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For Homi K. Bhabha
However we come to the question of postcolonial studies at this historical juncture, there are two phenomena, both topics of public debate since the early 1990s, that none of us can quite escape in our personal and collective lives at present: globalization and global warming. All thinking about the present has to engage both. What I do in this essay is to use some of the recent writings of Homi K. Bhabha to illustrate how a leading contemporary postcolonial thinker imagines the figure of the human in the era of what is often called "neoliberal" capitalism, and then enter a brief discussion of the debate on climate change to see how postcolonial thinking may need to be stretched to adjust itself to the reality of global warming. My ultimate proposition in this essay is simple: that the current conjuncture of globalization and global warming leaves us with the challenge of having to think of human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once.
The nineteenth century leftus with some internationalist and universal ideologies, prominent among them Marxism and liberalism, both progenies in different ways of the Enlightenment. Anticolonial thought was born of that lineage. The waves of decolonization movements of the 1950s and 60s were followed by postcolonial criticism that was placed, in the universities of the Anglo-American countries at least, as brotherin- arms to cultural studies. Together, cultural studies and postcolonial criticism fed into the literature on globalization, though globalization studies, as such, also drew on developments in the cognate disciplines of sociology, economics, and anthropology. Now we have a literature on global warming and a general sense of an environmental crisis that is no doubt mediated by the inequities of capitalist development, but it is a crisis that faces humanity as a whole. In all these moves, we are leftwith three images of the human: the universalist-Enlightenment view of the human as potentially the same everywhere, the subject with capacity to bear and exercise rights; the postcolonial-postmodern view of the human as the same but endowed everywhere with what some scholars call "anthropological difference"-differences of class, sexuality, gender, history, and so on. This second view is what the literature on globalization underlines. And then comes the figure of the...