ABSTRACT
That the colonized were never successfully pacified is well known to the postcolonial study of colonialism and the long and discontinuous process of decolonization.1 But proposals on how resistance is to be theorized display faultlines within the discussion that rehearse questions about subjectivity, identity, agency and the status of the reversediscourse as an oppositional practice, posing problems about the appropriate models for contemporary counter-hegemonic work. An agenda which disdains the objective of restoring the colonized as subject of its own history does so on the grounds that a simple inversion perpetuates the colonizer/colonized opposition within the terms defined by colonial discourse, remaining complicit with its assumptions by retaining undifferentiated identity categories, and failing to contest the conventions of that system of knowledge it supposedly challenges. Instead the project of a postcolonial critique is designated as deconstructing and displacing the eurocentric premises of a discursive apparatus which constructed the Third World not only for the west but also for the cultures so represented.2
