Globalization, Empire, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist: A Postcolonial Reading
The Arc of Empire: From Colonial Conquest to Global Neoliberalism
Navigating Identity in the Age of Global Empire
Introducing the Articles
Sir's two articles, "Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies" and "Globalization and Fiction: Exploring Postcolonial Critique and Literary Representations," both return again and again to the same claim, that the events of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror cannot be separated from globalization itself. Sir writes that "these violent events are also part of the phenomenon we think of as globalization," quoting Loomba's argument that this makes it "harder than ever to see our world as simply 'postcolonial'" (Barad, "Globalization and the Future" 187). What makes this pairing useful is that both articles insist globalization cannot be studied only through economics. The second article frames fiction as "a powerful medium for exploring the multifaceted dimensions of this global phenomenon," useful precisely because novels and films can hold "economic dominance, resistance, social justice, and the personal experiences of individuals caught in the tide of global change" together in a single narrative (Barad, "Globalization and Fiction" 177).
Reading Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist alongside these two articles and Loomba's own concluding chapter, I want to argue that the film dramatizes exactly this claim through one character's movement from corporate absorption into Empire toward a return to postcolonial critique. Changez Khan's career, his romance, his eventual return to Lahore, and his transformation into a lecturer and activist are not separate plotlines. Read through Sir's articles, they are one continuous argument about what globalization asks of a postcolonial subject, and what it refuses to give back.
Changez Khan: From Corporate Success to Postcolonial Resistance
Postcolonial Critique I: Empire, Not Colonization
Sir's first article leans heavily on Hardt and Negri's Empire, quoting their description of a new global order that "establishes no territorial center of power" and instead works as "a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule" that manages "hybrid identities" through "modulating networks of command" (qtd. in Barad, "Globalization and the Future" 188). Changez's career at Underwood Samson fits this description closely. He is not colonized by conquest. He is recruited into a network, trained, and rewarded for being absorbed into it. Loomba makes the same point in her conclusion when she notes that "Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal US constitutional project," a project that works "to include and incorporate minorities into the mainstream rather than simply expel or exclude them" (Loomba 214). Changez's early success at the firm, his rapid promotion and inclusion into an elite corporate world, reads as this incorporation in practice.
Sir's article also notes that Hardt and Negri compare this new Empire to Rome rather than to European colonialism, since "imperial Rome also loosely incorporated its subject states rather than controlling them directly" (Barad, "Globalization and the Future" 188). Underwood Samson works on the same logic. The firm does not force Changez to abandon his background; it simply makes his advancement conditional on how well he performs within its rules. This is close to what Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman argue in the passage Sir's article cites, that treating "US political and cultural power as a global dominant" can actually distract from a fuller examination of how power actually operates day to day, in offices, in hiring decisions, in who gets promoted and who gets watched (qtd. in Barad, "Globalization and the Future" 189). The film seems aware of this distinction. Changez is never told directly that he does not belong. He simply notices, gradually, that his belonging was always provisional, dependent on circumstances he does not control.
What the film then shows is how quickly that inclusion becomes conditional after 9/11. Loomba writes that in the aftermath, "many academics and policy makers across Britain and the US have been advocating the need for 'a new kind of imperialism'" (Loomba 221), and this shift toward open imperial language corresponds to the shift in how Changez is treated, questioned at the airport, watched by his colleagues, no longer simply an employee but a suspect. The film does not require him to change; it requires the people around him to reveal what was already structurally in place.
The Architecture of Conditional Inclusion: Corporate Empire and Identity
The Shift After 9/11: From Employee to Suspect
Postcolonial Critique II: Suspicion and the Attack on Critical Voices
One part of Loomba's conclusion that I found directly useful for reading the second half of the film is her account of how postcolonial scholarship itself came under attack after 9/11. She discusses Stanley Kurtz's call for the US House of Representatives to link federal funding for "area studies" centres to their role in training students for "national security, defence and intelligence agencies," on the grounds that such centres had become "anti-American" under the influence of postcolonial scholarship, and "especially Edward Said's Orientalism" (Loomba 228). Kurtz's claim, quoted by Loomba, is that Said "equated professors who support American foreign policy with the 19th century European intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires" and that the "core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power" (qtd. in Loomba 228).
