Ethics and Aesthetics of Globalism: A Postcolonial Perspective

The vernacular cosmopolitan takes the view that the commitment to a “right to difference in equality” has less to do with the affirmation or authentication of cultural origins and ethnic ‘identities’, and more to do with political practices and ethical choices.

Minoritarian affiliations or solidarities arise in response to the failures and limits of democratic representation, creating new modes of agency, new strategies of recognition, new forms of political and symbolic representation - NGOs, anti-globalisation groups, Truth Commissions, International courts, local agencies of transitional justice (the gacaca courts in rural Rwanda). Vernacular cosmopolitanism represents a political process that works towards the shared goals of democratic rule, through the process of ‘translating’ cultures and histories in ways that make it possible to reassess and revise the stories most familiar to you. Stories of your people and your homeland should be retold from the perspective of those who may not be your compatriots, but are part of the citizenry of a ‘world’.

One example of a post-colonial cosmopolitanism on a global scale is what is increasingly called the “Indian metaphor” - that is, the way in which the contemporary Indian experience is being rapidly translated into a model, even a metaphor, for living and working in the global world today. [ Tom Friedman, The Earth is Flat] Globalisation frequently announces itself in terms of the ‘new’ – the new global econonmy, new technologies, a new social order, but it is more nascent or ‘incubational’ than “new”. As a prescient French philosopher put it succintly in 1978: “We are witnessing a globalisation of the economy? For certain. A globalisation of political calculations? Without doubt. But a universalisation of political consciousness – certainly not.[Foucault]. Political ‘distortions’, economic divisions, and ethical dilemmas define our times because we live in an age of global transition (rather than transformation) in which the ‘extremes’ exist in a relation of antagonistic – and agonistic – proximity (not polarity). The ‘secular’ liberalisation of the markets has seen, side by side, the rise of xenophobia and religious fundamentalisms; diasporic populations who live in the West, and participate in its modernising public spheres and civil societies, are also amongst those who most fervently advocate traditionalism and orthodoxy; Western governments who have become spokespersons for the democratic ideal the world over, are themselves in thrall to the profound intolerance, and lack of transparency, of the Religious Right movements in their own countries.

To talk of the Indian metaphor in an age of globalisation is to acknowledge the processes of transfer—financial, cultural, the media, markets - as well as the process of transformation - the challenge to national sovereignty, the amiguities of international law and conventions, the hybridisation of cultures, the complexties of global governance.

Prof. Homi K. Bhabha