In postcolonial studies, the European colonial project is sometimes described as a powerful form of cultural mobility that travels from a metropolitan centre to a colonial periphery, an uneven exchange in which the metropolitan (European) centre exploits its provinces. Likewise, the political and cultural projects of decolonization are often described as a reversal of this movement: a ‘writing back’ from the periphery to the centre in order to highlight the inequities of imperial power and emphasize regional and ontological ‘differences from the assumptions of the imperial center’ to assert the cultural rehabilitation of the periphery (Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin 2). But while the twentieth century is, at times, defined as the century of decolonization, the political independence of former European colonies did not necessarily challenge the asymmetrical power relations (particularly cultural and economic discrepancies) between imperial urban centres such as London and Paris and the former colonies of Europe.

In the introduction to The Postcolonial and the Global (2008), Revathi Krishnaswamy surveys how the economic power and cultural forces of globalization have inspired many critical theorists to insist that the words colonizer and colonized, colonization and post-colonization are anachronistic in the early twenty-first century. ‘With capital successfully penetrating every corner of the globe’, Krishnaswamy writes, ‘many theorists of globalization see little sense in thinking of anything outside or beyond capital’ (13). Thus, terms such as ‘colonial’, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘imperial’ are merely historical concepts – terms best used to describe a world system that no longer exists. Indeed, as travel speeds up and new communication technologies engender extreme mobility, there are those who posit that concepts such as the nation-state and empire, centre and periphery, have given way to fluid movements that signal ‘the end of geography’ (Cresswell 3).