Wednesday, 25 August 2021

Thinking Activity: Future of Postcolonial Studies-Globalization and Environmentalism

Hello friends

In this blog I am going to write about the two articles from Ania Loomba's book "Colonialism and Postcolonialism".Ania Loomba's 'Colonialism and Postcolonialism' is worth referring to when we are understanding Postcolonialism. This book remains significant for two chief reasons….




👉Clarity in Concept: The way writer introduce any concept and theories regarding Postcolonial studies is explained in a very direct and clear language.


👉Contemporaneity: Relevance with current ongoing situations makes this book more noteworthy. The book is designed in such a way that we find parallelism between what is explained in a book with social, economical and political situations. of the day.

1.Conclusion: Globalisation and The Future of Postcolonial Studies


The article started with the 9/11 attack in the America.In Postcolonial Study the violent events like this is also a part of the phenomenon we think of as globalisation.In this article Anina Loomba has also mentioned important critics of Globalisation and some are in favoured of globalisation.


🟦Michal Hardt & Antonio Negri :'Empire'




'Empire' argues that the contemporary global order has produced a new form of sovereignty which should be called'Empire'.They talking about the new US.

In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial.center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decen. tered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incor- porates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperial map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.

                           (Hardt and Negri 2000: xiii-xii)


They believed that the new empire is better compared to the Roman Empire rather than the European colonialism.


🟦Arjun Appadurai - "Modernity at Large"


He talks about the cultural diamensions of globalisation.New hybridity,new forms of communication,new food,new clothes and new pattern of consumption are offered for the newness and benefits of globalisation.


🟦Simon Gikandi - "Globalisation and the claim of Postcoloniality"


He talked about the two terms of Postcolonial Studies.

-hybridiity

-differrnce


It is premature argue that the images and narratives that denote the new global culture are connected to a global structure or that they are disconnected from earlier or older forms of identity.In other words there is no reason no suppose that the global flow in images has a biological connection to transformation in social or cultural relationships'(Gikandi 2001:632; emphasis added).


🟦Etienne Balibar - Racism and Nationalism

For Balibar the new racial ideologies are not less rigid simply because they invoke culture instead of nature; and can be equally pernicious.(Balibar 1991a:22). Balibar connects neo-racism to anti 

-Semitism of the Renaissance.

🟦Samuel Huntington-Clash of Civilization

In his book he talks about Jews and Muslims.They both are important in reminding us that culture and biology have in fact never been neatly separable categories.And he also talk about strategies of inclusion and exclusion.

MUSLIMS- despotic and intractable

ASIAN.    - inscrutable and hard working


🟦P.Sainath -"And Then There Was The Market"


As we all know that globalisation made information and technology more widely available in the world.But P.Sainath observed far from fostering ideological openness. And it resulted in its own fundamentalism.

I found one interesting quote of P.Sainath from the article.

Market fundamentalism destroys more human lives than any other simply because it cuts across all national, cultural, geographic, reli- gious and other boundaries.It's as much at home in Moscow as in Mumbai or Minnesota.A South Africa - whose advances in the early 1990s thrilled the world- moved swiftly from apartheid to neo-liberal- ism.It sits as easily in Hindu, Islamic or Christian societies.And it contributes angry, despairing recruits to the armies of all religious fundamentalisms.Based on the premise that the market is the solu- tion to all the problems of the human race, it is, too, a very religious fundamentalism.It has its own Gospel: The Gospel of St. Growth, of St. Choice...


