Fractured Selves, Global Markets: A Postcolonial Critique of Identity in the Age of Globalization
This blog post, assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad, explores how postcolonial theory adapts when the colonizer is replaced by a borderless global market. Across these two companion articles, Barad sir argues that while traditional "center-margin" theories struggle to map the shifting realities of modern globalization, contemporary fiction provides the exact vocabulary we need to expose the human cost of this new, decentered empire.
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ARTICLE 1: Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies
Quick summary of what this article actually argues:
Barad sir opens by noting that after 9/11, the US invasion of Afghanistan/Iraq, and the "Global War on Terror," it became "harder than ever to see our world as simply 'postcolonial'" (quoting Loomba). He argues globalization can't be read through postcolonialism's old vocabulary of "margins and centers" Hardt and Negri's Empire describes a new, decentered form of global power with "no territorial center," unlike old European colonialism. The article then surveys economic critiques (Stiglitz's "Market Fundamentalism," Friedman's "Flat World" vs. Stiglitz's rebuttal that the world is "getting less flat," Sainath's line that market fundamentalism "destroys more human lives than any other" force), Schwab's "Globalization 4.0," and Chomsky's view of corporations as "private tyrannies." The most pointed section is the last: Barad sir shows how postcolonial studies itself has come under attack post-9/11 the ACTA report accusing universities of "anti-American" bias, Stanley Kurtz lobbying against "area studies" funding, and Loomba's closing insistence that "critiques of past and ongoing empires are going to be more necessary than ever."
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Postcolonial Studies After 9/11: Can Old Frameworks Survive a Borderless Empire?
Dilip Barad sir's article "Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies" (JHERS, 2022) makes an argument that unsettles a lot of what postcolonial theory takes for granted. Barad sir starts from a specific historical rupture September 11, 2001 and asks whether postcolonial studies, built on the vocabulary of colonizer and colonized, center and margin, can still explain a world where power no longer sits in one obvious place. Drawing on Ania Loomba, he writes that after 9/11 and the ensuing "Global War on Terror," it became harder to see the world as simply postcolonial at all. That's a bold opening claim, and it sets up the article's real question: has globalization made the postcolonial framework obsolete, or has it just made the framework more urgent only harder to apply?
Material at the George W. Bush Presidential Library Pertaining To The Global War on Terror
The theoretical core: Empire without a center
The article's most useful concept comes from Hardt and Negri's Empire, which Barad sir quotes directly: unlike old-style imperialism, this new "Empire" establishes no territorial center of power and relies on no fixed boundaries it's a "decentered and deterritorializing apparatus" that manages "hybrid identities" and "flexible hierarchies" through what they call "modulating networks of command." This is the theoretical hinge of the whole piece. Classical postcolonial theory Fanon's colonizer/colonized binary, Said's Orient/Occident split assumed a center (the metropole) exploiting a periphery (the colony). Barad sir , via O'Brien and Szeman, notes that this margin-and-center model may now be exactly what's preventing postcolonial studies from understanding contemporary power, because today's economies and identities move through transnational networks and flows, not fixed geographic hierarchies.
My critique of this framing
I find this argument partially convincing but also a little too tidy. Yes, power is more diffuse capital moves faster than any single nation-state's control. But "no center" doesn't mean "no hierarchy." The US still dominates global finance, military spending, and cultural export in ways that look suspiciously like a center, even if it doesn't hold literal colonies. Barad sir's own material undercuts the "no-center" thesis later in the article: he shows the same US-centered universities producing reports (like the ACTA report) that police which scholars get funding, and describes Niall Ferguson explicitly urging America's "best and brightest" to be trained for an imperial mission language that is very center-and-periphery. So while Hardt and Negri's model is useful for describing capital flows, I'd argue the political and military reality Barad sir's documents in his own article (the War on Terror, the silencing of postcolonial scholars) still runs on an old-fashioned single dominant actor. Globalization may decentralize the economy while re-centering the politics.