This is not simply background reading for the film. It explains why Changez cannot go back to being read simply as an employee once suspicion sets in. He becomes, in the eyes of his colleagues and the state, exactly the kind of figure Kurtz was worried about, someone whose knowledge of two worlds might be turned against American interests rather than placed at their service. Loomba's broader point in this section of the conclusion is that "disciplines of history and literature are also not exempt from this politics of patriotism and hyper-nationalism" (Loomba 228), citing an ACTA report that complained about Shakespeare being "polluted by a focus on social issues such as poverty and sexuality" (qtd. in Loomba 228). I read Changez's growing beard in the film, and the discomfort it visibly produces in his colleagues, as a smaller, more personal version of this same anxiety, the fear that someone who has been let into the institution might use that access to look back at it critically rather than simply serve it.
The Beard: From Fashion Choice to Ideological Weapon
Postcolonial Critique III: Valuation Work and Market Fundamentalism
Sir's article draws on Stiglitz's concept of "market fundamentalism," an ideology that is "both bad economics and bad politics" and has been "disadvantageous to developing countries, especially the poor within those countries" (qtd. in Barad, "Globalization and the Future" 190). It also cites Sainath's argument that this fundamentalism "destroys more human lives than any other" because it "cuts across all national, cultural, geographic, religious, and other boundaries," and functions as "a very religious fundamentalism" with "its own Gospel" (qtd. in Barad, "Globalization and the Future" 191). Changez's actual job, valuing companies for maximum profit regardless of the human cost of the decisions that follow, is a small-scale enactment of exactly this logic. The film's title becomes more layered when read this way. Changez is trained as an economic fundamentalist inside Underwood Samson well before anyone in the West applies the word "fundamentalist" to him in a religious sense.
Sir's second article brings in Chomsky's critique of globalization as a useful counterweight to this argument, since Chomsky insists that corporations exist to "prioritize profit and market share over social welfare" and that trade deals "primarily benefit privileged sectors" in the countries involved rather than the general population (Barad, "Globalization and Fiction" 180). Underwood Samson operates on exactly this understanding of value, and Changez is trained to see companies, workers, and entire industries purely in terms of what can be extracted from them. What the film adds to this economic critique is a face and a body, a young man who is himself being valued and extracted from in a comparable way. He is useful to the firm as long as his cultural fluency and work ethic serve its bottom line, and his position becomes precarious the moment his presence starts to feel like a liability rather than an asset.
The Gospel of Growth: Market Fundamentalism as Religious Doctrine
Postcolonial Critique IV: The Father and Erica, Two Directions of Pull
Sir asked us to consider Changez's relationship with his father alongside his relationship with Erica, and the two relationships work in opposite directions in the film.
His father, a poet from a family whose social standing has declined, represents a historically aware, critical position toward American power, closer to the postcolonial scholarship both articles defend. Loomba's conclusion insists that "if universities are to remain sites of dissent and free intellectual inquiry, if scholarship is not to be at the service of American or any other power, critiques of past and ongoing empires are going to be more necessary than ever" (Loomba 228). The father's skepticism toward his son's corporate ambitions echoes this same insistence on critique rather than uncritical participation. His warning to Changez, that he should not become a modern-day janissary, fighting other people's wars while believing himself free, works almost like a compressed version of Loomba's whole argument, that inclusion into Empire is never simply generous, and that a colonized or formerly colonized subject who serves that Empire's interests is not thereby freed from the history that produced the relationship in the first place.
The Poet Father: Historical Memory Against Market Logic
Erica: The Promise and Limits of Belonging in Empire
Erica, by contrast, represents the promise of full belonging inside Empire. Sir's second article notes that literary treatments of globalization often depict "individuals caught in the tide of global change," navigating both the "economic dominance" and the "personal experiences" that come with it (Barad, "Globalization and Fiction" 177). Erica's inability to fully let Changez into her life, even as they grow close, mirrors this asymmetry. Access to the institutions of Empire, its universities, its firms, its relationships, does not guarantee acceptance within it. When she uses details from his life for her own creative work without his full consent, the film shows a relationship where Changez's interiority becomes material for the other side's narrative rather than a basis for equal partnership. This detail matters because it repeats, on an intimate scale, the same dynamic Sir's articles describe at the level of institutions and economies, a relationship of use in which one side extracts value, whether financial or emotional or creative, from the other without offering equal standing in return.
Critique vs. Incorporation: The Father and Erica as Opposing Forces
Read together, the father pulls Changez toward the critical, historically grounded position that both of Sir's articles associate with postcolonial studies, while Erica represents the incorporation that Hardt and Negri describe, an inclusion that turns out to be conditional and asymmetrical.
