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RETHINKING COLONIALISMGloba l i za t ion, Pos tco lon i a l i sm, and the Nat ion

Ari f Dir l ikUniversity of Oregon, USA

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 iden-

tities 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 appropri-

ation of local identities for a national identity. All identity, historically

speaking, is a product of one or another form of colonialism, and hybridiza-

tion 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.

colonialism

globalization

identity

modernity

nationalism

postcolonialism

interventions Vol. 4(3) 428–448 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1369801022000013833

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The discussion below offers neither a historical survey nor a sociology ofcolonialism and postcolonialism. Rather, I re�ect on these terms, and whatmeaning they may have at a time of radical transformation, when the globalrelationships that they were intended to capture are fast disappearing. Wherethese changes will lead may be impossible to say, but they do invite some-thing akin to a thought experiment, an imagination of how the present andits immediate past may appear at some unspeci�ed time in the future, whenthe events that preoccupy the present will have receded into the past.

Colonialism and its offshoots, such as neo- and postcolonialism, haveoccupied a central place in historical and cultural studies for three decades.It is worth pondering if this centrality will, or can, persist in a rapidlychanging world. There is suf�cient evidence to think otherwise – or at leastto question the preoccupation with colonialism, if only as a reality check onour ways of thinking. Cultural and political identities produced by pastcolonialisms may serve presently as reminders of oppression or negations ofprior identities, but they are more likely to provide the foundation forcontemporary self-identi�cations. Is there any reason to assume thatidentities produced by modern colonialism, however problematic they mayseem presently, will fare differently?

This is not to say that the legacies of national, ethnic or racial exploitation,inequality, and oppression associated with colonialism are about to disappearany time soon; if anything, they have acquired greater visibility than ever inthe past. Modern colonialism has bequeathed its own legacies to the presentand the future, shaping the historical trajectories of colonizer and colonizedalike. What I do suggest is that preoccupation with colonialism and itslegacies makes for an exaggerated view of the hold of the past over contem-porary realities, and an obliviousness to the recon�guration of past legaciesby contemporary restructurations of power – especially changes in thepractices of capitalism and the nation-state that have already called forth areconsideration of the colonial past. There is no reason why modern colonial-ism should not appear differently in the future, as past colonialisms appearto us. The terms colonialism and postcolonialism become obstacles to under-standing when they prevent us from confronting such restructurations.

These restructurations �nd expression presently in the concept of globaliz-ation. Whatever its realities, or the dif�culties it presents as a concept,1

globalization represents a new way of perceiving the world that distinguishesthe present from the world of colonialism and neocolonialism at the momentof decolonization in the aftermath of World War II, so that even the vocabu-lary of colonialism appears distant, if not foreign. Postcolonial criticism, asit appears presently, speaks to the legacies of the past, but it is arguablyinformed in its basic premises and orientations by assumptions that derivetheir plausibility from its context in globalization. Viewed from the vantagepoint of this new perspective on the world, colonialism no longer appears as

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1 I have discussedthis problem in anumber of places.For a recentexample, see Dirlik(2000b).

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‘the highest stage of capitalism’, as Lenin wrote of imperialism (1969), but astage on the way to globalization – the most recent phase in the spatializa-tion of the world by a capitalism that has yet to live out its history.

Colonial ism/postcolonia l ism

Colonialism as a concept is much more complicated presently than it wasonly a generation ago. The novelty of modern colonialism and its effects oneither the colonizer or the colonized have been in dispute all along. Liberaland conservative development discourses, most notably modernizationdiscourse, have for the most part dismissed colonialism as an importantaspect of modernity, and, where they have recognized its importance, theyhave assigned to it a progressive historical role.2 Marxists have been moreambivalent on the question. Lenin’s interpretation of colonialism as anindispensable stage of capitalism was to play a crucial part in bringingcolonialism into the center of radical politics globally. Still, while mainstreamMarxism has condemned colonialism for the oppression and exploitation ofthe colonized, it, too, has often identi�ed colonialism with a progressivefunction in bringing societies ‘vegetating in the teeth of time’, in Marx’swords, into modernity (1981 [1853]: 6).3 Third World Marxists have sharedin this ambivalence.4

Nevertheless, if colonialism as a historical phenomenon always has beenin dispute, there was, in an earlier period, some consensus over the meaningof colonialism.5 Well into the 1970s, colonialism in a strict sense referred tothe political control by one nation of another nation or of a society strivingto become a nation. Where a colony had already achieved formal politicalindependence but still could not claim full autonomy due primarily toeconomic but also to ideological reasons, the preferred term was neo-colonialism. These terms could be broadened in scope to refer also torelationships between ‘regions’, as in the colonial or neocolonial subjectionof the Third to the First World. While there was some recognition, moreover,that colonialism was not a monopoly of capitalism because it could bepracticed by ‘socialist’ states as well, the ultimate cause of colonial formationswas installed in the structuring of the globe by capitalism, to which socialismitself was a response: hence a common assumption that the way out of thelegacies of colonialism lay with some form of socialism, which in practicemeant the creation of autonomous and sovereign economies that could escapestructural dependence on advanced capitalist societies and set their owndevelopmental agenda.

The issue of colonialism, in other words, revolved mostly around the issueof capitalism, and was in many ways subsidiary to the latter. To be sure, bythe 1960s questions of the relationship between colonialism and racism were

int erven t ions – 4:3

2 For a recentexample of acavalier dismissal ofcolonialism, seeRozman (1991).

3 It is interestingthat, in his‘keywords’ ofmodernity,Raymond Williams(1976) has no entryfor colonialismalthough there is onefor imperialism.

4 See thediscussions ofcapitalism andimperialism byChinese Marxists inthe 1920s and 1930sin Dirlik (1978: esp.ch. 3).

5 My descriptionhere of theunderstanding ofcolonialism thatprevailed during thetwo to three decadesafter World War IIwill be familiar tomost who livedthrough or studythat period. Acogent illustration ofthe various points Imake may be foundin the recent Englishlanguage publicationof essays on

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on the agenda of postcolonial discourses, but more often than not theyappeared not as problems in and of themselves, but as distinguishing featuresof capitalism in the setting of colonialism (the form class relations took incolonial capitalism, sort of to speak) that could be resolved in the long runonly through the abolition of capitalism. Anticolonial struggles derived theirhistorical meaning primarily from their contribution to the long-term strugglebetween capitalism and socialism. V. I. Lenin, much more so than Karl Marx,was the inspiration behind this view of the relationship between capitalismand colonialism.

