A recent issue of the new journal The Global South focuses on the relative absence of India-based voices in cultural theory dealing with India and postcolonialism. They ask, quite directly:

Why, for example, do India-based scholars remain so woefully underrepresented in postcolonial and globalization studies, even as India itself has become the field’s most widely referenced postcolonial location?

The editors argue that the focus on displacement that has characterised my postcolonial writing does not reflect the position of the majority:

…the almost complete identification of postcolonial studies with diaspora, exile, etc. has yielded a discourse ill-positioned to critique globalization, one arguably better suited to strategically undergird the notion of a global neoliberal subject.

While an important source of critique for postcolonial studies, it raises the question of what replaces this discourse of displacement. It is the alternative a familiar story of victimhood?

Reference

Alfred J. López and Ashok K. Mohapatra ‘India in a Global Age; or, The Neoliberal Epiphany’ The Global South (2008) 2: 1, pp. 1-5