Video: Understanding The Reluctant Fundamentalist's Postcolonial Themes
Postcolonial Critique V: From Individual Crisis to Collective Movement
Sir's second article draws on Suman Gupta's chapter on movements and protests to argue that fictional and cinematic treatments of globalization tend to show individual crises opening out into something larger and more collective. Gupta's framework, as Sir summarizes it, treats social movements as "symptomatic of a larger and deeper phenomenon," meaning that visible protest is only ever "the tip of the iceberg" sitting above "underlying structural and systemic issues" (Barad, "Globalization and Fiction" 182). Changez's personal disillusionment with Underwood Samson does not stay personal for long. By the end of the film he has become a lecturer whose classroom teaching edges into activism, and the film implies that his students are drawn into forms of protest against the same interlocking structures of finance and foreign policy that shaped his own career.
This matters because it changes how I read the ambiguous ending of the film, where American intelligence agencies suspect Changez of orchestrating violence through his students. Sir's article, again following Gupta, notes that such movements typically show "diverse and fragmentary" characteristics, so that "each group within a movement may have unique motivations, concerns, and strategies," which can create both solidarity and confusion about where responsibility actually lies (Barad, "Globalization and Fiction" 182-183). The film seems to want its audience to sit with exactly this uncertainty rather than resolve it. Changez is legible to the American characters only as a threat, a possible instigator, because the framework available to them, built on suspicion inherited from the War on Terror, cannot easily distinguish between a professor encouraging critical thought and someone directing violence. Loomba's point about postcolonial scholarship being treated as inherently "anti-American" (qtd. in Loomba 228) is, I think, precisely the framework operating on the American characters who cannot read Changez as anything other than dangerous once he stops performing gratitude toward the institutions that once absorbed him.
Broader Implications for Postcolonial Thought Today
Both of Sir's articles argue that postcolonial studies has not become obsolete because of globalization but has become more necessary because of it, since, as Loomba puts it, "no other critical practice has foregrounded the links between cultural forms and geopolitics to the degree that postcolonial studies has over the past four decades" (Loomba 218). The Reluctant Fundamentalist ends with Changez as a teacher, not a terrorist, someone who has moved from valuing companies to questioning power in a classroom. That trajectory, from corporate incorporation into Empire toward critical distance from it, is the same trajectory Sir's articles trace for the discipline of postcolonial studies itself.
What ties the two articles and the film together, for me, is the refusal to treat globalization as a purely economic story. Sir's first article insists on reading Globalization 4.0 and the Global War on Terror as part of one continuous history rather than two separate developments (Barad, "Globalization and the Future" 192-194), and the film insists on the same continuity by refusing to separate Changez's romantic life, his professional life, and his political life into different registers. His father's warning, his relationship with Erica, his work at Underwood Samson, and his eventual return to activism in Lahore are not four different plots. They are four pressure points on the same structure, the one Hardt and Negri call Empire and Loomba calls the "New American Empire," a structure that offers inclusion on the condition that the included never look at it too critically. Changez's whole arc, from eager recruit to reluctant witness to committed teacher, is what happens when that condition is finally broken.
For a globalized world that keeps insisting borders and old hierarchies no longer matter as much as they once did, Changez's story is a useful corrective. Postcolonial identity in this film is not something left behind once a person enters global institutions of finance, education, or romance. It resurfaces the moment those institutions decide that the person's presence is no longer convenient. Reading the film through Sir's two articles suggests that this is not a flaw specific to one firm, one relationship, or one country, but a structural feature of the way Empire, in Hardt and Negri's sense, manages inclusion, always conditional, always reversible, and always ready to fall back on older colonial suspicions the moment its own narrative of openness is tested.
The Necessity of Critique: Postcolonial Studies in a Globalized World
📚 Works Cited
Barad, Dilip. "Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies." Journal of Higher Education and Research Society, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 186-200.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364345863
Barad, Dilip. "Globalization and Fiction: Exploring Postcolonial Critique and Literary Representations." Journal of Higher Education and Research Society, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 177-185.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364345744
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism: New Critical Idiom. 2nd ed., Special Indian Edition, Routledge, 2009, pp. 214-228.
https://www.routledge.com/Colonialism-Postcolonialism
The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Directed by Mira Nair, performances by Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, and Liev Schreiber, IFC Films, 2012.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reluctant_Fundamentalist_(film)
This analysis connects Prof. Dilip Barad's postcolonial scholarship with Ania Loomba's theoretical framework and Mira Nair's cinematic adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's novel to examine how globalization, Empire, and postcolonial identity intersect in contemporary narratives.
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