Argument of  Indian Research Group:


The great range of actual measures carried on under the label of glob- alization .. were not those of integration and development. Rather they were the processes of imposition, disintegration, underdevelop- ement and appropriation. They were of continued extraction of debt servicing payments of the third world; depression of the prices of raw materials exported by the same countries; removal of tariff protection for their vulnerable productive sectors; removal of restraints on for- eign direct investment, allowing giant foreign corporations to grab larger sectors of the third world's economies; removal of restraints on the entry and exit of massive flows of speculative international capital, allowing their movements to dictate economic life; reduction of State spending on productive activity, development and welfare; privatization of activities, assets and natural resources, sharp increases in the cost of essential services and goods such as electricity, fuel, health care, education, transport, and food (accompanied by the harsher depression of women's consumption within each family's declining consumption); withdrawal of subsidized credit earlier directed to starved sectors; dismantling of workers' security of employment; reduction of the share of wages in the social product; suppression of domestic industry in the third world and closures of manufacturing firms on a massive scale; ruination of independent small industries; ruination of the handicrafts/handloom sector; replacement of subsis- tence crops with cash crops; destruction of food security. 

(Research Unit for Political Economy, 2003: n.p.)


👉so we can say that the  new empire both facilitates global connections and creats new opportunities and entrenched disparities and new divisions.


"Globalization is just another name for submission and domination', Nicanor Apaza, 46, an unemployed miner, said at a demonstration this week in which Indian women ... carried banners denouncing the International Monetary Fund and demanding the president's resigna- tion.'We've had to live with that here for 500 years, and now we want to be our own masters.'

👉The phrase "Market Fundamentalism"  is also use as a critique of globalisation by Joseph E Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and once Chief Economist at the World Bank.And sometimes it has been imposed upon the world by institutions like the world Bank and the IMF.Here I would like to quote that..

The international financial institutions have pushed a particular ideol- politics; it is based on premises concerning how markets work that do not hold even for developed countries, much less for developing countries. The IME has pushed these economic policies without a broader vision of society or the role of economics within society. And it has pushed these policies in ways that have undermined emerging democracies. More generally, globalization itself has been governed in ways that are undemocratic and have been disadvantageous to developing countries, especially the poor within those countries. (2002:)


🟦 Robert D Kalpnath:  "Supremacy by Stealth"


In this work he sees no contradiction between global networks of the kind identified by Hardt and Negri,and an American hegemony.


🟦Niall Ferguson


He said against the fact of Kalpnath that,

The British Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a generation of 'postcolonial' historians anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality is that the British were significantly more successful at establishing market economies, the rule of law and the transition to representative government than the majority of postcolonial govern- ments have been. The policy 'mix' favored by Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the International Monetary Fund, if not the World Bank: free trade, balanced budgets, sound money, the-common law, incorrupt administration and investment in infrastructure financed by international loans. These are precisely the things the world needs right now. (2003: 54)

🟦ACTA: American Council of Trustees and Alumni


ACTC suggest that universities are not up to this task because there are large number of American academics and students are critic of US Policies.


"Western civilization is the primary source of the world's ills even though it gave us the ideals of democracy,human rights, individual liberty and mutual tolerance".


👉Examples



Dying of artificial milk. This is what was happening in the 90’s in Pakistan, where formula was proposed in bad faith as the more modern and healthier alternative to breast milk. Tigers, the movie by the director Danis Tanovic (Oscar in 2002 for No Man’s Land), tells the real story of the former Nestlé salesman Syed Aamir Raza, who denounced the multinational’s criminal marketing policies, paying the price in terms of professional and personal consequences. The “Tigers” were those expert salesmen that were trained to convince people to stop breast feeding because it was described as an archaic and obsolete practice, in favour of artificial milk, which was strongly incentivised to doctors through samples, dinners, travels, and other benefits offered by the company.


💠Soft-drink giants accused over pesticides



💠Maggi Controversy




This we can see as a dark side or down side of the globalization. Because directly it has create an impact on Nestle Company.


If you want to know that why it is banned india?Click here.


💠Twitter VS Government of India


Examples from the Film


💠 Reluctant Fundamentalism:

the conflict between market fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism in the aftermath of 9/11.


💠Chakravyuh


 

💠Madaari - The conflict between common man (father whose child died in bridge crash) and nexus between construction company and politicians




💠Sonali cable - conflict between a girl who runs local tv/internet cable service vs giant company 'Shining' which started providing broadband.