As oppression and exploitation marked the political and economicrelationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the relationshipappeared culturally as a ‘Manichean’ opposition between the two (seeJanMohamed 1985). There was all along a recognition of a structural dialec-tic between the colonizer and the colonized. Structurally, economic andpolitical colonialism produced new practices and social formations, includ-ing class formations, that bound the two together; just as colonialism createda new native class that drew its sustenance from the colonizer, the task ofcolonization was rendered much easier by the collaboration of this class withthe colonizers. Even where it was possible to speak of a common cultureshared by the colonizer and the colonized in the ‘contact zones’ of thecolonies,6 this common culture enhanced, rather than alleviated, theManichean opposition between the two, expressed most importantly in thelanguage of race, leaving no doubt as to where each belonged economically,politically, and culturally. In ideologies of national liberation, native groupsand classes which were economically and culturally entangled with colonial-ism were viewed not as elements integral to the constitution of the nation,but as intrusions into the nation of foreign elements that would have to beeliminated in the realization of national sovereignty and autonomy.7

If we are to imagine how ambiguous the discourse of colonialism may appearto future generations, we need look no further than postcolonial criticism asit has developed over the last decade or so, bringing to the surface funda-mental contradictions in an earlier discourse on colonialism.8 Contemporarypostcolonial criticism is heir to this earlier discourse in reaf�rming thecentrality of the colonial experience, but also departs from it in quite signi�-cant ways, which ironically call into question the very meaning of colonial-ism. There were, all along, Third World voices dissatis�ed with thecontainment of the colonial experience within the categories of capitalism,demanding a hearing for the psychological and cultural dimensions ofcolonialism to which racism was of fundamental signi�cance.9 These are thevoices that have come forward over the last two decades when there has beena distinct shift in postcolonial discourse from the economic and political tothe cultural and the personal experiential.

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colonialism by Jean-Paul Sartre, whowas one of the pre-eminent critics ofcolonialism duringthe period inquestion. Theseessays, mostlywritten in the late1950s and early1960s, were �rstpublished in Frenchin 1964 (see Sartre2001). Sartre’s viewswere informed by,and in some waysderivative of, thewritings ofpostcolonialintellectuals such asFrantz Fanon, withwhom he had anintimate personalrelationship.

6 I borrow ‘contactzones’ from MaryLouise Pratt’sImperial Eyes:Travel Writing andTransculturation(1992).

7 Chinese Marxists,for example, arguedthat nationalautonomy anddevelopment couldnot be achievedwithout asimultaneous socialrevolution thatwould eliminate theclasses, bourgeois or‘feudal’, who wereallied to imperialismin their interests. SeeDirlik (1974).

8 For a discussionof the trans-formation of post-colonial criticismfrom the 1960s tothe present, seeAhmad (1995).

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The results where colonialism is concerned are quite contradictory. Theshift in attention to questions of cultural identity in postcolonial discoursehas been both a moment in, and a bene�ciary of, a more general reorienta-tion in Marxist thinking toward a recognition of at least the partial autonomyof the cultural from the economic or the political spheres of life. Introducedinto the colonial context, this has resulted in a disassociation of questions ofculture and cultural identity from the structures of capitalism, shifting thegrounds for discourse to the encounter between the colonizer and the colon-ized, unmediated by the structures of political economy within whichquestions of culture had been subsumed earlier. The distancing of questionsof colonialism from questions of capitalism has in some measure also madepossible the foregrounding of colonialism, rather than capitalism, as thecentral datum of modern history.

This centering of colonialism, however, has also rendered the term increas-ingly ambiguous, and raises serious questions, in particular about moderncolonialism. In many ways, contemporary postcolonial criticism is mostimportant as a re�ection on the history of postcolonial discourses (a self-criticism of the discourse, in other words), bringing to the surface contra-dictions that were rendered invisible earlier by barely examined andfundamentally teleological assumptions concerning capitalism, socialism andthe nation, but above all revolutionary national liberation movements againstcolonialism – the failure of which has done much to provoke an awarenessof these contradictions. Recognition of these contradictions also renders theconcept of colonialism quite problematic.

Robert Young writes with reference to J. P. Sartre and A. Memmi that:

Sartre’s insight that the Manichean system of racism and colonization, apparentlydividing colonizer from colonized, in fact generates dynamic mutual mentalrelations between colonizer and colonized which bind them in the colonial drama,was further elaborated by Albert Memmi in his demonstration that the dialecticalso involved what Hegel had called the ‘excluded middle’: the spectral presence ofthe liminal, subaltern �gures who slip between the two dominant antitheticalcategories. Sartre’s response was to emphasize the dialectical aspect of his ownaccount, suggesting that Memmi saw a situation where he also saw a system.(Young 2001: xiv)10

The difference between Sartre and Memmi to which Young points may besymbolic of the shift that has taken place in postcolonial criticism over thelast two decades, with Memmi having the last word – although contemporarypostcolonial criticism arguably has gone beyond what appears in Memmi’swork as a quali�cation and re�nement of the concept through personalexperience, to an explicit repudiation of systemic understandings ofcolonialism. To the extent that colonialism has been disassociated from

int erven t ions – 4:3

9 As Aimé Césaireput it, ‘Marx is allright, but we need tocomplete Marx’(quoted in Loomba1998).

10 See also Sartreon ‘Albert Memmi’sThe Colonizer andthe Colonized’(Sartre 2001: 48–53,51 n.).

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capitalism, the understanding of colonialism as system has retreated before asituational approach that valorizes contingency and difference over systemictotality.

The �rst, and the most evident, casualty of this shift has been the ThreeWorlds idea, which had been crucial in an earlier period both to the mappingof the world and to anticolonial politics.11 The ‘Third World’, the locationfor neo- and postcolonialisms, was a product of a systemic understanding ofthe world in terms of capitalism and socialism – the ‘First’ and the ‘Second’Worlds understood in developmental terms – which showed the Third Worldalternative paths to its future. Politically, the idea of the Third World pointedto the necessity of a common politics that derived from a common position-ing in the system (rather than some homogeneous essentialized commonquality, as is erroneously assumed these days in much postcolonial criticism).As colonialism had preceded the emergence of a Second World, the world ofsocialism, the Third World had historical priority to the Second, which pointsalso to the priority of capitalism in the systematic shaping of the world, towhich socialism was a response (which also made socialism into an attract-ive goal in the liberation from colonialism). It is possible to suggest that, withthe disappearance of the Second World in the 1980s, it no longer made senseto speak of a Third World. But the repudiation of the Three Worlds idea incontemporary postcolonial criticism is justi�ed most importantly by therepudiation of developmental meta-narratives that presupposed systemicorganization of the world, ignoring the many national and cultural differ-ences that marked all of the three worlds, but most importantly the ThirdWorld (see, for example, Prakash 1990).

