Xinjiang’s Indelible Footprint: Reading the New Imperialism of Neoliberalism in English and Waiting for the Barbarians

Abstract

Neoliberal discourses of globalization frequently emphasise a temporal break in history, a paradigm shift at once irreversible and comprehensible only on its own terms. This essay, conversely, uses an inter-imperial framework to evaluate neoliberalism as a variant among several capitalist practices. Bringing together Wang Gang’s novel English (2004) and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), it highlights the ways in which the ruins of language and infrastructures continue to inscribe the present tense. It also shows how the Silk Road, a nineteenth-century colonial construct, encapsulates China’s dreams of global trade and prosperity in a neoliberal era.