Happy harvest, dear readers! I hope you’ve had a lovely weekend and can look forward to taking a well-deserved break over the next few days. Self-care is such an important aspect of both academia and the working world that often goes overlooked, so make sure you take some time to recharge if at all possible. Being that this is the last post of the semester, I know I’m looking forward to doing just that before gearing up to write my final paper (detailed at the bottom of my last post). 

Also, before we get into this week’s material, I want to take a minute to remind you that this Thursday (what many of you may call Thanksgiving) is not a holiday for everyone; many Indigenous people instead see it as a day of mourning, as the only reason we can have Thanksgiving now is because of the treachery, deceit, and genocide that occurred when settler-colonizers first took this land hundreds of years ago (despite what elementary school may teach us). In addition, as the capitalist system has encouraged more and more retail chains to begin Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving Eve, businesses have subsequently forced their low- and working-class employees to give up their own family time and come in to cater to miserable customers. For example, the three years I worked at Pichael’s Craftz Barne* (name changed to protect store privacy) *, ALL employees were required to work both a Thanksgiving Eve and a Black Friday shift – no exceptions. You could volunteer to work more than one shift each day if you wanted, but you were required to work one at the bare minimum. I pulled 12-hour days on both days all three years because I personally don’t care to participate in a holiday that celebrates literal murder and don’t have very strong family ties, but my other coworkers were devastated because they missed out on valuable time with family members they didn’t see but once a year. So, if you decide to go out shopping on Thanksgiving Eve this year, I hope you keep this in mind and are nice to the cashiers and sales associates, even if they don’t seem very nice themselves – they have a good reason not to be. 

Now, let’s move on to the reading! Speaking of capitalism, I found Arif Dirlik’s “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism” a bit hard to comprehend at first; but, once I got into a groove, I was easily able to see how capitalism, globalism, and imperialism all fit hand-in-hand. Please bear with me – I know this all sounds overwhelming at the moment, which is why I’m bringing back the key terms of the week to help us understand the basics before we jump into the theory.

The first key term I’d like to address is “dependency theory,” which Ashcroft et. al. define in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts as “the continued impoverishment of colonized ‘Third World’ countries on the grounds that underdevelopment is not internally generated but a structural condition of global capitalism itself” (67). What they mean is that countries generally designated as “third world” (read: African and Asian countries) are actually restricted from becoming independent because the “First World” countries establish them as producers of raw materials, thus preventing them from acquiring the mass production and capital necessary to become a “First World” country. Take, for example, Thailand; Thailand is one of the largest producers of U.S. and U.K. clothing materials, yet the country is still considered “Third World” because much of its land is poor and undeveloped (or fam land). The modern- and industrialization that it did experience was not widespread enough to decrease its overall poverty levels (read: sweat shop work doesn’t pay very much). In short, the capitalist system – which in itself is a world system, as capitalism spread with Western imperialism and has since become the dominant economic and political system on a global scale – ensures that non-Western countries remain “Third World” countries so that “First World” (read: white) countries can keep their power and ideology in play. 

The second key term I’d like to address is related to the ideas of the world system and dependency theory, as well as how they function on a larger scale. “Globalization” is “the process whereby individual lives and local communities are affected by economic and cultural forces that operate world-wide. In effect it is the process of the world becoming a single place” (Ashcroft et. al. 110). Basically, globalism boils down to a familiar (single) story: the erasure of distinct cultures and societies with their own capital systems in favor of forcing them into a new system of global capital controlled by colonizers. Globalism arose from imperialist doctrines and impacts each culture differently, despite its aim to incorporate them into a universal system, and its operations are still centered within the West today, especially in America. 

In “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Arif Dirlik expands on globalism and its relationship to capitalism further, referencing the existence of “global capitalism” and its history of analysis within the PoCo realm. Dirlik notes that in many ways, PoCo as a discipline has failed to account for how modernization and globalism have harmed both the “Third World” countries that were forced to adopt and contribute to the world system and the marginalized peoples within “First World” countries themselves, as well as how globalism affects each culture differently (568). He calls for the discipline to “repudiate all master narratives, and since the most powerful current master narratives are the products of a post-Enlightenment European constitution of history and therefore Eurocentric… foremost among these master narratives to be repudiated is the narrative of modernization, in both its bourgeois and its Marxist incarnations” (565). The way I understand this quote is that we need to stop applying Western/First World terminology to countries that are not Western or “First World.” We cannot truly understand the pain and suffering these people experience if we think only in terms of colonizer and imperialist definitions; each of these countries had their own unique capital system before Westernization and imperialism were thrust upon them, which is what we need to consider if we’re going to try to advocate/serve as allies for them and make sure their voices are heard. The fact that the discipline uses “First World” terminology to begin with indicates not only that the PoCo discipline is situated primarily in the “First World” when it really shouldn’t be (the First World-Third World binary is what we’re trying to dismantle in the first place), but also that it is not truly aware of the atrocities happening to “Third World” countries – or how each country is affected differently – in the name of global capitalism. 

Dirlik goes on to further describe global capitalism, noting that “Fundamental to the structure of the new global capitalism is… ‘a new international division of ‘labor;’ that is, the transnationalization of production where, through subcontracting, the process of production (of even the same commodity) is globalized” (577). This division, however, is less of an actual division than it is a prime example of dependency theory, as “First World” countries force “Third World” countries to make their products so that they can sell them and retain 80% of the capital (while paying the “Third World” workers next to nothing). Global capitalism and transnationalization are why places like sweat shops still exist; production is globalized at the detriment to the non-Western countries it affects, with corporations like Walmart and Calvin Klein only paying attention to it (and saying that they’ll change – they don’t, actually) when mass fires break out and native people are outraged that their friends and families are dying, causing them to stop working. While Dirlik notes that it is hard to point to one center of global capitalism, he does hint that much of the power is still very much found in the West (especially Europe) and white countries. 

