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To account for this tentacular, insidious amorphous entity, Bernard Porter has coined the term superempire. Unlike Hardt and Negri, he locates this entity in America—an America that, though it shuns the traditional trappings of the word empire, aims “to remodel the world in her own image”; yet, like Hardt and Negri, Porter deems that this new configuration of empire in the form of “internationalist imperialism” is unprecedented; it may have originated as a new world order under the first Bush administration, but one thing is sure: “[the superempire] exceeds any previous empires the world has ever seen” (Porter 162).
As a new paradigm of power, this superempire seems devoid of antecedents and is not beleaguered by anxieties of influence. Because they target the binary logic behind colonialist, sexist, and racist constructions, both postcolonial and postmodernist theories—principally based on Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of modernist master narratives, Jean Baudrillard’s cultural simulacra, and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics—are useless, for they evade the “real enemy” (Hardt and Negri 211). The true enemy is, however, hard to fathom, for it takes such guises as globalization and capitalism,1 but this is a capitalism with a difference, straying from traditional conceptions, for it operates from an ill-defined location or nonplace of exploitation. So goes the argument in Hardt and Negri’s Empire.
For Hardt and Negri, the work of a postcolonial theoretician and a cultural critic like Homi K. Bhabha is relevant only so far as it is symptomatic of “the passage to Empire” (145), just as the new fundamentalisms are part of the same etiology. Significantly, the founding monument of postcolonial theory—The Empire Writes Back (1989), by the “down under” troika, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin—is not mentioned. In other words, writing—whether “back,” “forward,” or “sideways”—or simply literature, that most subjective discourse, is not part of Hardt and Negri’s political philosophy of the epochal shift toward empire.
Interpreting exemplary texts, the essays in this volume provide a supplement to Hardt and Negri’s book by reviewing the transition from colonial to postcolonial discourse as a historical but essentially imaginary and narrative construct. Examples of past and current empire building,