Globalization Through Postcolonial Eyes: Identity, Power, and Resistance

Introduction: The Article 1

The article  "Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies" takes up a question that postcolonial theory has struggled to answer cleanly: what happens to a field built on the vocabulary of colonizer and colonized, center and margin, once the world's power structures stop looking like classical empires? Barad frames this through 9/11 and the "Global War on Terror," using Ania Loomba's observation that it has become "harder than ever to see our world as simply 'postcolonial'" once a New American Empire diffuse, networked, and without a fixed territorial center took shape. He then walks through a chorus of thinkers on globalization (Friedman's "flat world," Hardt and Negri's "Empire," Stiglitz's critique of "market fundamentalism," Schwab's "Globalization 4.0," and finally Chomsky's dissent) to show that globalization is not a neutral, technocratic process. It is a contest over whose culture, economy, and knowledge get to set the terms  which is exactly the territory postcolonial studies was built to analyze, even if its old maps no longer quite fit.

What I take from the article is this: postcolonial critique hasn't become obsolete in a globalized world it has had to relocate. The colonizer is no longer necessarily a flag-bearing nation next door; it can be a supply chain, a credit rating, a hiring algorithm, or a media narrative that decides who counts as "civilized" and who counts as a "threat." Barad's article is essentially an argument that postcolonial studies must follow power to wherever it has migrated.

Question 1: How Does Globalization Reshape Postcolonial Identities?

This article suggests that globalization doesn't erase the hierarchies colonialism built it reformats them. Hardt and Negri's "Empire" is decentered and borderless, "managing hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command." That has a real effect on identity: a person from a formerly colonized nation is no longer defined only against a distant metropole. They are now defined by their position inside global flows of capital, labor, and media sometimes celebrated as global citizens, sometimes discarded as surplus population.

This produces a split identity that is arguably more disorienting than the old colonial binary. You can be economically "inside" the system plugged into its call centers, its outsourced offices, its supply chains while remaining culturally "outside" it, still read through inherited stereotypes the moment politics demands a scapegoat. Barad's discussion of post-9/11 America shows this clearly: people who had spent years assimilating into Western institutions were suddenly re-marked as foreign, suspicious, "Other," the instant the geopolitical mood shifted.

Question 2: How Does Global Capitalism Shape Cultural and Economic Life in Postcolonial Societies?

This is where Stiglitz and Chomsky's counterarguments matter most. Friedman's "flat world" imagines global capitalism as a great equalizer plug into the supply chain, and old hierarchies dissolve. But Stiglitz insists the world has, in some ways, been getting "less flat," not more. Chomsky goes further, arguing that trade deals don't really transfer wealth between nations; they redistribute it within nations, usually upward. Sainath's account of "Market Fundamentalism" pushes this to its sharpest point: an ideology that treats the market as a kind of religion, indifferent to whether it operates in "Moscow... Mumbai or Minnesota."

Applied to postcolonial societies, this means globalization tends to produce a narrow, globally fluent elite that benefits from integration into world capital, alongside a much larger population that experiences globalization mainly as extraction cheap labor, resource depletion, cultural products imported faster than local ones can compete. The economic dimension (who profits from global markets) and the cultural dimension (whose stories, languages, and images circulate globally) turn out to be the same story told twice.

Question 3: Connecting This to Film

In Slumdog Millionaire, Jamal's rise is staged as a fairy tale of globalization's meritocratic promise a boy from the Mumbai slums wins a game show broadcast worldwide, and knowledge gained through sheer survival becomes his ticket into a globalized economy of spectacle and reward. But the film only earns that ending by first showing, in brutal detail, what globalization's underside looks like for those who don't win: child exploitation, slum demolition for development projects, and a city being remade for tourists and call centers while its poorest residents are pushed to the margins of the very "shining India" they're meant to represent.

The White Tiger answers Slumdog's fairy tale directly, almost as a rebuttal. Balram doesn't rise through merit rewarded by a benevolent global system he rises by understanding that the system, described in the film as a "rooster coop," was never going to let him out through fair means. His employer, Ashok, is the very embodiment of the globalized elite Chomsky warns about: Western-educated, fluent in the language of ethical capitalism, and yet entirely dependent on the same exploitative hierarchies his family has run for generations. Balram's eventual escape into entrepreneurship is not a triumph of the flat world; it's proof that in an unequal system, someone has to become a new kind of master for anyone to stop being a servant. The film essentially dramatizes Chomsky's point that gains and losses are distributed within societies, not between them India doesn't "rise" in the film; Balram does, at the cost of everyone still trapped beneath him.

Broader Implications

Read together, the article and these films suggest that postcolonial thought today has to give up the comfort of a clear outside enemy. The empire is now inside the postcolonial nation itself, reproduced by local elites, global corporations, and media narratives that reward those who can perform global fluency while discarding those who can't. If postcolonial studies is going to remain useful, per Loomba's closing argument in the article, it has to keep functioning as a site of dissent refusing to let scholarship, or storytelling, become another service rendered to whichever power happens to be globalized this decade.

