Engaging the Postcolonial: Terrorism, Tourism, and Literary Cosmopolitanism in the Twenty-First Century

The May 2007 issue of Publications of the Modern Language Association(PMLA) featured an Editor’s Column entitled “The End of Postcolonial Theory?” In this very timely and illuminating discussion, one of the participants asks whether postcolonial theory’s failure was perhaps due to its inability to match knowledge and the world (Yaeger). A legitimate question indeed if we consider the diverse range of unresolved issues that continue to haunt postcolonial societies, like terrorism, environmental damage, and cultural untranslatability, to name only a few. In other words, is the term “postcolonial” still valid in the interpretation of contemporary societies? Notwithstanding the skepticism expressed in the title of the PMLA editorial, recent scholarly publications like the ones referred to in this essay have proven that when the “postcolonial” is creatively integrated into other paradigms like the “cosmopolitan,” the “transnational,” and the “global” it provides a richer and more nuanced account of contemporary society. In 1978 Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism produced a critique of Western metaphysics and exposed Eurocentric categories and imperial metanarratives. This in turn generated a series of studies that examined neglected aspects of imperial domination and subaltern subject formations. The term “postcolonial” became a critical lens to examine the complicity between knowledge and power both in the past and in the present. Centring its analyses on culture as forms of representation instead of on political economy, “postcolonial” studies examined gender, sexuality, race, social class, and other forms of identity and uncovered the colonial dimensions of diverse sites of marginality, alterity, and subalternity. Critics like Slemon adapted the field’s principal parameters to read settler colony/second world cultures of Canada and Australia. Despite the extent of its intersection with other fields and disciplines, postcolonialism’s theoretical gaps have come under scrutiny (McClinctok; Shohat; Dirlik; Gikandi). Since the publication in the 1980s of the seminal works of Said, Bhabha, and Spivak, the field’s fundamental understanding of colonialism as a determining marker of history, its tendency to homogenize cultures, times, and cultural formations, and its approbation of “deterministic economism” have all come under heavy criticism as pointed out by the participants in the PMLA round table discussion (Yaeger). Postcolonialism’s complicity with the global politics of Euro-American academia has also been criticized (Dirlik). Yet numerous studies in the last twenty years (one need only look at titles and special issues of journals published by prestigious university and commercial presses across the world) have shown that the field has enormously benefitted from these criticisms, which have turned out to be expressions of a productive crisis. Postcolonialism’s engagement with globalization and cultural critics’ use of “postcolonial” as a paradigm to read the transnational and translational conditions of migrancy have resulted in a number of important works. As Ashcroft argues, the postcolonial, by adapting itself to vernacular debates and local academic traditions, remains a relevant project to recover the local and regional. Globalization when understood “aculturally” translates as the diffusion of capital, urbanization, industrialization, and education in a unified world with a homogenous program available to all. But as Ashcroft points out, globalization is a multidirectional and a transcultural process, and it operates not necessarily hierarchically nor centrifugally but “rhizomically” (86, following Edouard Glissant). In Ashcroft’s view, postcolonial transformation is the key process that engages the local with the global and illuminates the emergence of multiple/postcolonial modernities (89). Using Ashcroft’s definition of a transformative paradigm of postcolonialism, I would like to focus on three key fields of enquiry that global modernities have produced, namely terrorism, tourism, and literary cosmopolitanism. These fields of enquiry are central to three recent publications—Terror and the Postcolonial (Boehmer and Morton, eds.); Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture …