Bringing capital back in : a materialist turn in postcolonial studies?

Participating as a plenary speaker at the 8th Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference has been for me a privilege and an exciting experience. I do not come from the field of cultural studies, but rather from political theory and philosophy. Nevertheless in the last decade I have become more and more engaged in discussions with scholars working in cultural and postcolonial studies, and I can say that these trans-disciplinary fields have become part of my anxious locations both as a scholar and as an activist. This is the reason why I felt particularly honored in having the chance to address the plenary session of the ACS Crossroads Conference. Being in Hong Kong was a further reason of intellectual excitement for me, since conversations with ‘Asian’ scholars – above all, Indian and Chinese – have been key to my engagement with cultural and postcolonial studies, and particularly to my attempt to reframe the temporal and spatial coordinates of ‘modernity’. I will return to this point later