The cognate subdisciplines of 'Third World Literature' and 'Colonial Discourse Analysis' emerged at a time when radical theory was in the process of distancing itself from the kind of activist culture that had started developing throughout Western Europe and North America during the period of the great anti-imperialist struggles in Indochina and Southern Africa. This distancing on the part of contemporary metropolitan radicalism from its own immediate past has led to other kinds of distancing as well. In terms of historical periodization, there appears to be in both these subdisciplines far greater interest in the colonialism of the past than in the imperialism of the present. In terms of social processes, interest has shifted from the 'facts' of imperialist wars and political economies of exploitation to 'fictions' of representation and cultural artefact. In terms of global spaces, one is hearing, as these subdisciplines now function in the United States, a lot less about the United States itself and a lot more about Britain and France. In terms of academic disciplines, much more prestige attaches now to Literature, Philosophy and radical Anthropology than to Political Economy. In terms of theoretical positions, Marxism is often dismissed as a 'modes-of-production narrative', a 'totalizing system', and so on, while engagements shift more towards Narratology, Discourse Analysis, Deconstruction, or New History of a Foucauldian kind. To the extent that both 'Third World Literature' and Colonial Discourse Analysis' privilege coloniality as the framing term of epochal experience, national identity is logically privileged as the main locus of meaning, analysis and (self-)representation, which is, in turn, particularly attractive to the growing number of' Third World intellectuals' who are based in the metropolitan university. They can now materially represent the undifferentiated colonized Other - more recently and more fashionably, the postcolonial Other - without much examining of their own presence in that institution, except perhaps in the characteristically postmodernist mode of ironic pleasure in observing the duplicities and multiplicities of one's own persona. The East, reborn and greatly expanded now as a 'Third World', seems to have become, yet again, a career- even for the 'Oriental' this time, and within the 'Occident' too.

house of the dragon & religious imagery 🤝

Camelot (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2018, dir. Alan Paul)

If a human gets a pig's brain transplanted, is it still human or is it a pig?

Leslie Cheung in Happy Together (1997) dir. Wong Kar-wai

like a murmuring brook

curving about you