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The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism
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Article  in  Journal of World History · January 2000

DOI: 10.1353/jwh.2000.0022

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Book Reviews 159

Philadelphia who watched the 1988 Olympics in Seoul on satellite.

However, I would like to know how these examples differ from the
deterritorialization of Chinese culture in the last two centuries. Why
is it that most Chinese all over the world retain some feelings of “Chi-
neseness,” despite the fact that their families have lived in New York,
Calcutta, Buenos Aires, and other places for generations and differ in
cultural background in terms of language, common history, and reli-
gion? How did mass media influence their identity, and was it the same
in Bombay as it was in New York? This is doubtful.
Given these critical remarks, it would be too easy to write Appadu-
rai’s essays off as a postmodernist literary exercise, especially since
sociologists around Martin Albrow try to extrapolate from Appadurai’s
“scapes.” (See J. Eade, ed., Living in the Global City [New York: Rout-
ledge, 1997]; and M. Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society beyond
Modernity [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997].) Albrow sees
Appadurai’s theory as a stimulus to the sociological imagination for
current research. In my mind, it would be even more interesting if
Appadurai himself would take up the challenge to do empirical socio-
historial research, using his ideas of “scapes” in order to show “the
newness” of various cultural changes within the sphere of globalization
and, more important, the empirical value of his theory. This would be
a useful exercise indeed, and the results could bring postmodernists’
notions and discussions about globalization beyond what world histo-
rian Janet Abu-Lughod has termed “the global babble.” Modernity at
Large has become a must for postmodernist students and scholars, and
it has the potential to become a must for other scientists as well.
gijsbert oonk
Erasmus University

The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of

Global Capitalism. By arif dirlik. Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 252. $60 (cloth); $25 (paper).

Relations between colonized peoples and their colonizers have long

been a staple fare of intellectual inquiry and debate among anthropol-
ogists, historians, political economists, sociologists, and even geogra-
phers. More recently, literary theorists have entered the fray and cre-
ated a whole lexicon to frame these relationships. If most historians
have tended to view these literary incursions into their domain with
benign amusement, the so-called “postcolonial” studies have become
an increasingly important part of the contemporary intellectual land-
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160 journal of world history, spring 2000

scape. Reinforcing each other in a self-referential manner, a whole raft

of “post”-marked academic specialities like “poststructuralism” and
“postmodernism” have seemingly effected a seismological shift in our
epistemological topography.
Contrary to their pretensions to historicize literature but conso-
nant with their disciplinary training, postcolonial theorists tend to
assume that representations of the world in fiction suffice as evidence,
that the production and negotiation of meaning in literary encounters
is all that matters. Not only does this obviate the need to confront
contrary evidence, but it encourages, even at its best, a shallow form
of self-referential navel-gazing. Shrouded in dense prose passing as
theory, this assumption subverts the entire tradition of empirical
research that is the bedrock of the historian’s craft. Yet, precisely
because of the impenetrability of this “discourse”—to employ a favorite
postcolonial/postmodern term—most historians have been reluctant
to confront the literature. Merely hoping that it will go away, of
course, does not make the wish come true, and a style of academic
scholarship irremediably hostile to empirical research has colonized
many university departments and has massed on the frontiers of the
historical disciplines themselves.
In The Postcolonial Aura, a collection of ten articles, five of them
previously unpublished, Arif Dirlik mercilessly exposes the fundamen-
tal fallacies that permeate “post”-marked academic specialities, much
as Edward Thompson exposed the Althusserian “orrery of errors” for
an earlier generation of historians. The central article, which supplies
the anthology with its title, provides a detailed critique of postcolonial
theorists' claims to decenter the Eurocentrism that cages reigning
metanarratives in history. Dirlik demonstrates that though “postcolo-
nialism” is an amorphous concept embracing the United States and
other settler colonies, as well as former European colonies in Asia and
Africa (though curiously not those in Latin and Central America),
and is coeval with capitalism, the attempt to dethrone metanarratives
including capitalism is a subterfuge for political disengagement. After
all, the primary reason we talk of Eurocentrism, rather than Sinocen-
trism or Indocentrism, is that capitalism enabled Europeans to domi-
nate our planet. Ironically, Dirlik points out that the denial of the
validity of metanarratives such as capitalism and its most uncompro-
mising critique, Marxism, is itself due to the rise of global capitalism:
the set of flexible production relations and “space-time” compression
associated with the “new international division of labor,” the conse-
quent blurring of distinctions between the “three worlds,” and the
appearance of “Third World” conditions in the heartlands of the most
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Book Reviews 161

