ABSTRACT
In a response to the question – which runs the risk nowadays of becoming largely rhetorical – “When exactly does the ‘post-colonial’ begin?” – Arif Dirlik answers, with admirable brevity and, as he claims, only partly facetiously, that it begins when “Third-World intellectuals have arrived in the First World academe.”4 One can ponder the many ironies of the response, not least that postcolonial studies were, at least at their inception, a metropolitan phenomenon, taking place in a context of deep restructuring in the former colonies of political-economic, intellectual, and academic life that coincided with the more or less thorough abandonment of state-originated projects of development that sought to redress some of the imbalances of colonial-era “maldevelopment.”5 This era may be said to have ended with Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 and the policy of neoliberal development inaugurated by the “reforms” of Deng Xiaoping. These reforms were widely emulated in the next decade and a half in other countries in Asia, culminating for our purposes in the liberalization policies set in motion in India in the early 1990s. Issues of social justice, not least the redistribution of productive resources (notably land), the use of a variety of state-originated or state-backed initiatives to
ensure a measure of opportunity to redress the inequalities inherited from an earlier epoch of direct or indirect foreign rule were more or less decisively abandoned during this period, in favour of a return to an extroverted pattern of growth, following the recommendations of the so-called multilateral agencies – most notably, the IMF and the World Bank.6 The “postcolonial” project, in the sense in which Dirlik uses the term, tends to sidestep these issues, indeed has remained “silent on the relationship of the idea of postcolonialism to its context in contemporary capitalism.”7 It is, in his view, a largely – if no longer exclusively – metropolitan regrouping of intellectual energies that focuses instead on all sorts of issues related to Eurocentrism, hybridity, multiple modernities, and so on. Be that as it may, for the purposes of this chapter, I will be focusing on a more specific subset of what might be called postcolonial studies brought to the fore by intellectuals who have maintained a strong connection with the country of their origin, and whose intellectual output is informed by that connection.8
