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Marxism and Postcolonial Studies Now

"Postcolonial" has never been a very satisfying rubric. Marxist thinkers like Ngugi wa Thiong'o have long been suspicious of the epochal difference implied between social relations under colonialism and those that succeeded them, preferring the term "neo-colonial." As a merely empirical term it is not particularly descriptive: not only foundational anti-colonial theory (that of Franz Fanon, for example) but also some of the most important "postcolonial" literature (such as that of the early Achebe) was written in the dizzying urgency of the moment immediately preceding decolonization. Nor is it particularly descriptive geographically: are the independent settler colonies postcolonial? How about oppressed, relatively autochthonous communities within them? What about the huge swathes of the literally postcolonial world, formerly allied with the Soviet bloc Angola, Vietnam, Cuba, for example that barely register at all in the discourse of the postcolonial? These may be nitpicking questions, although a case could be made that they register the surface effects of much deeper contradictions at the heart of a postcolonial discourse that is, more than anything else, the academic version of a U.S. posture of benevolent stewardship over the "developing" world. Be this as it may, the post-Soviet moment finds postcolonial studies in something like a crisis. No doubt this has something to do with the disarticulation of the old Soviet Bloc itself, as a very different though not necessarily happier history of decolonization emerges from nations heretofore relatively inaccessible. More importantly, the post-Soviet universalization of free-market ideology that goes by the name of "globalization" though this is in fact only one moment in an ongoing dialectic of globalization and counterglobalizationwhile it has undoubtedly moved the political atmosphere