The Post-Colonial State in Our Time

Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Vijay Prashad, professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and author, most recently, of The Darker Nations: A People's History of The Third World. Much of what he said is not strictly speaking original, but the interpretive framework he is after promises to bring together many disparate phenomena operating across the developed/developing world divide, from urban gentrification to the creation of financial bubbles. To understand the current world order, Prashad takes us back to the imagination of an alternative path, the Third World dream of liberation and self-assertion; through it, as Fanon once said, formerly colonised societies would achieve what Europe could not.

From an economic and geographic perspective, this vision is decidedly not new: we see the invocation of the old I.S.I. (import-substitution-industrialisation) model set against today's neoliberal tyranny, the South-North resource flow as "accumulation by dispossession" (Prashad quotes David Harvey on this), and so on. But in a cultural sense, the awareness of the immediate postwar aftermath as an age of new global connections, which I discussed earlier in the context of Amitav Ghosh's essay on Hindi films in the non-Western world, is a fruitful area of historical thinking that is just now coming to the fore. Prashad's focus on major state figures like Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, and on high-level events like the Bandung conference, thus serves a dual purpose: to render new cultural meanings to traditional diplomatic and political narratives (showing how these figures were important to a deep and wide movement that thought of the world differently, not just seeing them as another Cold War power bloc), and to argue that the idea of the Third World was institutionally anchored in state and transnational power (the implicit contrast is to today's fragmented, subterranean, ragtag resistances epitomised by the World Social Forum). The destruction or "assassination," in his term, of these power structures represented the real death of the dream in the late 1970s.

After his vibrant and provocative presentation, I asked Prashad a nagging question. On the one hand, he still views the "Global South" as a viable force in international relations, and he is interested in studying the developmental models and pathways of "BRIC" (Brazil-India-China) nations as an alternative to the current U.S.-dominated world order. But on the other hand, he rightly pointed out that India's current government continues to send heavy subscriptions to the IMF and is even seeking to restart the Doha round. Is the post-colonial state not now part of the very process that creates an "accumulation by dispossession"? Can it be part of a "globalising" world economy and a source of resistance to it at the same time? Prashad's answer was that elections matter and things may change. The Indian state does not essentially have one role or another, but its policies swing back and forth; therefore, it is also susceptible to influence, to the contingent democratic process. An electoral victory, for example, would presumably reconfigure the state on the world stage. Such a faith in popular democracy to triumph over large-scale structures is in many ways not traditional Marxism at all. It relies instead on forging innovative links between local resistances and state power, and not in the least on a considerable degree of optimism.