ABSTRACT
What then is the difference between these two parallel movements: on the one hand, transnational capital and the super nation-states, on the other, Cultural Studies? This is the problematic which I wish to tackle. My short answer is: there is not much difference, or in fact, they are both exhibiting the same movement; the latter is guided by the former and, to put it strongly, transnational-global cultural studies is in complicity with economic neoimperialism and the neo-colonial politics of nation-state structures. Unless counterhegemonic positions and projects can be initiated, not to install cultural studies as a traditional, conservative discipline of the colonialist past, but to generate strategic knowledge in alliances with resisting subject groups (academic or otherwise) or nonstatist, non-conformist oriented social movements across borders, the future history of cultural studies will be written as a ‘post-colonialist’ discipline just like sociology or anthropology developed in the nineteenth century under the high imperialist project. As David Morley (forthcoming) points out, postmodernism has a complicitous dimension leaning toward the highest stage of cultural imperialism, likewise, transnational cultural studies, if not seriously argued over, can be the vanguard of global capitalism.3
