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by nonwhite colonial subjects. From this perspective, we can’t simply ignore the anticolonialist literature produced by the Second World while we uncritically assume that all the literature produced by nonwhite colonized peoples is neces‐ sarily a literature of resistance. Another debate engaging the attention of postcolonial critics concerns the politics of their own critical agenda. For example, the term postcolonial criticism implies that colonialism is a thing of the past. In reality, it is not. Colonialism is no longer practiced as it was between the late fifteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, through the direct, overt administration of governors and educators from the colonizing country. Today, through different means, the same kind of political, economic, and cultural subjugation of vulnerable nations occurs at the hands of international corporations from such world powers as the United States, Germany, and Japan. Indeed, Japan has become so Americanized since the end of World War II that it is considered a Western power. This neocolonialism, as it’s called, exploits the cheap labor available in develop‐ ing countries, often at the expense of those countries’ own struggling businesses, cultural traditions, and ecological well-being. Neocolonialist corporate enter‐ prise is supported, when the need arises, by puppet regimes (local rulers paid by a corporation to support its interests) and by covert military intervention (some‐ times in the form of financing troops loyal to corporate political interests, some‐ times in the form of enlisting military aid from the Western power most closely aligned with the corporation’s concerns). In other words, just as in the case of old-style European colonialism, there is big money to be made in this game, and the major players are too powerful to be bound by any rules of fair play. Cultural imperialism, 3 a direct result of economic domination, consists of the “takeover” of one culture by another: the food, clothing, customs, recreation, and values of the economically dominant culture increasingly replace those of the economically vulnerable culture until the latter appears to be a kind of imitation of the former. American cultural imperialism has been one of the most pervasive forms of this phenomenon, as we see American fashions, movies, music, sports, fast food, and consumerism squeeze out indigenous cultural tradi‐ tions all over the world. Some theorists believe that postcolonial criticism is itself a form of cultural imperialism. For one thing, most postcolonial critics—including those born in formerly colonized nations, many of whom were educated at European universi‐ ties and live abroad—all belong to an intellectual elite, an academic ruling class that has, it would seem, little in common with subalterns, or people of inferior status, that is, with the majority of poor, exploited ex-colonial peoples who are the object of their concern.