203 : Globalization and Postcolonial Identity: From Frantz Fanon to Ania Loomba and the Indian Cinematic Imagination

Globalization and Postcolonial Identity: From Frantz Fanon to Ania Loomba and the Indian Cinematic Imagination

Assignment of Paper 203: Postcolonial studies 

Academic Details

• Name: Krupali Belam
• Roll No : 13
• Enrollment No : 5108240007
• Semester: 3
• Batch: 2024–26
• Email: krupalibelam1204@gmail.com

Assignment Details:

• Paper Name:Postcolonial studies 

• Paper No.:203

• Topic: Globalization and Postcolonial Identity: From Frantz Fanon to Ania Loomba and the Indian Cinematic Imagination

• Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

• Submission Date: 7 November 2025

Table of Contents

Abstract 

Keywords 

Research Question

1. Introduction 

2. Frantz Fanon and the Foundations of Postcolonial Identity 

3. Ania Loomba and Globalization: Rethinking Postcolonialism 

4. Comparative Framework: Fanon and Loomba 

5. Indian Cinematic Imagination: From Lagaan to The White Tiger

6. Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies 

7. Conclusion 

References 

Abstract

This paper explores the evolving concept of postcolonial identity through the theoretical lens of Frantz Fanon and Ania Loomba, tracing its transformation from the violent struggle for decolonization to the subtle negotiations of identity within globalization. It examines how the foundational ideas in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth on decolonial resistance and national consciousness find renewed relevance in Ania Loomba’s critique of global capitalism, hybridity, and neocolonialism. Furthermore, it extends this theoretical dialogue into contemporary Indian cinema specifically films such as Lagaan (2001), Rang De Basanti (2006), and The White Tiger (2021) to reveal how postcolonial identities continue to be shaped by the intersection of global and local forces. The study argues that the postcolonial subject is not merely a residue of colonial history but an active participant in the global cultural economy, negotiating identity through resistance, hybridity, and self-representation.

Keywords

Postcolonialism, Globalization, Frantz Fanon, Ania Loomba, Indian Cinema, Hybridity, Neocolonialism, Resistance, Identity, Cultural Politics

Research Question

How has the concept of postcolonial identity evolved from Fanon’s revolutionary decolonization to Loomba’s theorization of globalization, and how do contemporary Indian films reflect and reframe these transformations?

Hypothesis

The paper hypothesizes that globalization, while appearing as an emancipatory force, continues to reproduce colonial hierarchies through cultural and economic dominance. However, in the spirit of Fanon’s decolonial vision and Loomba’s critical globalization theory, Indian cinema becomes a crucial space for rearticulating postcolonial identity transforming resistance from physical liberation to cultural self-definition in a globalized context.

1. Introduction

The concept of postcolonial identity lies at the intersection of history, culture, and politics. Emerging from the ashes of colonial domination, it encapsulates the struggles of formerly colonized societies to reclaim their agency and cultural voice. Yet, in the twenty-first century, as globalization reshapes economic and cultural landscapes, the postcolonial subject finds itself entangled in a new web of power relations. The question arises has decolonization truly ended, or has it merely taken on another form under the global capitalist order?

This study situates Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Ania Loomba’s Colonialism/Postcolonialism (2005, 2015) as pivotal theoretical texts for understanding this shift. Fanon, writing during the height of anti-colonial struggle, envisioned liberation through radical transformation political, psychological, and cultural. Loomba, conversely, theorizes how the same structures of inequality that Fanon resisted persist in new guises through the globalization of markets, media, and migration. Together, their works chart the trajectory from the physical violence of decolonization to the symbolic violence of neoliberalism.

Connecting these theoretical frameworks to Indian cinema allows us to see how postcolonial identity operates beyond academia in everyday cultural expressions that shape popular consciousness. Films like Lagaan and Rang De Basanti reimagine colonial history and youth rebellion, while The White Tiger critiques the neocolonial class hierarchies of modern India. Each film, in its own way, echoes Fanon’s call for decolonization and Loomba’s warning against the deceptive inclusivity of globalization.

