After 9/11-Thinking About the Global, Thinking About Postcolonial

Abstract

in a teacup, to capture the sands of the beach in the cup of one’s hand. What I write instead is a meditation, a set of scattered thoughts, reflections on the usefulness of postcolonial theorizing in these times, and my own biography as a postcolonial subject and educator. If there is anyone who still resists the ideas of globalization, transnationalism, postcolonialism, and their implications for how we live with each other in the modern world, their implications for the taken-for-granted organizing categories such as nation, state, culture, identity, and Empire-the idea that we live in a deeply interconnected world in which centers and margins are unstable and are constantly being redefined, rearticulated, and reordered-then, such a person must have been awaken from his or her methodological slumber by the events of 9/11. The critical events of that day-the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crescendo of the fallout attendant to these extraordinary acts-threaten to consume us all. It is striking, in the language of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), how fragile modern forms of center-periphery arrangements of imperial rule are. It is striking-with the intensification of representational technologies,