I’d now like to begin applying aspects of Dirlik’s theory to Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 novel Exit West, which enacts much of what Dirlik discusses while also incorporating aspects of magical realism to simultaneously soften the blow and sharpen the reader’s understanding of modern emigration and the crises that refugees face around the world. One quote in particular that I think is widely exemplified in Exit West pertains to definitions of “First” and “Third” world countries. Dirlik writes, “Parts of the earlier Third World are today on the pathways of transnational capital and belong in the ‘developed’ sector of the world economy. Likewise, parts of the First World marginalized in the new global economy are hardly distinguishably in way of life from what used to be viewed as the Third World” (579). Parts of the “First World” that are reminiscent of what is generally considered to be “Third World” especially come to light in Hamid’s depiction of the fall of London and the development of Dark London. Dark London in particular is described as “the worst of the black holes in the fabric of the nation” (Hamid 129) as vacant houses, parks, and plots of land begin to be inhabited by migrants from all over the world, the majority of whom are coming through magical doors to escape the horrific war-like environments of their hometowns. Soon, the power is cut to that specific area and London natives begin attacking migrants, causing what was once a beautiful, upper-class part of London to turn into a warzone not unlike where Nadia and Saeed came from. All of these migrants formerly of the Third World have now become the marginalized within the first world, their only choice at living a somewhat peaceful life being contributing to the existing capital system (read: white-dominant system) by building a pipeline at a worker camp in the London Halo.

Yet another aspect of Dirlik’s theory that I found to be exemplified in Exit West concerns the temporal limits of postcolonialism. Dirlik notes that “in a world situation in which severe inequalities persist in older colonial forms or in their neonational reconfigurations, moreover, ‘the unified temporality of ‘postcoloniality’ risks reproducing the colonial discourse of an allochronic other, living in another time, still lagging behind us, the genuine postcolonials’” (573). Upon looking up the definition of allochronic and realizing that it means something along the lines of ‘not able to exist at the same time/same timelines,’ I came to understand this quote as saying that the danger in the definition “post-colonial” is that the “post” signifies that colonialism is over and not affecting anyone anymore, nor will it be able to affect others in the future. I think this is why Exit West and its doors always looked to the future and why each future, though it may have been better than the past, was still riddled with the same problems. Nadia and Saeed continued to struggle with relating to each other culturally (as he was much more conservative than she), as well as connecting with the “natives” of the various places they inhabited. Their struggle with identity and belonging was still present in the future, even if that struggle was less pronounced. I think this is why both of them ended up back in their hometowns like “hawks returning to their nests” (Hamid 230) at the end of the novel after having separated fifty years prior. Settler colonialism is still very much happening in both the United States and Japan (and undoubtedly many other countries), and even in places where it may not necessarily be happening anymore, those people are still affected by imperialism’s and capitalism’s legacy. 

Overall, I think the novel did a great job at re-presenting the lives of migrants and refugees in a modern world to an audience that may not have been open or accepting to them. Readers are able to see how the dominant system that works for them cannot always work for other people, and that what is happening in “Third World” countries with which they don’t associate is also happening right in their own backyards – they just have to open their eyes (and their hearts) to see it. In Monika Bulaj’s amazing, though short, TED Talk, she leaves us without an answer to a crucial question that follows the same line of questioning/concern as Dirlik and Hamid: “What do we know about the country and the people we pretend to protect?” The answer to this, in my opinion, is that we don’t know anything due to universalism, essentialism, racism, sexism – you name it. We get so caught up in “First World” dominant languages and ideologies that we end up skipping right over or silencing the voices and people for whom we’re trying to advocate and support. If there is one thing to take away from globalism, it’s that we need to remember how it affects people at different lengths and is not always (if ever, really) a positive thing for non-Western/white people. 

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With this semester coming to a close in the next two and half weeks, I can honestly say that this course has changed/improved the way I look at non-Western literature and authors; I think I’m now better able to make connections between my work with East Asian concepts to other Asian and new African countries without worrying about whether or not I’m talking about Japan/China/Korea too much. I’ve learned that it’s okay to draw parallels without minimizing the struggle of one country for another. We were given the opportunity to expand on concepts we learned in Indigenous Rhetoric, as well as to learn about new theories that go beyond the scope of the Western world and Western problems (even if the West was the one causing said problems); this was an opportunity for which I am grateful, as it is my goal to become a globally competent scholar who understands that struggles and consequences are diverse, even in their similarities.  

Next semester, I intend to take another independent study with Dr. Vogel to focus more on Japanese literature and non-Western criticism, so I hope to come back to scholars like Bhabha and Said, as well as to add more knowledge of scholars like them to my well of information. I think I’d like to begin looking at Japan through a post-colonial lens, as Japan has experienced both sides of colonialism and – I think – has developed a unique method of both coping with and denying that past. I’d be grateful for any suggestions on scholars or theories within that realm, though I fully intend to do my own research and come up with theories to investigate that I can incorporate into the independent study proposal. But for now, I’m going to dive deep into nationalism and am excited to explore its utilization and effects in India through the work of Arundhati Roy. Thank you for your patience and for a wonderful semester, everyone.