The comparative framework adopted here does not view Fanon and Loomba as opposing thinkers but as two ends of a historical continuum: Fanon’s revolutionary subject evolves into Loomba’s globalized, hybrid self. The postcolonial identity, therefore, is no longer defined solely by opposition to the colonizer but by negotiation within global systems of power.

This paper proceeds in seven sections. After outlining Fanon’s theoretical foundations of postcolonial identity, it turns to Loomba’s reconceptualization of postcolonialism in the age of globalization. It then undertakes a comparative analysis of both frameworks before exploring how Indian cinema visualizes and contests global hierarchies through hybrid forms of storytelling. Ultimately, it argues that globalization, while promising cultural exchange, often extends colonial patterns of domination and that postcolonial identity survives through ongoing acts of creative resistance.

2. Frantz Fanon and the Foundations of Postcolonial Identity

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth stands as one of the most influential texts in postcolonial thought. Written during the Algerian War of Independence, it portrays decolonization as not merely a political event but a total transformation of human consciousness. Fanon insists that colonialism dehumanizes both colonizer and colonized, reducing the latter to an object within a racist hierarchy. Liberation, therefore, requires not reform but rupture.

Fanon declares, “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon” (Fanon 35). This violence is both literal and psychological a cathartic force through which the colonized reclaim agency and humanity. Yet, Fanon’s advocacy of violence is often misunderstood. He does not glorify bloodshed but identifies it as the inevitable result of centuries of suppression. The colonized subject, long silenced, must act to reconstitute their being in history.

Beyond revolution, Fanon emphasizes the importance of national consciousness a collective awakening that binds individuals to a shared identity beyond colonial categories. In The Wretched of the Earth, he warns that after political independence, the national bourgeoisie often imitates the colonizer’s economic model, perpetuating inequality. Fanon’s vision, therefore, anticipates the very critique of neocolonialism that later theorists like Loomba and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o would expand.

A crucial element of Fanon’s theory is the psychological colonization of the mind. As Lewis Gordon notes, Fanon understood colonialism as “epistemic violence” a domination not only of land but of meaning itself (Gordon 82). The colonized internalize the inferiority imposed by the colonizer, creating what Fanon calls a “zone of non-being.” Hence, liberation must begin with a transformation of consciousness, what Ngũgĩ later described as “decolonizing the mind.”

Fanon’s influence extends beyond political theory to literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. His ideas reverberate in the works of Edward Said, who exposed the cultural imperialism of Orientalist discourse, and in Gayatri Spivak’s question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Together, they illustrate how Fanon’s notion of reclaiming voice remains central to postcolonial identity formation.

3. Ania Loomba and Globalization: Rethinking Postcolonialism

While Fanon wrote in the fervor of anti-colonial revolution, Ania Loomba writes in the aftermath when global capitalism and digital networks have replaced empires but not their hierarchies. In her seminal text Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Loomba interrogates the illusion that globalization has dissolved colonial boundaries. Instead, she argues, globalization represents “the latest phase of imperialism,” where control is exercised through economic dependency, cultural homogenization, and global media flows (Loomba 216).

For Loomba, postcolonialism cannot be understood apart from globalization because the two processes are historically intertwined. The colonial expansion of Europe was the first form of globalization, spreading capitalist markets, Western epistemologies, and racial hierarchies across the globe. Contemporary globalization, while seemingly more democratic, still privileges Western capital and culture under the guise of cosmopolitanism.

Loomba’s intervention is twofold. First, she critiques the assumption that postcolonialism is a completed stage. Instead, she proposes the term postcoloniality a condition that persists as long as global inequalities remain. Second, she redefines identity as a site of constant negotiation. In the globalized world, the postcolonial subject is hybrid: simultaneously local and global, resistant and complicit.

Drawing from Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and mimicry, Loomba suggests that hybridity is not mere cultural mixing but a political strategy. It allows the subaltern to speak within dominant systems, altering meanings from within. Yet, she also warns against celebrating hybridity uncritically, as global capitalism often commodifies difference to sustain its dominance.