Much more important in their consequences may be the questions thatpostcolonial criticism has raised concerning the nation-state, which also drawon the priority of the situational over the systemic, in this case the boundarydividing the colonizer and the colonized, or the boundary of the nation whichalso de�nes the identity of those within. Contemporary postcolonial criticismprivileges the ‘liminal, subaltern �gures’ of ‘the excluded middle’ over theantithetical categories of colonizer and colonized, which in many ways haveceased to be antithetical as the boundary dividing them has been called intoquestion for its essentialist and homogenizing assumptions. In stressing theexperiential aspects of colonial encounters over their structural context, post-colonial criticism has moved past ‘Manichean’ divisions between the colon-izer and the colonized, and even the ‘spectral excluded middle’, to stress‘borderlands’ conditions, where the domination of one by the other yieldsbefore boundary crossings, hybridities, mutual appropriations, and,especially, the everyday resistance of the colonized to the colonizer. This newemphasis helps give voice to the victimized but, in the process of rescuing thecolonized from voicelessness, also blurs the depth of the victimizationcolonialism visited upon its ‘objects’. It is important to emphasize that the

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11 For an extensivediscussion, see Dirlik(1995).

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very groups that appeared in an earlier anticolonial discourse as obstacles tonational unity because of their complicity with colonialism out of materialinterest or cultural bonding appear in contemporary postcolonial discourseas the paradigmatic products of the colonial encounter. The borders, in otherwords, have taken over from the interior in the understanding of the colonialencounter, also calling into question what nation or national culture mightmean under the circumstances.

The reorientation in postcolonial criticism and its critique of an earlier post-colonial discourse are attributable in fundamental ways to the failures ofpostcolonial regimes that have exposed the contradictions in the assumptionsthat guided anticolonial thinking and movements in the aftermath of WorldWar II. It is not that these contradictions were not recognized earlier. Rather,they were suppressed under the teleologies of national liberation and nationbuilding, or viewed as marginal encumbrances that would go away with theachievement of those goals. This itself, however, requires some explanation,and a reminder of the differences between the present context and that of themoment of decolonization. In the preoccupation with culture and culturalidentity presently, it is easy to forget that colonialism did not just disappearbecause colonialists realized its futility or inhumanity, or merely fade awaysmoothly and peacefully. Decolonization was a process fraught with theviolence of colonialism, where anticolonialism could achieve its goals only byturning against the colonizers their weapons of violence. Under the circum-stances, the contradictions of anticolonialism had to be suppressed if thestruggle were to have any chance of success. This was the tragedy of decoloni-sation, which now appears as its futility. Its results have been the reverse ofwhat it intended: the contradictions, emerging to the surface, call intoquestion both earlier understandings of colonialism and the anticolonialstruggles they informed.

The Third World differences that contemporary postcolonial criticisminsists on were not merely consequences of precolonial legacies, but the veryproducts of colonialism. The tripartite mapping of the world disguised thefundamental ways in which the world was fractured further into colonialspaces produced out of the material and cultural bonding between the colon-izer and the colonized. If modern colonialism is incomprehensible withoutreference to the capitalist world-system, that system was itself complicatedimmensely by equally systemic relations produced by colonialism, whichfractured the First World of capitalism as much as they did the Third Worldof colonialism, as witnessed by competition and con�ict over colonies. Whilethe capitalist world-system in the long run provided First World nations withsome commonality in the containment of colonial fractures,12 however, therewas no comparable bond that could endow the Third World with either acollective interest or a collective consciousness; commonality in positioning

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12 How else toexplain, otherwise,the United Statestaking over fromJapan in Korea, orfrom France inSouth-East Asia, topreserve colonialrelationships underthe guise ofcontainingCommunism?

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in the capitalist world-system did not make for either political or culturalcommonality, except perhaps in the most evanescent, situational sense. Thisis apparent not only in the many con�icts among so-called Third Worldsocieties, but even more eloquently in the indifference of these societies toone another once the transitory enthusiasm of revolutionary undertakingshad evaporated. Escaping into the Second World of socialism, or ‘de-linking’from the system (see Amin 1990), were the only options available, and neitheroffered a satisfactory solution of the problems faced by colonial and neo-colonial societies. The �rst implied escaping one kind of colonialism to beentrapped in another, but without the structural integration that came withincorporation in capitalism, which at least brought some bene�ts with it. Theother alternative meant opting out of the system only to be isolated, whileleaving the system intact. The tragic consequences of the urge to autarky wereto be demonstrated in the cases of the People’s Republic of China in the 1960sand Cambodia in the 1970s; its futility acknowledged in its abandonment bythe late 1970s.

The idea of a Third World solidarity that could transform the systemappears in hindsight as an abstract illusion that did not have the power toforge collective interests or collective consciousness. For all the oppressive-ness and exploitativeness of the colonial system, however, ties forged betweenthe colonizers and the colonized were immediate and concrete, and colonialspaces which have not altogether disappeared from global con�gurationswere to prove to be much more durable than was apparent in an earlierperiod. The hope that national liberation could lead to the abolition of thecolonial system, or replacement of colonial by autonomous nationalidentities, was to founder on this contradictory relationship between colonizerand colonized, which was as much a relationship of unity as of Manicheanopposition.

