Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

“While colonialism was a frontal, more militant system of conquest and overthrow, globalization is a subtle, more nihilistic conquest”, writes Ameh Dennis Akoh (2010) in his study of globalization and its relation to postcolonialism. Globalization as a political ideology emerged after the Cold War, and it has been construed by leading postcolonial theorists as another form of imperialism that is much more sinister in its implications. Globalization’s project to open borders and erase boundaries emerges from existing centers of power which entails the dissolution of national cultures in favor of cosmopolitanism. As a political tool of cultural unification, globalization does not offer a level playing field where disparate cultures and histories can co-exist and intermingle, instead it is another form of cultural dominance where minoritarian cultures are co-opted into larger Western discursive and epistemic frameworks. Critics of globalization therefore rightly point out that the idea of so-called “universalism” behind globalizing endeavors is not inclusive of marginalized and oppressed cultures. It is also imperative to question that, in a global village, who really possesses the power to cross and thus benefit from open borders and international trade, and for whom open borders are never really open. Furthermore, as the idea of “world literature” becomes more viable in a globalized world, the cost is the erasure of vernacular and regional literature. Postcolonial academia must therefore resist the promises of globalization and re-center marginalized vernaculars in place of the global Anglophone canon. In my paper, I discuss the impact of globalization.