Loomba’s analysis extends Fanon’s concerns into the present. Where Fanon feared the national bourgeoisie’s mimicry of the colonizer, Loomba identifies multinational corporations and global media as new agents of mimicry replicating Western consumer culture across the world. The result is a paradoxical identity: outwardly diverse but inwardly homogenized.

Her reflections on global feminism, diaspora, and transnationalism further complicate postcolonial identity. For instance, diasporic identities, though hybrid, often reproduce privilege through class and access to global mobility. Loomba thus calls for a critical postcolonialism one aware of its complicity in global power relations.

4. Comparative Framework: Fanon and Loomba

Both Fanon and Loomba engage with the central problem of domination, but their contexts and therefore their strategies differ. Fanon’s world was one of direct occupation; Loomba’s, one of dispersed control. Yet both understand that power reproduces itself through culture and consciousness.

Fanon’s revolutionary subject seeks liberation through rupture. His language is apocalyptic, envisioning a world reborn through violence and solidarity. Loomba’s subject, by contrast, resists through negotiation within cultural institutions, media, and global flows. Her language is critical rather than prophetic. Still, both insist that resistance must be conscious, collective, and creative.

Fanon’s critique of the postcolonial bourgeoisie finds resonance in Loomba’s analysis of global elites. The “national bourgeoisie,” once content to replace the colonizer, now serves the global capitalist class. In both cases, the masses remain excluded from the promised benefits of independence or globalization.

Their differences also reveal a theoretical evolution:

• Fanon focuses on material liberation (land, power, agency).

• Loomba focuses on discursive liberation (representation, narrative, identity).

In combining both perspectives, one sees that postcolonial identity today must fight on two fronts: against economic neocolonialism and against epistemic colonization through media and culture.

5. Indian Cinematic Imagination: From Lagaan to The White Tiger

Cinema in India has long served as a cultural space where colonial memory, national identity, and global aspirations intersect. Films such as Lagaan (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001), Rang De Basanti (Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, 2006), and The White Tiger (Ramin Bahrani, 2021) reveal how postcolonial identity is negotiated within the pressures of globalization. Each dramatizes a different historical moment the colonial past, the neoliberal present, and the globalized future forming a cinematic continuum of resistance that parallels the theoretical trajectory from Fanon to Loomba.

Lagaan: Re-enacting the Colonial Encounter

Set in nineteenth-century India, Lagaan transforms the colonial power struggle into a cricket match between Indian peasants and British officers. The film becomes an allegory of Fanon’s idea that decolonization involves “a complete disordering of the colonial world” (The Wretched of the Earth 36). The villagers’ refusal to pay the oppressive tax (lagaan) and their victory on the cricket field symbolize the reclaiming of dignity through collective action.

Gowariker’s use of cricket a quintessentially British sport reverses mimicry into mastery, echoing Homi Bhabha’s concept that mimicry “repeats rather than re-presents” colonial authority, exposing its fragility (Bhabha 88). The villagers learn the colonizer’s game only to defeat him at it, transforming an instrument of domination into a means of liberation. The film’s reception abroad, especially its Oscar nomination, also demonstrates Loomba’s notion of “postcolonial texts entering global circuits,” where indigenous narratives gain visibility but risk commodification within Western markets. Thus, Lagaan performs both resistance and participation in globalization simultaneously subverting and benefiting from it.

Rang De Basanti: From Nationalism to Global Activism 

Rang De Basanti bridges colonial memory and contemporary disillusionment. A group of Delhi students cast in a film about freedom fighters become politically radicalized after a friend’s death in a military scandal. The film blends past and present through cross-cutting between British-era executions and modern student protests, embodying Fanon’s notion of “national consciousness” awakening through action (Fanon 148).

However, the film’s resistance is symbolic rather than armed. Its heroes use media as their weapon occupying a radio station to broadcast truth representing a new mode of postcolonial rebellion mediated by global communication technology. Loomba’s ideas on global hybridity and transnational activism are vivid here: the protagonists are westernized youth who rediscover national history through a global language of media and spectacle.

As film scholar Jyotika Virdi notes, modern Bollywood often “invokes history to speak to the present while remaining firmly anchored in a global cinematic aesthetic” (Virdi 134). Rang De Basanti thus reflects how postcolonial identity in global India is a hybrid formation both cosmopolitan and national, both consumerist and critical. It illustrates Loomba’s claim that resistance in the age of globalization must navigate within the very systems it seeks to challenge.