advanced economies. Associated with these changes have been large

diasporic movements, and it is not an accident that discussions of mul-
ticulturalism among corporate managers and business magazines pre-
ceded discussions of “hybridity” and “in-betweenness” among post-
colonial theorists. Given postcolonialism’s political irrelevance, Dirlik
argues for a resuscitation of the term Third World, not because of its
descriptive utility but because it keeps alive the possibility of resis-
tance to structures of domination. On another register, the emergence
of major centers of capital accumulation in east Asia has meant that
capitalism has become a truly global abstraction as, for the first time in
history, non-European capitalist societies make their own contribu-
tions to its narrative. This has been paralleled by the transformation
of Confucianism from an obstacle to capitalist modernization to the
wellspring of capitalist development along Asia’s Pacific rim. Yet Dir-
lik demonstrates that the Confucian revival is in many respects a mir-
ror image of the essentializing procedures deployed in Orientalism: a
“self-Orientalization” process propagated by governing elites in the
region and area specialists in the West.
If he highlights the marginalization of class by the postcolonial and
“self-Orientalization” discourses, Dirlik does not suggest that all forms
of exploitation are reducible in the final analysis to class. In a signifi-
cant chapter on the indigenous peoples, he approaches issues of
exploitation and culture through the prism of sovereignty movements
of Native Americans, Hawaiians, and the indigenous peoples of the
Pacific. This enables him also to construct the local as a strategic site
of resistance to global capitalism.
Yet for a historian, as Dirlik is by training, it is strange to attribute
so much importance to global capitalism. Capitalism has been global
since its inception, and however much the Internet and satellite tele-
casts might suggest “space-time” compression, the telegraph and radio
were equally impressive at their respective debuts on the world stage.
If the networks of capitalist production and procurement now tran-
scend political frontiers, this too is nothing new. The dialectic
between the territorial and the de-territorial organization of produc-
tion is a dialectic at least as old as capitalism itself, as Giovanni
Arrighi has documented in detail in his Long Twentieth Century (Lon-
don: Verso, 1995). Slavery, the creation of settler colonies, and the
transportation of indentured laborers all indicate that large-scale pop-
ulation transfers are similarly not hallmarks of contemporary capital-
ism. The novelty, of course, is the authentic contributions now being
made to the narrative of capitalism by non-European capitalist soci-
eties, as Dirlik underscores. Curiously, though, he does not then take
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162 journal of world history, spring 2000

the logical step of questioning the analytical categories of the modern

social sciences, which remain theoretical encapsulations of the Euro-
American narrative of sociohistorical change. Indeed, he is critical of
those who, like Dipesh Chakrabarty, have sought to “provincialize”
Europe because of their affiliation or flirtation with postcolonial stud-
ies. Surely, while Dirlik is devastatingly critical of postcolonial studies,
and rightly so, there is also something we can learn from them.
Notwithstanding these reservations, this is a provocatively original
book. Dirlik makes a compelling argument against the fallacies of
postcolonialism and its cognate theoretical streams.
ravi arvind palat
University of Auckland

Gorbachev’s Revolution. By anthony d’agostino. New York:

New York University Press, 1998. Pp. ix + 384. $50 (cloth).

In the years following Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev’s rise to

power as general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, a verita-
ble sea change has swept across the former Soviet Union and eastern
Europe, generating an ever growing body of academic and popular lit-
erature that seeks to assess the “Gorbachev revolution.” One of the
newest contributions to these writings is Anthony D’Agostino’s Gor-
bachev’s Revolution, which builds on the author’s earlier study of Soviet
succession struggles. In his latest book, D’Agostino addresses the para-
dox of how a reform movement designed to fortify Communism actu-
ally brought about its downfall. He dismisses those who see this dra-
matic development as the natural or logical extension of the course of
reform, and those who see the collapse as the inevitable consequence
of the command economy or of the Soviet system’s illegitimacy.
Instead, D’Agostino argues that “the end of Communism was never
the goal of the Gorbachev government, but like so much else in the
history of the Soviet Union, was the unplanned and unintended result
of an intense and many-faceted struggle for power” (p. 6). Spotlight-
ing the role of contingency, chance, irony, and human frailty, he dis-
cards the notion that Gorbachev had a conversion experience that
convinced him to reject Communism. He insists—rightly, in my view
—that the only way Communism could have been destroyed was by
attempting to reform and strengthen it.
After spelling out his argument, D’Agostino documents the power
struggle with which Gorbachev had to deal during his entire tenure in
office, switching to a more powerful lens in examining the period

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