ABSTRACT
The racial difference has functioned as one of the most powerful yet most fragile markers of human identity, difficult to police and maintain yet persistent, a constructed idea yet all too real in its devastating effects. Colonialism was the means through which capitalism achieved its global expansion. In colonial situations the state and its various institutions are especially crucial in maintaining the racial and class distinctions and ideologies necessary for creating capitalism. The precise intersection of racial ideologies with the process of class formation depended both upon the kinds of societies which colonial powers penetrated and the specific racial ideologies that emerged there. In the postcolonial world also, capitalist economies coexist with, or are hampered by pre-capitalist forms. The postcolonial studies have been preoccupied with issues of hybridity, creolisation, and mestizaje, with the in-betweenness, diasporas, mobility and cross-overs of ideas and identities generated by colonialism.
