The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism

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Excerpt from The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism by Arif Dirlik "When exactly . . . does the 'post-colonial' begin?" queries Ella Shohat in a recent discussion of the subject.1 Misreading the question deliberately, I will supply here an answer that is only partially facetious: When Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe. My goal in the discussion below is twofold: to review the term post-colonial, and the various intellectual and cultural positions associated with it, in the context of centemporary transformations in global relationships, and to examine the reconsiderations of problems of domination and hegemony as well as of recieved critical practices that these transformations require. Postcolonial is the most recent entrant to achieve prominent visibility in the ranks of those "post" marked words, postcolonial claims as its special provenance the terrain that in an earlier day used to go by the name of Third World. It is intended, therefore, to achieve an authentic globalization of cultural discourses by the extension globally of the intellectual concerns and orientations originating at the central sites of Euro-American cultural criticism and by the introduction into the latter of voices and subjectivities from the margins of earlier political and ideological colonialism that now demand a hearing at those very sites at the center. The goal, indeed, is no less than to abolish all distinctions between center and periphery as well as all other "binarisms" that are allegedly a legacy of colonial(ist) ways of thinking and to reveal societies globally in their complex heterogeneity and contingency. Although intellectuals who hail from one part of that terrain, India, have played a conspicuously prominent role in its formulation and dissemination, the appeals of post-coloniality, which on the

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