Globalization Through Postcolonial Eyes: What Fiction and Film Teach Us  Article 2

Introduction

Globalization is usually sold to us as a good thing more connection, more trade, more culture flowing freely between countries. But when we look at this idea through a postcolonial lens, the picture gets a lot more complicated. Postcolonial thinkers argue that globalization often just repeats old colonial patterns in a new form: instead of empires ruling other countries directly, powerful nations and corporations now control the world through money, media, and culture. This blog looks at how contemporary fiction writers from postcolonial backgrounds push back against this idea, and how their work brings up themes of resistance, hybridity, and identity crisis. To make the discussion clearer, I'll also connect it to Mira Nair's film The Namesake, which shows many of the same struggles on screen.

Summary of the Main Idea

The core argument here is simple: globalization is not neutral. It looks like the whole world is becoming "one," but really, some cultures (usually Western ones) get treated as normal and universal, while others (usually from former colonies) get treated as "different" or "ethnic." People and goods from poorer, formerly colonized countries move around the world too, but their movement is judged very differently a Western tourist is a "traveler," while a poor migrant from Africa or South Asia is often seen as a threat or a problem. Postcolonial fiction writers are very aware of this double standard, and they write stories that expose it instead of hiding it.

Resistance in Postcolonial Fiction

One way authors respond to globalization is through resistance but not always the loud, obvious kind. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in novels like Americanah, resists by simply refusing to let Africa be reduced to one flat story. She writes about real, complicated Nigerian lives, even when her characters are living in London or America, so readers can't lump "Africa" into one simple idea. Mohsin Hamid does something similar in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. His main character succeeds in the world of American finance the heart of global capitalism and then chooses to walk away from it. The whole novel is written as him talking to an American stranger, which flips the usual power dynamic: instead of the West studying and judging the East, here the East gets to question the West. That's resistance done through storytelling structure, not violence.

Hybridity: Living Between Two Worlds

Hybridity is another huge theme. This isn't just about mixing two cultures neatly together it's about the messy, in-between space people from postcolonial backgrounds often live in, belonging fully to neither side. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is the classic example. He mixes English with Hindi and Urdu words and rhythms, so the language itself becomes hybrid, not just the story. Zadie Smith's White Teeth shows hybridity as something that changes across generations immigrant parents and their British-born kids don't experience identity the same way at all. And in Hamid's later novel Exit West, magical doors let people walk straight from one country into another, which is his way of saying that in a globalized world, where you're "from" matters less than the fact that you're always in motion, always in-between.

Identity Crisis and the Cost of Moving Between Cultures

Many postcolonial writers also focus on the emotional cost of globalization the identity crisis that comes from living between an old culture and a new one. Jhumpa Lahiri writes about this quietly, through small details like food, names, and family rituals, showing how immigrants can look successful on the outside while feeling lost on the inside. Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss goes further, connecting a local uprising in Nepal/India with the humiliating experience of an illegal immigrant working in a New York kitchen showing that globalization creates confusion and pain on both ends of migration, not just for the people who leave.

Connecting It to Film: The Namesake

Mira Nair's film The Namesake, based on Lahiri's novel, brings all of this to life visually. The main character, Gogol, is literally named after a Russian author because of a train accident his father survived so his name ties together Russia, Bengal, and America all at once, before he's even old enough to understand any of it. The film keeps cutting back and forth between Calcutta and New York, using trains and music from both cultures, so the audience never gets one single "home" to settle into just like Gogol himself. His journey of rejecting his heritage as a teenager, then slowly reconnecting with it after his father's death, shows that hybrid identity isn't something you solve once and move on from it's something you keep negotiating your whole life. This matches exactly what Bhabha calls the "third space," a place that isn't fully one culture or the other, but its own thing.

Broader Implications

So what does all this mean for us today? It means we should be careful about celebrating globalization too quickly. Yes, the world is more connected than ever, but postcolonial fiction and film remind us that this connection isn't equal. Whose culture gets called "global" and whose gets called "foreign"? Whose migration is called opportunity and whose is called a crisis? These writers use fiction not to reject connection between cultures, but to insist that we notice who benefits and who gets left behind in that process. In a world where borders, media, and money move faster than ever, postcolonial thought is still asking the same basic question colonialism always raised: who gets to be seen as fully human, and who doesn't?

References:

• Barad, Dilip. “Globalization and Fiction: Exploring Postcolonial Critique and Literary Representations.”  vol. 10, 30 Oct. 2022, pp. 177–185, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376371617_GLOBALIZATION_AND_FICTION_EXPLORING_POSTCOLONIAL_CRITIQUE_AND_LITERARY_REPRESENTATIONS
• Barad, Dilip. “Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies.”  vol. 10, 15 Oct. 2022, pp. 186–200, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376374570_GLOBALIZATION_AND_THE_FUTURE_OF_POSTCOLONIAL_STUDIES