Postcolonialism, Subaltern studies and Globalization:

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Postcolonialism, Subaltern studies and
Globalization

• Catarina Kinnvall

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Overview

• Postcolonialism Imaginary identifications
• Multiculturalism and diaspora politics
• Subaltern Studies
• Summarizing the globalization debates
• Points for discussion

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Imaginary identifications

• Constructing identities through significant
  others and collective narratives
• The civilized Europeans identity cannot exist
  without the uncivilized other missionary racism

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Multiculturalism and diaspora politics

• Relies upon a concept of homogenous entities
• Politics of recognition
• Translation, third room, hybridization
• Neo-racism
• Citizenship discourses

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Subaltern Studies

• Started in England in the 1970s
• Developed from Gramscis theories of culture and
  class politics
• Ranajit Guha initiated the project
• 1970s focus on workers and peasant movement
• 1980s focus on resistance to state power
• 1990s influenced by poststructuralists

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Summarizing the globalization debates

• Starting premises
• Implications for social change
• Impacts on the human condition
• Policy responses
• c.f. Scholte

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Starting premises

• competing definitions internationalization or
  something different?
• varying measurements of scale globalism or
  scepticism?
• contrasting chronologies old or new?
• diverse explanations materialist or idealist,
  individualist or structuralist?

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Implications for social change

• old capitalism, new capitalism or
  postcolonialism?
• persistent statism or poststatist governance?
• homogenization or heterogenization of identities?
• old lines or new turns in knowledge?
• extension of modernity or dawn of postmodernity?

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Impacts on the human condition

• increased or decreased security?
• more or less social democracy?
• greater or reduced democracy?

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Policy responses

• neoliberalist reliance on market forces?
• rejectionist reliance on localism?
• reformist reliance on public policies?
• transformist reliance on social revolution?

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Points for discussion

• How does a postcolonial perspective fit into the
  globalization debate?
• How does postcolonialism differ from other
  critical approaches?
• Postcolonialism strength and weaknesses?