Even more fundamental were problems presented by nation building,which was at once the point of departure for, and the goal of, nationalliberation movements. The assumption of some kind of a national existenceprior to colonization seems to be such a powerful idea that it is perpetuatedeven in contemporary postcolonial criticism, which, for all its critique of thenation for its homogenizing and essentializing claims to culture, neverthelessretains the same assumptions in the language of hybridity, in-betweenness,etc. The question of the nation is of fundamental signi�cance not onlybecause of its importance to understanding the dynamics of postcolonialsocieties, but also to conceptions of colonialism, which, as I note above,presuppose by de�nition the domination of one nation by another. Is itpossible that, as colonialism generated nationalism, it was only with theemergence of nationalism that colonialism came to be so named by thecolonized?13

In his discussion of nationalism in France, Eugen Weber (1976: ch. 29) has

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13 Colonizers, ofcourse, used theword ‘colonialism’with considerablepride, until, withanticolonialstruggles, it becamereprehensible. In theworld’s fairs of thelate nineteenth andearly twentiethcentury in Europe,North America, andJapan, colonialpossessions,including theirinhabitants, wereput on display asexhibits of nationalprowess. SeeGreenhalgh (1998).

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suggested that nation building itself can be understood as a colonial activity,an issue that is also raised by Fernand Braudel (1990: chs 4–6). Nations, evenin their origins in Europe, implied the establishment of boundaries and theimposition on disparate local populations of uniform administrations thaterased pre-existing practices of social regulation. Even more striking wasthe erasure (at least in intention) of local cultures and the promotion of ahomogeneous national culture that would endow the nation with culturalidentity. If this process does not appear as traumatic in hindsight as theexperiences of colonial societies, it is because the process was stretched overlong periods and the resistances to it were spread out in time and space.14

Moreover, if national cultures seem ‘natural’ rather than historically invented,it is because the process of invention entailed not just the imposition of newcultural norms from the top down, but also the appropriation of localcultures in the de�nition of national cultures (see Con�no 1991).15 Hence the‘civilizing mission’ of national culture, however colonialist, appears as arelatively benign one, as it does to both Weber and Braudel.

For all the retroactive readings of the nation back into the past, nations inthe colonial world were products of colonialism, if inadvertently. Whilecolonial policy and its effects varied widely, it is arguable nevertheless that,in contrast to nation building in Europe, European colonizers had littleinterest in the political integration of colonial territories into national entities,or the homogenization of their cultures into national cultures – which forobvious reasons were contrary to their interests. We may recall here theviolence with which movements for national liberation and sovereignty weremet across the colonial world and the ideological efforts to discredit nationalliberation movements by identifying them with a global Communist conspir-acy. Nevertheless, to realize their own interests in the colonies Europeancolonizers had little choice but to establish administrative boundaries inaccordance with their needs and abilities, to seek to impose uniform rules onthe colonies that took account, in varying degrees in different places, of localpractices, and to create functionaries recruited from the local population tofacilitate colonial rule. If the locals were not passive recipients of these trans-formations, but went along with, resisted, or appropriated them to their ownends, that does not mean that they did so with a national consciousness, butin accordance with disparate, locally grounded interests and consciousness.Anticolonial nationalism would emerge in the end out of the ranks of thenative functionaries of colonial rule, who were both of the new structure ofpower and shut out from its rewards, and who were keenly aware by virtueof their colonial education of the fundamental differences that distinguishedcolonial rule from national politics in Europe.

Nevertheless, the historical relationship between colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism presents a major problem for the concept of colonialism:if there was no nation to begin with, how is it possible to speak of colonialism,

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14 Corrigan andSayer (1985) argue,for instance, thatnation building inEngland took awhole millennium,and entailed a‘cultural revolution’.

15 See also Gellner(1983). Gellnerwrites that, whilethe nation imposes a‘high culture’ onsociety, ‘nationalismusually conquers inthe name of aputative folk culture’(ibid.: 57).

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except in a sense imagined retroactively, after a national consciousness hadcome into existence in response to colonialism?16 Was colonialism in that casethe concern of a class that was itself the product of colonialism? If so, whatwere the consequences of their imaginings for the populations that colonial-ism had gathered under its administrative aegis, which they now sought tomake into a nation? Is it possible that they would end up as colonialists them-selves where these populations were concerned?

Anticolonial nationalism took many forms, which ranged from therevolutionary nationalism of the national liberation movements, to reformiststrategies of various kinds, to accommodationism. I should like to focushere on revolutionary nationalism, since it is there that the contradictions ofpostcolonial efforts at nation building are most obvious, and it is thesecontradictions that inform much of the criticism that is directed presently atan earlier postcolonialism. The tragedy of anticolonial revolutionarynationalism has been that it was condemned almost from the beginning toreplicate the practices of the colonialists in their very efforts at nationbuilding. It is a tragedy because, once a radical nationalist awareness hademerged, and colonial rule had been named as such, the revolutionarieshad no choice but to create a nation to achieve liberation, which they viewedto be part and parcel of the same process. Such a nation, moreover, had tobe suf�ciently uni�ed to struggle against colonialism and withstand its pres-sures, which meant in practice puritanical intolerance of any sign of disunityor less centrist and integrationist views of the nation.17 Here the colonialismof nation building is most starkly obvious, as the very idea of the nation, andthe way it was imagined, was already stamped with the legacy of the verycolonialism it sought to overthrow – a ‘foreign’ practice, more or less, seekingto become nativized. Partha Chatterjee’s (1986) observation that nationalismin the colonies was a ‘derivative’ discourse that replicated in its assumptionsthe very cultural formulations of the colonizer is crucial to understanding thedilemmas of revolutionary nationalism. Ania Loomba has argued recently,from a gender perspective, that anticolonial nationalism also perpetuatedcolonial perspectives and practices of gender relations (1998: 215–31).Nationalism, necessary to the struggle against colonialism, was also a productof the latter both historically and in the ideological baggage it carried intothe postcolonial period.

To a radical anticolonialist such as Frantz Fanon, whose work is seminalto most discussions of colonialism and postcolonialism, the nation andnational culture were not given, but were to be products of the revolution-ary struggle for justice of the masses, who were the most abjectly oppressedof the colonized. But Fanon, like many others, ignored that those masses, inparticular the peasantry, might be the most averse of all to the homogeniz-ing urges of nationalism. I think it is misleading to suggest that nationalliberation movements were informed by an essentialized conception of

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16 Achille Mbembe,who is much harsherin his criticism ofnationalist responsesto colonialism,writes that‘colonialism was aco-invention. It wasthe result of Westernviolence as well asthe work of a swarmof Africanauxiliaries seekingpro�t. Where theylacked a signi�cantwhite settlerpopulation tooccupy the land,colonial powersgenerally got blacksto colonize theirown congeners inthe name of themetropolitan nation.More decisively,“unhealthy” as itmight appear,colonialism as amental and materialphenomenonexercised a strongseduction onAfricans. As arefracted andendlesslyreconstituted fabricof �ctions,colonialismgenerated mutualutopias andhallucinationsshared by thecolonizers and thecolonized’ (Mbembe2002).

