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Metropolitanism and postcoloniality in Hardt and Negri’s Empire trilogy

This article surveys Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire trilogy – Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth – in terms of postcolonialism. As “the Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century”, the trilogy has inspired contemporary leftist debates on transnationalism and shaped critical discourses about biopolitics and immaterial labor. In their manifesto, Hardt and Negri claim that old empires perished long ago, and the postcolonial condition no longer explains the current global order. Yet the trilogy is fraught with localized postcolonial issues, and the trilogy resounds with old national and colonial issues such as nationalism, imperialism and local unrests, the anxieties of which the authors cannot obliterate. By developing these localized postcolonial questions, this article takes issue with the way the trilogy assimilates postcolonial social formations that reside beneath the grand narrative of global Empire.