Arif Dirlik

Arif Dirlik is cited as a critic of globalization and the transnational order it produces. In Edward Said’s account, Dirlik helps shift attention from the formal end of colonial rule to the continuing organization of power: states lose authority over borders, labor, and income, while the South remains subordinate to the North. His work also asks whether Western academic engagement with postcoloniality confronts these conditions or turns away from them.

Globalization and the Transnational Order

Said places Dirlik alongside Masao Miyoshi in a discussion of the political and economic order described by Harry Magdoff as globalization. In this account, a small financial elite expands its power across the globe, raising prices for commodities and services and redistributing wealth from lower-income sectors, usually in the non-Western world, to higher-income sectors. Dirlik’s analysis concerns the broader structure accompanying that redistribution: a transnational order in which states no longer have borders in the former sense, and labor and income become subject to global managers.

The significance of this account lies in its description of colonialism as a continuing relation rather than merely a past political arrangement. Said summarizes the outcome as the subservience of the South to the North. The shift from colonial administration to global management changes the form of domination without, in this analysis, eliminating the unequal relation between regions.

Academic Engagement and Its Limits

Dirlik and Miyoshi also examine the Western academic interest in multiculturalism and postcoloniality. As Said presents their argument, attention to these subjects can function as a cultural and intellectual retreat from the new realities of global power. Academic recognition of cultural difference, on its own, does not necessarily amount to scrutiny of the economic and political systems that redistribute wealth and govern labor across borders.

Miyoshi gives this concern a pointed formulation, calling for rigorous political and economic scrutiny rather than pedagogic expediency and identifying liberal self-deception in fields such as cultural studies and multiculturalism. Said attributes the broader diagnosis to both scholars: their work asks readers to test academic claims of critical engagement against the material order those claims may leave unexamined.

Place in Said’s Discussion of Postcolonial Critique

Dirlik’s contribution appears within Said’s comparison of postcolonialism and postmodernism. The discussion distinguishes postcolonial scholarship, whose earlier work often approached domination and control from the standpoint of political independence or an unfinished liberation project, from postmodernism’s comparatively detached emphasis on contingency, consumerism, and the disappearance of grand narratives. Dirlik’s critique of globalization reinforces the continuing political stakes of postcolonial analysis: colonial relations may reappear in transnational economic arrangements even when the older imperial framework has changed.

Said therefore invokes Dirlik not as a character in a narrated episode but as a scholarly voice in a wider argument about the persistence and transformation of imperial power. His work links the critique of academic discourse to questions of borders, labor, income, and the global subordination of the South, insisting that cultural inquiry be measured against the political economy it seeks to understand.