Where this connects to film
This tension decentralized economic empire versus very centered political/military power is exactly what Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener (2005) dramatizes. On the surface it's a thriller about a British diplomat investigating his wife's murder in Kenya, but underneath it's a study of exactly the "Empire" Hardt and Negri describe: a pharmaceutical multinational testing a drug on Kenyan patients without real consent, operating through NGOs, diplomats, and corporate lawyers spread across three continents no single visible villain sitting in a colonial governor's office, just a "modulating network of command" that produces the same exploitation colonialism used to. And yet, just as Barad sir's article shows, the people who can investigate and resist (Justin, the diplomat) still move through very center-heavy institutions the British Foreign Office, London law firms while the Kenyan characters who die for the story remain peripheral even within a film that is supposedly about them. The film accidentally proves his own tension: globalization disperses economic power but the postcolonial hierarchy of whose life counts as a "story" hasn't moved at all.
Broader implication
What his article ultimately argues and what I'd push further is that postcolonial studies shouldn't abandon the center/margin framework so much as relocate it: from geography to economy and institutional access. The 9/11-era attacks on postcolonial scholarship that sir documents (Kurtz's lobbying, the ACTA report, the branding of critical scholars as "anti-American") show that the old colonial reflex delegitimizing dissenting knowledge production is alive and well, just wearing globalization's clothes. Loomba's closing line, which sir quotes, is the article's real thesis: critiques of past and ongoing empires are "going to be more necessary than ever." That's not a retreat from postcolonial theory it's a demand that the theory adapt fast enough to track power that no longer announces itself with a flag.
ARTICLE 2: Globalization and Fiction: Exploring Postcolonial Critique and Literary Representations
Quick summary of what this article actually argues:
This companion piece turns from theory to fiction, examining five novels through a "pro- vs. anti-globalization".
Lens:
DeLillo's Cosmopolis (anti-globalization protests seen through a billionaire's eyes), Robert Newman's The Fountain at the Center of the World (a fictionalized account of the 1999 Seattle WTO protests), Ian McEwan's Saturday (a London surgeon's day intersecting with the Iraq War protests), Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (displacement, Kashmir, and marginalized characters), and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (a chauffeur's satirical rise through globalized India's corruption). Drawing on Suman Gupta's five-point framework for reading fictional "movements and protests," sir argues these novels show protest as (1) a surface symptom of deeper structural issues, (2) global in scale and shared purpose, (3) internally fragmented, (4) caught between resisting and co-opting globalization's own norms, and (5) rooted in older Marxist/working-class critique.
The conclusion frames globalization in fiction as a "comprehensive framework" combining economic domination with resistance across race, class, caste, and colonial history.
Fiction as Protest: Reading Globalization Through Adiga, Roy, and DeLillo
If sir's first article asks whether postcolonial theory can keep up with a decentered global Empire, his companion article, "Globalization and Fiction," answers a related but different question: if theory struggles to name what globalization is doing to people, can fiction do it better? sir's method here is refreshingly concrete instead of staying in the register of Hardt, Negri, and Stiglitz, he reads five novels as case studies of globalization's human cost, organized loosely around Suman Gupta's framework for how literature represents "movements and protests."
The article's key move
What I find most useful in this piece is sir's insistence that fictional protest scenes aren't just backdrop they're structurally meaningful. He shows how DeLillo's Cosmopolis stages an anti-globalization riot (burning tires, rubber bullets) as the backdrop to a billionaire's existential unraveling, so the protest becomes a mirror for the "decline of excess" the novel is really about. Newman's Fountain at the Center of the World goes further, fictionalizing the real 1999 WTO protests in Seattle day-by-day, weaving in details like Mexican factory labor and a South American disease to show globalization's material human toll rather than just its ideological debate. Gupta's five-point framework, which sir applies throughout, is genuinely sharp: protests are "surface manifestations" of deeper structural problems, they achieve global scale and shared purpose across borders, but remain internally fragmented and, crucially, they risk being co-opted by the very globalized norms they resist. That last point is the one postcolonial critics don't discuss often enough: resistance movements can end up adopting the market logic of the system they're fighting, which blunts their own critique.
