Rajiv Malhotra on Postmodern Imperialism
The postmodern insistence on denying such identities as “Indian” and “Western” leaves non-Western cultures vulnerable to even further exploitation because they are denied the security of possessing a difference which is real and defensible. Postmodernism, then, tends to undermine the particular reality of the non-Western culture that might be in need of being affirmed, protected and developed.
The London-based Indian Muslim cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar points out that the postmodern criticism of nation-states and their related identities actually empowers imperialism insofar as it “softens the prey” on behalf of the predator empires by advocating the abandonment of distinctiveness in a one-sided manner. This is so because the West does not practice what it exports. The call to abandon distinctiveness is propagated and promoted through a network of intellectuals in the Third World nurtured and sustained by the First World.[ii]
[Lila: I’ll call this coconut imperialism, coconut being urban slang for “brown on the outside, white inside,” that is, Indians who have no connection to or knowledge of their own cultural heritage and simply ape/adopt Western culture wholesale]
Malhotra:
Postmodern philosophers have made many attempts to deconstruct the West’s “meta-narratives,” as they are often called, rightly pointing out that such claims of universalism are in fact parochial and arrogant views of what is merely one cultural tradition among many others. It is perhaps a paradox that the West is simultaneously protecting itself by rewriting its story in a new and renewed chauvinistic mode in which deconstruction itself is seen as the culmination and fruit of its long, singular and ineffably superior philosophical trajectory.
Without an outside perspective on the Western mentalities, the postmodern critiques assume an unfolding consciousness in which Westerners are the leaders and agents. They tend to project their latest theories back into Western intellectual history, thereby enhancing the Western collective identity rather than dissolving it. Although it decries identity, postmodernism is itself the product of a history that has been shaped by particular attitudes to difference and that cannot be assumed to be the template for world history. Postmodernism is highly critical of imperialism and colonialism, yet it has a grand narrative of its own which remains largely outside the bounds of the deconstruction process. Indian traditions are marginalized by the postmodernists.
[Lila: Thus, you have the meeting of minds between Slavoj Zizek, post-modern radical, and Julian Assange, the publisher of Wikileaks, the two who are now the de facto spokesmen for millions, if not billions, of non-whites affected by empire. Beneath the libertarian language, Assange is known to be deeply controlling. Zizek is the European icon of the new Uncle Comms – leftist or communist ideologues from the third-world doing the work of our new remote imperialism ]
The two are now uncritically embraced by anarchists and peace-lovers, under the misleading assumption that they are simply public intellectuals, whereas, all signs so far point to Assange at least being a hybrid creation of the corporate-intelligence complex.]
Malhotra:
The power of the U.S.A. and the European Union remains unaffected by the fringe activities of its own liberal postmodern scholars. Ironically, many of the “leftist radicals” of the counterculture in France and the U.S. later became neo-conservatives — because of the temptations of the marketplace and because the sacrifices required by the left proved unsustainable. Only a few years after participating in strikes and anti-war and civil liberties marches, these “radicals” found themselves calling for the defense of “Judeo-Christian civilization” and advocating aggressive but selective “humanitarian” intervention into other countries. The U.S. military has used liberal social scientists to foment conflict in countries such as Chile and, more recently, Iraq. In fact, much of the research into foreign “area studies” is done by liberal scholars and ends up serving the interests of the state and/or church.[iii] At the same time, the West is secure in its sense of history and identity, and that’s because postmodernist discourse in the West is limited to academic cocoons and applied mainly to pop culture – it is not allowed to change the education system of policymaking, for instance.
India’s postmodernist scholars who brag about their Western training and connections are encouraged to deconstruct Indian civilization, showing it to be a scourge against the oppressed. The deconstruction of India by Indian thinkers has a destabilizing effect which invites a new kind of colonialism. The most fashionable kind of difference being championed by Indian postmodernists is on behalf of the subalterns, i.e. “from below,” seen as the oppressed underclass. But many of these “oppressed minorities” have been taken over by global nexuses (Western churches, Chinese Maoists and Islamists, to name only the major ones) with the result that they are not truly autonomous and independent but satellites serving a new kind of remote-controlled colonialism. Thus the postmodern posture on difference has had the overall effect of causing native cultural identities to become vulnerable to imperialism – which is exactly the opposite of what the postmodernists claim they want to achieve. This is a serious topic of inquiry outside the scope of this book and which I cover in my previous book, Breaking India.[iv]
