The first aspect relates to the establishment and consolidation of postcolonial studies as demonstrated by the growing number of teaching and research programmes (undergraduate and postgraduate), the publication of handbooks, readers and manuals, and the increase in the number of conferences, centres, networks and associations in postcolonial studies. The second aspect refers to the explosion and expansion of postcolonial studies as part of the larger cultural field, which renders it a commodity of exchange in the global marketplace.

Many persuasive critics such as Arif Dirlik (1994), Aijaz Ahmad (1995), Neil Lazarus (2011) and Benita Parry (2004) have passionately addressed the complicity and connivance of the postcolonial field with Western hegemony. They state that postcolonialism has become one of the features of late capitalism that allows the West to normalize, assimilate and control the operations of anti-colonial struggles, erasing material conditions of resistance and replacing them with elegant discursive constructions on otherness, shrinking a field of embattlement to text. This contention between a more Marxist and material understanding of the operations of postcolonialism and its poststructuralist spin-offs in the academic arena has often led to new perceptions, but also to new forms of binarism and oppositional thinking.

By exploring the relationship between the field of postcolonial studies and its links with the cultural industry, my aim is to demonstrate how these two aspects can never be truly disengaged from one another, but that their relationship does not necessarily imply condemning the postcolonial field as a sellout, as a contaminated tool moving away from its original political and ethical project. It only demonstrates that the field has developed and moved along, in fluid and at times strident ways, with the operation of globalization, which, despite having so many links and overlaps with the field of postcolonial studies and its objects of investigation, operates in keeping with wider dynamics and principles.

To say that the world is an increasingly integrated and interconnected system of conjuncture and disjuncture is not to say anything new. Scholars of world systems have claimed that this has been the case for several centuries. In his analysis of the world system, Immanuel Wallerstein claims that there is neither a Third World nor a First World, and therefore for our current argument there is no postcolonial realm separate from the West, but only one world connected by a complex network of economic exchange relationships that function on the ‘commodification of everything’ (Wallerstein 1983). His claim is that this was set in motion in the past by colonialism and imperialism and is further reproduced under globalization. This system of unequal patterns of dependence (Wallerstein’s notion of dependence theory) reproduces hegemonic structures arranged around dividing lines such as north and south, centre and periphery, in which nationalism, race and class still play determining roles (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). On these issues, see also Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan’s theories on uneven development (2003).

To say that the commodification flow between Third World culture and the West has always been there is correct. The idea of exchange between these two directions is now no longer poignant if we emphasize and focus on globalization as the worldwide interconnectedness of culture and markets, but the intensity of this relationship, and the shifts in power relations between the two fields have changed significantly in recent decades. Furthermore, there is certainly something new under the sun, and it consists of the acceleration of the earlier conditions of the penetrating capitalism and of improved communication technologies and travel. (Harvey 1989; Appadurai 1990). What everyone agrees on is the heightened scale of these transitions – the heightened intensity of nodes, flows and networks – that have created a transformation on a planetary scale, bringing human subjects, objects and culture to an unprecedented confrontation.

What makes globalization specific to our times is the recognition that, although its local manifestations can be heterogeneous and particularized, it is an intrinsic part of a much wider, complex economy whose operation and effects are homogenizing (Appadurai 1996). This also applies to the cultural industry, which, in an age of late capitalism, creates space for local marginal manifestations, such as postcolonial artefacts, and turns them into a commodity of global exchange. Emerging markets, and the role of diasporic migrants in fashioning cartographies of home and abroad, testify to the indisputable link between local taste and global reach. What in the past was part of an exoticizing representation of the other – spicy food, luxurious textiles and home decorations, spiritual quests or alternative healing methods – has now been turned into commodified exotica. The Orient becomes a fetish, a series of objects to be desired in order to inflect the anonymity of the global style with a couleur locale. The list of what is now available is not truly exhausted by such obvious examples as the worldwide proliferation of fusion food, ethnic clothing, world music, world cinema, fair trade or the so-called new-age industry – all commercial and global responses to local traditions and heritages. These instances of the local have obviously been filtered and claimed as part of the global (glocal entities), otherwise they could not have had the visibility, viability and exchange value that they do today. It appears that the local is merely manufactured to satisfy global needs of projection of ‘authenticity’, and that what is actually at work here is the push and pull factors of the new world order. However, the truth is that this all too easily wraps everything up in vague simplistic generalizations, whereas an accurate analysis of what has happened in recent years must examine the actual complex mechanisms at work.