17 The teleology ofthe nation is quiteevident in Sartre’sanalysis of the fateof PatriceLumumba, where heroundly condemnsall competitors toLumumba who had

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national culture; to the extent that the nation was more of a project than anexisting entity, a national culture, too, was something yet to be realized, andcould only be imagined. More to the point may be a teleology of the nation,a nation conceived in opposition to colonialism, and therefore in terms ofthose who were the least touched by colonialism and the most oppressed byit. All others were suspect to various degrees. In Fanon’s The Wretched of theEarth, and Sartre’s commentary on it (2001: 36–55), the national future isassociated with the peasantry’s struggle for justice and democracy. The urbanpopulation, even the urban proletariat, appears suspect for having beentainted by colonialism, if not for collusion with it. As Sartre wrote:

Fanon hides nothing: to �ght against us [French colonialism], the former colonymust �ght against itself. Or rather, the two are one and the same thing. In the heatof the combat, all internal barriers must melt, the powerless bourgeoisie ofracketeers and traders, the urban proletariat which is always privileged, thelumpenproletariat of the shanty towns, all must come into line with the ruralmasses, the real reservoir of the national revolutionary army; in those lands whosedevelopment colonialism deliberately halted, the peasantry, when it revolts, appearsvery quickly as the revolutionary class; it knows naked oppression, it suffers fromit much more than the workers of the towns and to prevent it from dying of hunger,it will take nothing less than a complete shattering of all existing structures. If ittriumphs, the national revolution will be socialist; if its momentum is halted andthe colonized bourgeoisie take power, the new state, despite formal sovereignty,remains in the hands of the imperialists. (Sartre 2001: 139)

Sartre’s statement reads here as an eloquent summary of the vision that guidednational liberation movements from China to Algeria. It is also a reminder ofthe need for caution on how we interpret those movements from a presentvantage, when, arguably, the bourgeoisie has won and seeks to rewrite the pastin accordance with its vision. Nevertheless, it is not altogether persuasive froma contemporary perspective to blame all the failures of national liberationmovements on the machinations of imperialism or the native bourgeoisie,especially after socialism has been abandoned even where peasant-basedrevolutions had achieved victory – as in the People’s Republic of China or thePeople’s Republic of Vietnam. His statement also points to a fundamentalproblem in ideologies of national liberation: the substitution of a utopianteleology of the nation for its realities. If the nation did not yet exist, what werethe grounds for excluding from it those who were the social and culturalproducts of the structures of colonialism? The idea of a social revolution forjustice, democracy, and equality was vulnerable all along to appropriation forthe cause of an imagined nationalism, which could be all the more virulentfor being imagined, and yet incapable of producing a viable national entity –let alone one that could plausibly promise welfare, democracy, or justice.

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‘federalist’ notionsof the nation. See‘The politicalthought of PatriceLumumba’ (Sartre2001: 156–200).

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Postcolonial i sm/globa l izat ion

If the contemporary criticism of an earlier postcolonial criticism is to be morethan an ideological erasure of the past or a celebration of present-day wisdomover past fallacies, it needs to account for its relationship to its own circum-stances. Contemporary postcolonial criticism derives much of its force andplausibility from radical changes in the world situation, changes that are inpart consequences of decolonization, and also of transformations incapitalism provoked by anticolonial struggles of the past. Colonialism is nolonger a major force in shaping the world, although it is by no means dead– as witness the struggles for liberation of Palestinians, of ethnic groupsaround the world from Kurds in Turkey to Tibetans in the People’s Republicof China, or of the many indigenous peoples around the world who sufferoppression, marginalisation, and disenfranchisement under a variety ofregimes from all three worlds. The consequences of colonialism are also inevidence in the marginalization and precarious existence of the majority ofthe world’s population, as is acknowledged even by a conservative UnitedStates president when he states that, ‘a world where some live in comfort andplenty, while half of the human race lives on less than $2 a day, is neither justnor stable’ (Bush 2001).

Nevertheless, the present world is a world that is radically different fromthe world of decolonization in the immediate aftermath of World War II.Capitalism has reinvented itself and opened up to the formerly colonized,who are now participants in its global operations. Former colonials are in theprocess of colonizing the ‘mother’ countries, bringing the earlier ‘contactzones’ of the colonies into the heart of formerly colonialist societies. Thesemotions of people force a rede�nition both of nations and national cultures.Postcolonial intellectuals, having arrived in the First World, call into questioncherished ideals of Eurocentric notions of progress and knowledge, for whichthey are rewarded by widespread acknowledgment of the vanguard role theyplay in the production of knowledge. New entrants into the ranks ofcapitalism revive cultural legacies erased by Eurocentrism to claim alterna-tive paths to the future. As the former three worlds are con�gured so that itis possible to �nd Third Worlds in the First and First Worlds in the Second,so are class relations globally, so that it is now possible to �nd in the globalruling class representatives from all the former three worlds. Contemporarypostcolonial criticism, whatever its virtues, is also an elite affair, an expres-sion of cultural con�ict and contention within a global elite; former colonialswho are integrated into the system no longer have any interest in criticism ofthe system of which they are part, but rather assert their new-found powerthrough varieties of cultural nationalism.18 On the other hand, there is alsoan embarrassment or even pain in keeping alive memories of colonialism,or awareness of its legacies, as memories are likely to create cultural and

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18 I have in mindhere those varietiesof postcolonialcriticism that eschewany relationshipbetween culturalcriticism and thestructures ofpolitical economy orrefuse to account forthe relationship oftheir undertaking tocontemporarycon�gurations ofpower. There is insome of these casesalso a tendency toreinterpret thecolonial as a sign ofthe progressivelymodern. For anexample, see Lee(1999). Lee’s views,I may add, resonatewith the views of theleadership in thePeople’s Republic ofChina and inShanghai, itselfengaged in erasingthe memories ofrevolution. It is alsoworth emphasizinghere that, contraryto narcissisticassumptions inacademic work,postcolonialintellectuals are notjust those involvedin academic orcultural work, butinclude the fargreater number whostaff all manner oforganizations,includingtransnationalcorporations, andcommand muchmore practicalpower thanacademics.