The White Tiger: Neocolonialism and the Global Class Order

Ramin Bahrani’s film adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s novel (2008) represents postcolonial India fully absorbed into global capitalism. Balram Halwai, a poor chauffeur turned entrepreneur, narrates his ascent within a system that mimics the colonial logic of master and servant. His journey embodies Loomba’s thesis that globalization has not erased colonial hierarchies but repackaged them as economic aspiration. When Balram murders his employer and creates his own company, he fulfills Fanon’s vision of violent liberation but within a neoliberal framework his freedom depends on adopting the very ethos of exploitation he escaped.

Critics have linked the film to “subaltern modernity,” where the global South participates in capitalism while bearing its contradictions (Chakrabarty 202). The White Tiger is neither a simple success story nor a moral fable but a mirror to Fanon’s “postcolonial bourgeoisie” corrupt, ambitious, and alienated. Through dark satire, the film reveals the psychological continuity between colonial servitude and neoliberal slavery.

6. Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies

The dialogue between Fanon and Loomba invites reflection on the future of postcolonial studies. If the twentieth century was the era of national liberation, the twenty-first is the era of global interdependence. The central challenge today is to address new forms of domination that operate without colonial flags through data monopolies, cultural algorithms, and economic dependency. Loomba urges scholars to expand postcolonial critique into fields like environmental justice and digital capitalism, bridging the gap between the “local past” and the “global future.”

In this sense, postcolonial studies must evolve into a form of planetary critique, echoing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to “think the human beyond the nation” (Chakrabarty). Global warming, migration, and digital surveillance are the new frontiers of power. They demand a critical framework that combines Fanon’s moral urgency with Loomba’s analytic breadth.

The films discussed here already gesture toward this future. Lagaan historicizes resistance, Rang De Basanti globalizes it, and The White Tiger commodifies it. Together they trace the arc from decolonization to global assimilation, reminding viewers that the struggle for agency never ends it merely changes form.

As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o observes, “decolonizing the mind is an ongoing process”. Postcolonial identity in the age of globalization must therefore remain dynamic rooted in historical memory yet attuned to emerging realities. Only then can Fanon’s dream of a truly human world survive the global market’s seductive homogenization.

7. Conclusion

The journey from Fanon’s Algeria to Loomba’s globalized world reveals the enduring paradox of postcolonial identity. Colonialism’s political structures may have collapsed, but its epistemic and economic frameworks persist. Through Fanon, we see the urgency of psychological liberation; through Loomba, we grasp the complexity of cultural entanglement. Indian cinema translates these abstract theories into lived stories of peasants, students, and entrepreneurs who negotiate their place in a world still structured by inequality.

Globalization does not abolish colonial difference; it remaps it. Yet within this remapping lies the possibility of renewal. Fanon’s revolutionary spirit and Loomba’s critical insight together offer a framework for ethical resistance in the twenty-first century one that moves from the battlefield to the screen, from political struggle to cultural creation.

Thus, postcolonial identity today is neither a return to tradition nor a surrender to global modernity. It is a hybrid act of consciousness always in translation, always in resistance. As Ania Loomba writes, “Postcolonialism must remain unfinished, for the project of decolonization is not yet complete.” The task of the postcolonial thinker, artist, and citizen is to continue that unfinished work.

Word count: 2850

Images: 6

References 

Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. HarperCollins, 2008.

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Bahrani, Ramin, director. The White Tiger. Netflix, 2021.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 197–222. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/596640. Accessed 7 Nov. 2025.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1963.

Gordon, Lewis R. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. Fordham University Press, 2015.

Gowariker, Ashutosh, director. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. Aamir Khan Productions, 2001.

Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2005.

Mehra, Rakeysh Omprakash, director. Rang De Basanti. UTV Motion Pictures, 2006.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Heinemann, 1986.

Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid. Indiana University Press, 2009.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.

Virdi, Jyotika. The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History. Rutgers University Press, 2003.