Accordingly, a more careful analysis of the relationship between the postcolonial field and the cultural industry is long overdue. This relates not only to the operation of the commodification of the East (new Orientalism practices, as Gayatri Spivak refers to them, neo-Orientalism as Elleke Bohmer more precisely defines them, or re-Orientalism as Lisa Lau describes the consumption of the Orient by Orientals), but also to the more technical and commercial relationship between what, in the classic definition of Adorno and Horkheimer, was defined as ‘cultural industry’, and the implications between culture (in this case postcolonial culture, as far as we can categorize it as such) and its redistribution via commercial structures such as publishing, film and music, art and museums, though only some of these issues are at the core of this book.

Adorno and Horkheimer believe that ‘[t]he whole world is made to pass through the filter of the cultural industry’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1996: 126), destroying the oppositional and critical aspects of art. Their shorthand vision was that the rise of the cultural industry has taken such things as books, paintings and pieces of music and converted them into films, posters, or records in order to make money and entertain the audience by making them stop thinking about their everyday problems. Hence, what has become the ideal is the amusement itself – taking the place of higher things:

This rather bleak view of the cultural industry held by Adorno and Horkheimer was very much influenced by the time in which they lived, the rise of Nazism, their being challenged by their exile in the US, and their experience up close in a society in transformation, in which art as a critical tool had been replaced by art as a commodity. The Dialectic of Enlightenment reflects their experience of the 1930s, deeply rooted in European, and more specifically German, cultural tradition, their exile in California as Marxist and Jew in the 1940s and their return to Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. Their Californian intermezzo had a significant impact on them. There they experienced at close quarters just how exiled Jewish Hollywood magnates took part in new colossal cinematic projects. Horkheimer and Adorno therefore encapsulate and embody the austerity of European cultural pessimism in a period of considerable turmoil, disorientation and devastation. They propose a high standard for European culture and a model of cultural analysis that is uncompromising and rigorous. It is a good lesson against the allure of commercialized art, the purpose of which is quick satisfaction without fulfilling desire.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s reference to mass deception can be interpreted in two ways: on the one hand, it indicates deception on a large scale, where every single one of us is deceived; on the other hand, it refers to the deception characterized by those who claim that it is possible to popularize art. Adorno and Horkheimer denounce the claim that the masses can have instant access to culture by simply circumventing the demands elitist culture makes on our cultural knowledge and experience. As Steinert explains,

Adorno and Horkheimer state that people are provided with mass-produced products in keeping with their financial and social position. Hence, instead of consumers choosing (for) themselves, it is the cultural industry that selects the appropriate products for the consumers. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the cultural industry puts a price tag on every cultural commodity it produces, which eliminates the critical power of the consumers. Therefore, the cultural industry does not satisfy the desires of the public, either as consumers or audiences, but it produces them, stifling the possibility for choice and agency in the process. As J.M. Bernstein rightly summarizes,

However, we need to remind ourselves that the cultural industry is not synonymous with media, and Adorno never uses the term ‘mass communication’. The cultural industry ‘extends to commodity-form culture and goes beyond the media into architecture, design, art exhibitions, journalistic conventions, dating, serious music’ (Steinert 2003: 9).

Adorno and Horkheimer protested against the interference and profound dissemination of technology in the realm of culture. They see reproducibility of cultural products as an industrial mode of production that results in the standardization of the work of art: ‘if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1996: 122). There is, therefore, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of the cultural industry a nostalgia for the cultural experience that is independent of any technological intrusion.

For Benjamin, mechanically reproduced imitations, replicas, and printing have some progressive potential just as making a film or photograph has potential for freedom and democratic access to art. It paves the way for a totally different form of arrangements. Though Benjamin is preoccupied with the question of authenticity and uniqueness, as well as traditional authority – which he refers to as the ‘aura’ – he also sees it as emancipation from the notion of art as sacred. With the detachment of the ritual and cultural values from the work of art, a new era of crisis develops.

Although Adorno appreciates Benjamin’s argument, he believes Benjamin to be too optimistic in terms of his view on new technologies. Accordingly, Adorno observes,