ABSTRACT
The idea that cultural forms often voice resistance to established power has become a cliché in the later part of the twentieth century. Faux rebellion, packaged for ready consumption in the cultural marketplace, is almost as available as Coca-Cola. No wonder there is a good deal of nostalgia for a more clear-cut age of rebel culture, when Opposition and Establishment had quite distinct moral iconographies. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the anticolonial movements of the Third World, where Amilcar Cabral’s concept of “culture as resistance” played a crucial role in appraising how colonial rule had maintained itself for centuries by saturating the majority of the world’s population with internalized self-contempt. Decolonizing the mind would prove as important as changing the flag flying over Government House. Subsequently, postcolonial life brought its own landscape of cultural power into being, with suppressed majorities and minorities often struggling to win a legitimate voice in many a liberated nation-state. With the onset of neocolonialism under the technocratic rule of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the balance of power and resistance changed yet again as countries in the developing world fell one by one into the suffocating grip of the “debt trap.”
