Reading the text in its worldly situation

Abstract

"Emboldened by rampant U.S. American imperialist military incursions, ideologues of empire are confidently espousing a new colonialism.[2] One such figure, Niall Ferguson, celebrating the British Empire and advocating for American colonialism, explicitly condemns "a generation of postcolonial' historians anachronistically affronted by [the British Empire's] racism" (1) and calls for universities to prepare a new imperial elite to once more take up the "white man's burden." Another neo-imperialist, Michael Ignatieff, argues that "imperialism doesn't stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect" (26). Against a backdrop of brutal wars of domination and unapologetic racist mythmaking, critical exposs of the material history and continuation of imperialism are crucial. Unfortunately in its current orthodox form, postcolonial studies is often not up to the task. Dominated by the impenetrable language of postmodern theories that prohibit the attempt to understand history or explain social forces, postcolonialism has focused on the cultural detritus of previous moments of empire — the discursive and ideological remnants of European colonialism — while neglecting the economic, political and military forms of imperialism that survived formal colonialism's demise. Postcolonial studies as a field has also been marred by disdain for social movements and "totalizing" theories of liberation. There is much to learn from the global justice movement, which has scrutinized economic institutions of global capitalism — the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization and Free Trade Area of the Americas — and from the global mass movement against the war on Iraq, which has drawn attention to the material motivations for "wars of liberation." Marxist analyses of imperialism's centrality to capitalism remain invaluable for cutting through the ideological mystifications of capitalism‟s current forms.