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psychological obstacles to assimilation into the system, while forgettingmakes for easier assimilation – and acceptance.19

All this, of course, is part and parcel of what goes these days by the nameof globalization. The urge to integrate the world into a system throughcolonization has given way to managing a world where those who are unableto integrate or seem super�uous are simply marginalized, and colonialmanagement is replaced by the management of chaos, as is implied inPresident Bush’s statement above. Socialism has disappeared as an alterna-tive, as have the revolutionary alternatives of an earlier postcolonialism. Post-colonial elites, who have assumed responsibility for managing formerlycolonial or even revolutionary societies (such as the People’s Republic ofChina), seem to be trapped between neo-liberalism and traditionalism, but ineither case unable to think beyond the world of transnational capitalism, orthe ideology of globalization that underwrites it, which has assumed thepower of a life-force (see Chanda 2001: 32). Even the language of an earlierday seems inappropriate, and to invoke it an act of bad faith.

Colonialism as an idea does not carry much weight when everyday life hasbeen colonized, and those of the world’s populations who can afford to doso have become participants in the same cultural practices, regardless oforigin. Globalization returns us to a condition where once again it iscapitalism, rather than colonialism, that appears as the major problem. Theavoidance of this question is a serious problem of contemporary postcolonialcriticism which, focused on past legacies, is largely oblivious to its ownconditions of existence and its relationship to contemporary con�gurationsof power. It also ignores the ways in which its interpretation of the pastmay serve to promote or, at the least, play into the hands of a globalizedcapitalism.

The contemporary critique of an earlier postcolonial criticism has donemuch to complicate colonial relationships. But is colonialism, therefore,irrelevant, and should we simply discard earlier anticolonial ideologies andstruggles as irrelevant to any understanding of the past and the present,ridden as they were with the contradictions I have discussed above, and futileif not destructive in their consequences? Not unless we wish to erase thehistory of the present, and the part colonialism has played in shaping bothits structures and its identities. What is needed, instead, is historicizingcolonialism.

Similarly to terms such as globalization or hybridity, colonialism is in someways trivial in its generality. In a fundamental sense, all history is colonialhistory, and all human beings have been colonists of one kind or another asthey have spread over and settled around the world. Even in a more restrictedpolitical or cultural sense, colonialism is not just a modern phenomenon. Thevery idea of civilization is a colonial idea in its assumption that the normsassociated with civilization provide a means for converting the others of

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19 It is not just theelite that seeks toforget, of course, butalso the people ingeneral who do notwant to be remindedcontinually of theircolonial origins orthe brutalization oftheir precolonialsocieties. For adiscussion, seeNeumann (1994).

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civilization, the ‘barbarians’, in the process erasing alternative norms andways of living.

But colonialism is also a very complicated and vague term. It would beobscurantist to confuse the colonialism of independent ‘colonists’ with state-sponsored and - directed colonialism, even though there may be a historicalrelationship between the two. On the other hand, not every case of invasionof one people by another lends itself to description as ‘colonial’; as in the caseof the successive waves of tribal peoples who invaded China, and even cameto rule the empire, who were ultimately absorbed into Chinese society.Perhaps most importantly, there is some question as to whether colonialismshould be viewed as a ‘totalistic’ phenomenon, which erases other kinds ofsocial and political relationships, or as an ‘add on’, an addition to existingsocial and political relationships, which may recon�gure the �eld of socialand political relationships while being subject itself to their dynamics – muchlike globalization these days. Colonialism has differed historically accordingto not only the colonizer, but even more importantly the colonized. It did notlead to the same consequences everywhere, and, within individual societies,different classes, genders, and ethnicities felt its effects, and related to it,differently.

The question, then, is what characterizes modern European colonialism.Modern European colonialism is incomprehensible without reference to thecapitalism that dynamized it, just as the formations of historical capitalismin Europe may not be understood without reference to colonialism. Thisintimate relationship distinguishes modern colonialism from other colonial-isms, both in scope (the entire globe) and in depth (the transformation of lifeat the everyday level). If the goal of global conquest by capitalism/colonialism has become a reality only by the late twentieth century, the realitynevertheless has a long history behind it that is deeply entangled in colonial-ism. We may add here that Europe itself is a product of colonialism in adeeper sense than simply the colonial character of modernity: the veryformation and emergence of Europe was the product of the colonizationof what is now Europe by trade, religion, and military conquest, whichcoincided temporally with the Europeans’ colonization of the world.

At the same time, second, European colonialism was entangled from thebeginning with the nation-state. Whether colonization produced the nation-state (in collusion with an emergent capital) or the nation-state producedcolonialism is a moot matter; as the two assume recognizable form almostsimultaneously from the seventeenth century, and practices of nation buildingand colonialism, while quite distinct ultimately, were nevertheless entangledwith one another. On the other hand, there is little question that it wasEuropean colonialism that universalized the system of nation-states globally.As Chatterjee has argued eloquently in the work referred to above, the ironyof nationalism in non-European societies is that, while it has been motivated

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by the urge for liberation from European (or Euro-American) colonization,domination, and hegemony, as a form it owed its origins to Europe, and itemployed the same practises of administrative centralization and culturalhomogenization that had characterized the formation of the nation-states inEurope. The colonialism of the nation-state has become more apparent inthese new settings, as the formerly colonized have sought to establish thehegemony of the nation, and the national idea, over widely disparate popu-lations. Ethnic con�ict may not be restricted to non-European states, but itcontinues to assume a sharper expression there. National colonization oflocal populations need not be restricted to those that can be classi�ed as‘ethnic’, but characterized the relationship between the national and the local,as is visible these days also in the proliferating assertions of local culturesagainst national or global hegemony.

If a historical period may be judged not only by its particular innovationsand creations, but also by the contradictions produced by those sameinnovations and creations, the contradictions produced by capitalism andnationalism, but particularly the latter, may go a long ways toward explain-ing why colonialism looms large in the historical consciousness of the present.Modern colonialism did not merely impose Euro-American domination overthe world, but also spread globally the ideologies of development generatedby capitalism; that colonialism then became the obstacle to the realization inthe colonies of the aspirations to development it brought with it was a majorfactor in fueling anticolonialism. Modern colonialism also brought with it theideology of nationalism which not only made it intolerable, but fosteredaspirations to identity with deep cultural consequences. Postcolonial criticismhas called into question the very system of values associated with modernityfor its complicity in colonialism. It has also created an urge for the discoveryor assertion of native values to overcome the alienation from the self or nativeculture that was the result of colonialism. It is ironic, of course, that that verysearch, and its faith in the existence of such values, usually lodged in nationalimaginings, is itself a product of that very same colonialism.

