique urges us to resist these hegemonic frames by exposing their ideological underpinnings and by turning to alternative cinemas. Films from Latin America, Africa, and Asia often reverse the gaze, portraying Western intervention as exploitation rather than salvation. For example, Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener critiques Western pharmaceutical imperialism in Africa, while Indian cinema has begun re-narrating colonial histories from indigenous perspectives. Rather than replicating Hollywood’s hegemonic model, as some voices suggest, non-Western industries like Bollywood can offer counter-narratives that challenge rather than reinforce American dominance.
Ultimately, Hollywood’s projection of American hegemony through films like Rambo and Bond demonstrates cinema’s capacity to shape geopolitical imagination. Postcolonial readings expose these works not as mere action fantasies but as cultural artifacts deeply embedded in imperial ideology. The challenge lies in cultivating counter-hegemonic cinemas that open space for plural narratives, ensuring that global spectatorship is not monopolized by America’s celluloid empire.
The article Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli’s RRR highlights how the film transforms the legacies of Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem into nationalist icons while sidestepping the specific tribal struggles they embodied
Reimagining Resistance The Appropr…. Historically, Raju opposed the British after the Madras Forest Act curtailed Adivasi rights, while Bheem rallied against the Nizam with his cry of Jal, Jangal, Zameen (water, forest, land). Yet, in RRR, their localized, land-based struggles become subsumed under a pan-Indian fight against colonial power. This cinematic appropriation makes for an exhilarating nationalist epic but strips their resistance of its environmental and indigenous roots.
Such reimaginings can contribute positively by inspiring collective pride and reminding audiences of the heroism embedded in anti-colonial struggles. The spectacle of Raju and Bheem united against the Raj reinforces a sense of unity, resilience, and anti-imperial passion. Yet, the danger lies in how nationalism often overshadows the deeper battles those against displacement, loss of forests, and erasure of indigenous lifeworlds that continue even today. By turning tribal leaders into nationalist superheroes, the film risks silencing the very communities it claims to honor, reducing their specific struggles into symbolic gestures of state-centered pride.
Postcolonial critique asks us to see this as not just storytelling but as a politics of representation. Annie Zaidi’s reflections on displacement “losing a river… losing honey and herbs… losing the right to protest” show how indigenous dispossession is not just past history but lived present. When RRR neglects these realities, it inadvertently reinforces the same structures of silencing that colonial powers once imposed. Nationalism replaces colonialism as the dominant lens, leaving unaddressed the complicity of modern states and corporations in dispossessing tribal communities.
Other films across the globe show how such appropriation can either resist or reinforce hegemonies. James Cameron’s Avatar reimagines indigenous resistance in an alien world, dramatizing resource theft and displacement but still filtering it through a Western savior narrative. In contrast, Indian films like Narmada Diary or Kaala center subaltern struggles more directly, foregrounding the lived realities of displacement and land rights. These works show that cinema can either flatten indigenous resistance into spectacle or amplify its ongoing political urgency.
In sum, RRR dazzles as a nationalist fantasy but misses the chance to connect its heroes’ legacies with contemporary struggles for environmental and indigenous justice. By appropriating tribal leaders into a homogenized narrative of anti-British resistance, the film both celebrates and undermines postcolonial struggles. A more nuanced portrayal one that reclaims Jal, Jangal, Zameen as urgent rallying cries against today’s climate and corporate crises could transform cinematic spectacle into a vehicle of solidarity, making resistance not just historical memory but a living force for justice.
References :
Comments
Post a Comment