Keynote Speech

In their academic blockbuster of 2000, Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri made the polemical argument that postcolonial theory leads to a dead end because it remains obsessed with the modern form of domination associated with colonialism that is no longer the primary mode of power operating in contemporary globalization. There is some truth to this claim regardless of the relative merits and weaknesses of their own account of the postmodern sovereignty they call "empire". The origins of postcolonial theory and cultural critique in the discipline of literary studies has meant that their analyses of oppression, domination, and exploitation have taken as their fundamental paradigm the experience of nineteenth century European territorial imperialism and colonialism. Hence, if we consider the critique of Orientalist discourse or representational systems (Said), the racist stereotypes of colonial discourse (Bhabha rewriting Fanon), or even the epistemic violence of colonial subject-formation through the civilizing processes of colonial law and education (Spivak), these different variations of postcolonial cultural critique are bound by a common understanding of power that emphasizes its 'mentalist' or 'imagistic'/'imaginative' character, whether this is understood in terms of the role of myth, ideology, or discursive norms that are imposed on the colonized subject at the moment of its constitution. This keynote speech situates the contribution of postcolonial theory to political theory, especially its relation to the concepts of resistance and civil society, and proceeds to assess the limits of postcolonial theory for the analysis of contemporary globalization,. I argue that in postcolonial globalization, power cannot be adequately understood as primarily psychical in its functioning. I make my argument by examining the production of three types of female subjects of transnational labor that are part of the necessary feminization of labor in contemporary global capitalism: the woman factory worker under regimes of foreign direct investment and international subcontracting, the foreign domestic worker, and the transnational sex worker, trafficked or otherwise. How do these material processes of subject-formation lead to a fundamental rethinking of key concepts of postcolonial theory?

Featuring Speaker: Pheng Cheah (Professor of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)

Pheng Cheah is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2006). He is also the co-editor of Cosmopolitics - Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (Routledge, 2003). He is currently working on a book on world literature in the age of global financialization and another book on the concept of instrumentality. For further introduction to Professor Cheah, please visit: http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/faculty_bios/pheng_cheah.html

Interlocutor: Wu, Rwei-Ren (Assistant Research Fellow, Academia Sinica)

Wu Rwei-Ren is Assistant Research Fellow in the Institute of Taiwan History at Academia Sinica. His academic interests include but are not limited to comparative politics, Asian nationalism, postcolonial theory, identity politics, political history and history of political thoughts( modern Taiwan and Japan). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from The University of Chicago. Among his various publications, he also translated Benedict Andersen’s magnum opus, Imagined Community, into Chinese. For further introduction to Professor Wu, please visit his webpage at http://www.ith.sinica.edu.tw/index.php