In eschewing meta-narratives and structures, contemporary postcolonialcriticism has a tendency to dehistoricize colonialism, which in some ways alsohas made it impossible to grasp those historical relationships that animatedearlier discussions of colonialism. On the other hand, attention has beenshifted almost entirely from the critique of political economy to the critiqueof culture (Eurocentrism), and from the critique of the nation-state as anorgan of power, a political entity, to the critique of the nation as culturalentity. Similarly, the search for systemic alternatives to the present of anearlier generation has been overtaken by cultural nationalisms of one kind oranother that take for granted the existing system of political economy and�ght out their battles on the grounds of culture. It is not that these are notimportant issues, but, divorced from the structures of political economy, they

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are also distanced from their historical context, or substitute the situationalfor the systemic – which adds up to the same thing. This, ironically, under-cuts the ability to deal historically with the issue that is at the center ofcontemporary postcolonial criticism: the issue of cultural identity.

I noted above in passing that a term such as ‘hybridity’, which is quitepopular these days in postcolonial discussions of colonial identities, issomewhat trivial in its generality as it is possible to argue, similarly to thecase of colonialism, that all human identity is hybrid, as cultures and civiliz-ations have been colonizing and hybridizing their populations all along. Inits tacit rei�cation of cultural identities, moreover, the term obstructs recog-nition of the historicity of identity, which is always in the process offormation and de-formation.20 The cultures constituting the hybrid, we mayargue, are themselves products of previous hybridizations; that is, previoushistories. Hybridization did not begin with European colonialism; neither isit very convincing that the kind of hybridization produced by Europeancolonialism is any less likely than earlier hybridizations to produce newcultural identities that may be complex but are not, therefore, condemned toa bifurcated existence. Many of the identities that today are taken for grantedas civilizational or national identities are not only ‘hybrid’; they are theproducts of prior colonizations, resistances, and encounters of various kinds,including oppression, exploitation, and forceful conversion, which are nowburied under celebrations of historical emergence. The identity produced bythe colonization of Europe is hailed today as the hallmark of a Europeanidentity that distinguishes Europe from all others.21 The culture that iscelebrated today as Chinese culture is the product of the colonization of thearea we call China from the north; and the process goes on to this day inwestern China and Tibet. Islamic conquest of a good bit of the world was toproduce an Islamic identity, in the name of which people continue to commitsuicide. The horri�c experience of slavery does not prevent African-Americans from identi�cation with a United States national identity; neitherdoes the continued colonization of Amerindians or the internment ofJapanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. The list isendless, as it could be extended to most historical civilizations, but also tonations as well as ethnic groups and indigenous peoples.

Will this also be the case with the present, when identities producedthrough European and Euro-American colonialism, which are the cause of somuch cultural agony and contention presently, will be taken for granted asnew identities, without memory of the coercion and hybridization that wentinto their making? Let me stress that I am not speaking here of homogeniz-ation of some kind, but simply suggesting that the spread of European andEuro-American values globally has created identities which differ from placeto place in terms of localized encounters and interactions, but which allcontain some or another aspect of the culture and values associated with

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20 In a recentdiscussion of thispaper in a seminar atthe University ofCalifornia, SantaCruz, Jim Cliffordobjected that noteveryone uses‘hybridity’ahistorically, andasked for examplesof those who did. Iam grateful for thisreminder. I wouldlike to note here thatmy reference is not toany individuals, butto the concept itself.As I have argued atlength elsewhere, theterm hybridity notonly does notindicate concretelywhat the hybrid maybe, except that it isthe product of somekind of mixture, butit also implies non-hybridity of itsconstituents. If, onthe other hand, webreak down thehybrid into itsconcreteconstituents, downto the level ofeveryday life, theconcept becomessuper�uous, as at thislevel the historicity ofidentity (or ‘routes’,as Clifford prefers)becomes evident (seeDirlik 2000a). It isimportant, I think, todistinguish‘hybridity’ as criticalstrategy, as deployedfor example by HomiBhabha in openingup spaces forcriticism, fromhybridity asexplanation ofidentity.

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modernity. In this sense, there is little difference between the global effectsof modern European capitalist civilization and earlier civilizations thatalso made world-historical, if not global, claims. Why, then, a seeminglyobsessive denial of the entanglement of most contemporary national andcivilizational identities in a modernity shaped by European capitalism andcolonialism, and the cultures they produced, as if the repudiation of Euro-centrism requires the denial of a phase of history in the shaping of whichEuro-American material and cultural practices have played a crucial part? Isresistance to this modernity simply a reaction to its unprecedented trans-formative power globally, which is also unprecedented in the depth of itspenetration to the level of everyday life? Can contemporary cultural claimsto alternative modernities, or even anti-modernities, be grasped without refer-ence to the knowledges and cultural values which, for better or worse, havetheir sources not just in an imagined ‘west’, but in a civilizational systemgrowing out of the ‘west’, the system of a capitalist civilization that is by nomeans just ‘western’?

The difference from the past, perhaps the crucial difference, may be thecontradictions of this particular civilization, especially the contradictions ofnationalism. Nationalism may have been a product of European conquest,and the idea of the nation part of the legacy of European colonialism. Butthe national idea is a source both of a heightened sense of loss, howeverelusive may be the ‘self’ that has been lost, and of powerful imaginings:basing its claims on history, nationalism nevertheless imagines itself to haveexisted from the origins of time – in de�ance of history. This itself is apowerful stimulus in the search for an authentic identity, against the coloniallegacy, that is autochthonous both in origin and the ful�llment of its historicaldestiny. It may not always be the case that nationalism makes for greaterresistance to alien domination than in pre-nationalist pasts; and it certainlywould be premature to say how long nationalism will retain its power toshape cultural identity. But, for the time being, the search for national andethnic identity against colonialism or memories of colonialism plays apowerful part in contemporary politics and culture.

There is, however, also good evidence of the durability of colonial identitiesin the identi�cation of the formerly colonized with their colonizers, whichmay be most evident in our day in the trajectories of diasporic motions, whichare directed in many cases along the lines or spaces of colonial relationships.Who plays and loves cricket is a question that comes immediately to mind;as does the question of the recent ‘banana wars’, which pit Europeancolonialism against United States neocolonialism over the question of wherebananas could be imported from to the European Union.

