Colonial Fear And Desire In 2016

Colonial Fear and Desire in 2016
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With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, globalization seemed to augur the End of History. Globalization enabled “the free movement of capital, people and goods; trickle-down economics; a much diminished role for nation states; and a belief that market forces, now unleashed, were unstoppable.” What could be more liberal, democratic, and progressive?

But today, globalization has collapsed from within. What Lenin called the “labor aristocracy” has revolted. Workers in the “advanced” North have even less incentive than their predecessors a century ago to bear common cause with comrade-proletariats in the “underdeveloped” South. No longer supreme in skills or wages or even geopolitics, with terrorists bombing citadels of civilization like New York, London, and Paris, large segments of the middle class in the West have opted to reject globalization. It disenfranchises them, they decry. They’d rather build walls. These can come physically (e.g., along the US-Mexico border) and legislatively (e.g., outlaw immigrants/refugees).

And make no mistake. This Northern rejection of globalization forwards an explicitly pro-“white” agenda. Note, for example, the openness of white supremacist groups in British, European, and American politics since these signal events in 2016: Britain’s exit from the European Union (“Brexit”) in June; the election of Donald J. Trump to the US presidency in November; and the rise of Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front (NF) party, as a presidential candidate for France. These developments resurge an ethno-nationalism that targets anyone and anything from a non-white, non-Christian, and non-heteronormative background.

But not all is what it seems. Fourteen years ago, I identified an anxiety to globalization for globalizers. It stems from globalization’s underlying colonial discourse: that is, (1) in claiming to represent all that is modern, advanced, and virile (“whiteness”), globalism presents itself in exclusive opposition to localism, defined as backward, traditional, and feminized (“lack of whiteness”); accordingly, (2) the global should penetrate/conquer the local but (3) the global invariably fails given the impossibility of total control and the local’s blind intransigence (thereby warranting more globalizing/colonizing measures that lead to ever-escalating bouts of frustration and failure); and yet, (4) globalizers still desire the local/Other. Such desire remains despite fears of reprisals in the form of reverse conquest and penetration. Globalization, in short, consumes itself as much as the Other. To demonstrate parallels between globalization and the colonial imaginary, I compared their respective literatures.

I discovered the following:

Each of these responses [in globalization] – excitement, withdrawal, ambivalence – stakes different interests…At the same time, all three effectively elide globalism’s central contradiction – [its] incompleteness…That this happens to come from the West, the source of global technology and capital, rather than elsewhere, the market for globalization, remains conveniently unexamined. It discloses a (neo)colonial anxiety about the global’s dependence on the local.

Brexiters, Trumpists, and Le Penists certainly highlight such fear. The Other may do onto the Self what globalization/colonialism had done onto the Other! At the same time, anticipation laces globalization. Globalizers cannot stay away. They aim to keep on “globalizing” despite laments about frustrations and failures, difficulties and damages. A study from the Stern School of Business at New York University shows that other than trade, globalization has increased in all sectors including capital, people, and information (Mathews 2016). And there are no signs that these will decrease.

As in previous attempts at colonial control, globalizers will fail. Why? Because the globalizing/colonial Self has now internalized the Other. Note this epitome of Yellow Peril fiction, Dr. Fu Manchu, first serialized in 1912 as dime-store novels later turned into popular films and TV shows. (The latest version was aired in 2015.) In the series, there is always a young white hero who cannot resist the soul-shaking temptations of globalization despite its obvious risks:

After experiencing Fah Lo Suee [daughter of Fu Manchu], he feels ‘haunted’ by her ‘feline passion’ yet ‘dread[s]’ their next [encounter]. No longer the complacent young man of science and empire, Greville now trembles with the fear and excitement of the Other within the Self.

In sum, neither America nor Europe can be “great,” not to mention “again,” without the Other.

And don’t think the Other doesn’t know this.

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