 


 

💠Ghayal Once Again Again - the conflict of younsters who witnessed Murder of RTI activist against multi-business owner Bansal (represents Ambanis)




2.Conclusion:The Future of Postcolonial Studies

The article starts with the practitioner of Postcolonial studies like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,

"No longer have a Postcolonial perspective.I think Postcolonial is the day before yesterday".(Spivak:2013: 2)


🟦Vandana Shiva: Environmental Activist


She exposed the connection between colonialism and the destruction of environmental according to her culture is very women- friendly.


According to Ramachandra Guha and Jaun Martinez-Alier,

In india the Narmada Bachao Aandolan led widespread protests against a project,funded by multinational as well as indigenous capital.And it's just not damage only ecology but the displacement of thousands of tribal peoples all across the Narmada Valley.

🟦 Arundhati Roy


She reminds us that tribal people in central India have a history of resistance that predates Mao by centuries.

In that Luxemburg's ideas remain important today for two reasons.


1.She alert us to the deep historical connection between trade and colonialism.

2.She reminds us that accumulation is a constant process rather than a past event.


#Globalisation is a spectacular display of the energy of capital as it moves across the world in seach of new markets and new raw materials,goodand labour,while there is certainly a redefinition of older colonial and neo-colonial boundaries through this process, the newer divisions build on former patterns of dispossession. Because it is an ongoing process, David Harvey suggests that we redefine ‘primitive accu­mulation’ as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2005: 144).


 🟦 According to Harvey,


All the features of primitive accumulation that Marx mentions have remained powerfully present with capitalism’s historical geography until now. Displacement of peasant populations and the formation of a landless proletariat has accelerated in countries such as Mexico and India in the last three decades, many formerly common property resources, such as water, have been privatised (often at World Bank insistence) … alternative (indigenous and even, in the case of the United States, petty commodity) forms of production and consumption have been suppressed. Nationalised industries have been privatised. Family farming has been taken over by agribusiness. And slavery has not disappeared (particularly in the sex trade).


(Harvey 2005: 145–46)


Chakrabarty conceds that,


Climate change, refracted through global capital, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighborhoods of California).


(Chakrabarty 2009: 221)


He also insist that we will have to abandon our previous conceptions of human freedom that entitled thinking about the injustice, oppression, inequality,or even uniformity foisted on them by other human or human made system.


🟦Ian Baucon observes that a 'new universaliam: the universalism of species thinking' is being proposed here.


Ania Loomba has also discussed some recent scholarship and political movements that show why the colonial past and the globalised present are deeply interconnected.



Examples


💠Sardar Sarovar Dam,Narmada river 


💠Dhruv Bhatt's Tatvamasi


The novel remain totally aloof from the agitation in the villages and around Narmada Dam by school activities.

Dhruv  Bhatt belongs to Bhat those witers who may not be considered as the historians,the interpreter of contemporary culture and the prophets of their people.such writers do not concern themselves with social themes.


We can say that his concern is more spiritual in his writing and completely forgot about social realism.


💠Film:Sherni 


This movie discusses how one tiger is stuck between that place where industrial development was grown up. The story goes like this tiger became the talk of town and politicians use this for upcoming elections. One forest officer called Vidhya tries to save a tiger and send them to a zoo and one professor helped her and at the climax of the movie we found that at the middle there is a mill. Tiger is not able to across it and that’s why she stuck.  



💠Film:Avatar


💠Film:Planet of the Apes


💠Aarey Forest Controversy:


💠Lakshadweep


💠Anti Goonda Regulation


💠Kerala to restrict use of groundwater by 


💠Char Dham Road Project






No comments:

Post a Comment

The Last Leaf by O'Henry

#std9  #moments #surprisingendings  The most important feature of O. Henry’s writing is the unexpected ending. The story usually...