Hybridity may be used to refute arguments for a Eurocentric transform-ation of cultural identities, but hybridity also implies an admission thatcontemporary cultural identities globally are infused with the values spread

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21 A good exampleof this point is anexhibit (13 May–19August 2001) at theWalter Gropius Bauin Berlin, which wasput together by thejoint efforts ofCentral and EasternEuropean scholars(German, Polish,Slovak, Czech, andHungarian). Entitled‘Central Europe inthe Year 1000’(Europas Mitte um1000), the exhibitchronicles what maybest be described asthe colonization ofcentral Europe fromthe south and thesouth-east by trade,religion, andmilitary force, butconcludes with acelebratory assertionof a particularEuropean identitythat had come intobeing by the year1000. It not onlyplaces a particularinterpretation onthis process, but alsoerases much thatwas to come later,including what somescholars take to be acolonization ofeastern by westernEurope.

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by capitalism and the nation-state, as well as the knowledges and values theyproduced. This is, in fact, a main distinction between present and past post-colonialism: to recognize the legitimacy of the hybrid against claims tonational purity, which acknowledges tacitly the transformation culturally ofsocieties globally through the agency of colonialism. Colonialism, howeveroppressive and unjust in its practices, also created cultural bonds betweenthe colonizer and the colonized, which have shaped irrevocably the culturalidentities of both and which survive decolonization.

Recognition of this bond also foregrounds the importance of historicalcontext in identity formations. An earlier generation of colonized was alsoaware of these bonds that shaped them, and there is every evidence that theyvalued these bonds. But the very institutions of colonialism, and colonialracism, denied their participation in the culture that had formed them.Manichean opposition was perhaps the only option open to them. This stillseems to be the only option open to those in the contemporary world whocontinue to suffer from colonialism. For the decolonized, the racism is notgone but most colonial institutions are, which opens up new visions on thecultures of colonialism, and the possibility of acknowledging the culturalbonds of colonialism. If it is ‘globalization’ that has made this possible, wemay well ask whether these legacies of colonialism themselves can surviveglobalization.

Mbembe (2002) writes that ‘the thematic of anti-imperialism is exhausted’.We might add that the problematic of postcolonialism is also exhausted; boththe problematic of radical anticolonial nationalism of the decades surround-ing decolonization and the problematic of cultural identity that has domi-nated recent postcolonial thinking, which has revealed the contradictions ofan earlier postcolonialism but seems incapable itself of producing anythingbeyond increasingly formulaic litanies about borders and hybridities. Mostimportantly, while some still continue to suffer from colonialism, colonialismas systemic activity has receded before a recon�guration of global relations,so that, even where colonialism persists, it appears differently than it didbefore as it is refracted through these new relationships. This presents newquestions both of politics and of cultural identities.

Chaos and ‘Empire ’

In a radical evaluation of the contemporary world published recently,Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri enjoin us to think the world in new terms,in terms of what they describe as ‘Empire’. Empire is to be distinguished fromimperialism, because in the contemporary world no single power identi�ablewith a nation-state, including the United States, has the wherewithal tocontrol the world in old ways. Empire represents the emergence of a new

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mode of governance that does not necessarily put an end to chaos – whichmay in fact proliferate – but only to threats to its domination. As theydescribe what they mean by Empire:

The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries;Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire positsa regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules overthe entire ‘civilized’ world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, theconcept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest,but rather as an order that suspends history and thereby �xes the existing state ofaffairs for eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is the way things willalways be and the way they were always meant to be. Empire presents its rule notas a transitory moment in the movement of history, but as a regime with notemporal boundaries and in this sense outside history or at the end of history. Third,the rule of Empire operates on all registers of the social order extending down tothe depths of the social world. Empire not only manages a territory and a popu-lation but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human inter-actions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule issocial life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form ofbiopower. Finally, although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood,the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace – a perpetual and universalpeace outside of history. (Hardt and Negri 2000: xiv–xv)

The abstract nature of this statement may be disconcerting, and yet it is notintended as a description of the world but a way of thinking about it. Its veryabstractness captures the increasingly abstract nature of economic andpolitical power in the world even as the latter infuses society thoroughly, fromthe highest level of governance to everyday social life, including the life of thebody.

I offer this statement here by way of conclusion as a way of rethinking theproblems I have discussed above. I myself do not think that the very manyfractures of the modern world, including colonialism, have disappeared;rather, they have been complicated in the postmodern recon�gurations ofmodernity. Agency has not disappeared altogether either, as those fracturesand the con�icts they breed are still very real – as we have been remindedpainfully by the recent terrorist tragedy in New York and Washington, DC,and its aftermath which is still in the process of unfolding. On the other hand,it is also the case, I believe, that the concepts inherited from modernity arenot suf�cient to capture the realities of the contemporary world, and, to theextent that we are unable to see through earlier spatial and temporalmappings of the world, we may be unable also to capture the radicalreorganization of power in the world, all the way to the psychic and physicalremaking of what it means to be human. And in this many participate,

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regardless of their territorial and cultural location. Empire is one way to thinkour way through this dif�culty.

It is also a way of responding to these transformations both analyticallyand politically. While old con�icts persist, there are also new ones on theemergence. Empire, as Hardt and Negri observe, generates its own contra-dictions, and these contradictions are no longer just between east and west,between civilizations or nations, or between colonizers and colonized, but inplaces marginalized or worked over by a transnational capital and the insti-tutional innovations it invites. Imprisonment in earlier categories of thinkingmodernity may also blind us to these contradictions and what they may implyfor struggles for liberation. Empire may be all-encompassing, but it alsogenerates spaces within its very body in these contradictions, spaces that mayhopefully produce not just chaos, but also new ways of thinking our way outof the burdens of not only the past but, more importantly, of the present.

Acknowledgements

This essay was written while I was a fellow at Grif�th University, Brisbane,Australia. I am grateful to colleagues there for a productive month, and theircomments on this essay. My special thanks to Mark Beeson, Mary Farquhar,Nick Knight, and Colin McKerras. I should also like to thank for theircomments, criticisms, and encouragement the participants in a seminardiscussion of this paper at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of Cali-fornia, Santa Cruz, especially Jim Clifford, Chris Connery, Gail Hershatter,and Rob Wilson.

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