My critique where I think the article under-argues its strongest example
Barad sir gives The White Tiger only a short paragraph, but I think Adiga's novel is actually the sharpest illustration of Gupta's whole framework, and deserved more space. Balram Halwai doesn't protest globalization he becomes it. His transformation from a village sweet-shop worker into a globalized entrepreneur happens through murder, bribery, and moral compromise, which is Adiga's satirical point: in a "globalized India," social mobility for the poor isn't achieved by resisting the system's corruption, it's achieved by mastering it. This is Gupta's fourth point in its purest form a resistance narrative that gets fully absorbed into the norms it should be opposing. Roy's Ministry of Utmost Happiness, by contrast, refuses that absorption: her characters (Kashmiri separatists, displaced communities, a transgender protagonist) stay on the margins throughout, which is precisely Roy's critique that globalized India's growth story requires certain people to remain permanently outside it.
Connecting this to film
The White Tiger (2021, dir. Ramin Bahrani) is the obvious and, I think, genuinely strong film companion here, since it's a direct adaptation and lets us watch the novel's argument play out visually. The film's most postcolonial-globalization moment isn't the murder it's the outsourcing call-center subplot around Balram's employers, the Stork family, who've made their money through coal but aspire to "modern," globally-facing business (their son Ashok has just returned from New York). Balram's servitude to Ashok is staged explicitly as the old colonial master-servant relationship wearing new clothes: Ashok is Westernized, English-speaking, and morally uneasy about exploiting Balram, exactly like his account of how the New American Empire "manages hybrid identities" rather than ruling through crude domination. Balram's escape at the end becoming a globalized entrepreneur himself, complete with his own outsourced call-center workforce is the film's darkest joke: he doesn't dismantle the system, he replicates it, becoming exactly the kind of exploiter he once served. That's Gupta's "co-optation" thesis, and his broader argument, made visible in a single character arc.
Broader implication
Taken together, what sir's article suggests and what I'd underline is that fiction can do something theory alone can't: it can hold contradiction without resolving it. Cosmopolis doesn't decide whether the protesters or the billionaire are right; The White Tiger doesn't let us cleanly cheer Balram's rise. That refusal to resolve is itself a postcolonial move, resisting the neat narratives (progress, development, meritocracy) that globalization's boosters the Friedmans and the Schwabs he quotes in his companion piece like to tell. If postcolonial theory needs new tools to describe a decentered Empire, as Article 1 argues, then postcolonial fiction may already be supplying them: not through argument, but through characters who show us what it feels like to be simultaneously exploited by and complicit in the system exploiting them.
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Works Cited:
- Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. HarperCollins Publishers India, 2008.
- Barad, Dilip. "Globalization and Fiction: Exploring Postcolonial Critique and Literary Representations." Journal of Higher Education and Research Society, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 177-85.
- ---. "Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies." Journal of Higher Education and Research Society, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 186-200.
- The Constant Gardener. Directed by Fernando Meirelles, performances by Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, Focus Features, 2005.
- DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. Scribner, 2003.
- Gupta, Suman. Globalization and Literature. Polity Press, 2013.
- Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000.
- Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 2nd ed., New Critical Idiom, Routledge, 2009.
- O'Brien, Susie, and Imre Szeman. "The Globalization of Fiction / The Fiction of Globalization." South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 100, no. 3, 2001, pp. 603-26.
- Root, Christina. “A Melodiousness at Odds with Pessimism: Ian McEwan’s Saturday.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 35, no. 1, 2011, pp. 60–78. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.35.1.60. Accessed 25 Aug. 2026.
- Roy, Arundhati. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018.
- The White Tiger. Directed by Ramin Bahrani, performances by Adarsh Gourav, Rajkummar Rao, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Netflix, 2021.
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