ABSTRACT
Postcolonial studies arose alongside the first wave of what has been idealistically labeled globalization but might more properly be called neoliberalization, a global redistribution of wealth enforced through the brutal imposition of structural adjustment policies across the decolonized world (Harvey 2005). If, as Neil Lazarus argues, the trajectory of the discipline’s subsequent concentration on the problem of imperialism rather than capitalism itself can be read in correlation to “the epochal reversal” of the insurgent revolutionary ideologies of the Third World (Lazarus 2011, 9), then we should ask how the blindspots of the contemporary discipline might be symptomatic of our current conjuncture of intensified liberalization, asset-stripping, accelerated US imperialist aggression – combined with a paradoxical impotence implicit in its inability to defeat insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite bringing to bear all the might of the US military-industrial complex – and incipient cold war with China. Postcolonial studies provides valuable tools for the analysis of colonial formations of race, class, ethnicity and gender that continue to haunt independent nations. However, it seems less able to account for the proliferation of new forms of militarization and securitization under the aegis of the American imperium and the neoliberal state, the transition into capitalism of China and the countries of the former Soviet Empire or the vertiginous wealth accumulation amongst the elites of Brazil, India and South Africa.
