ABSTRACT
The dependency school seems to have lost favour among current scholars of social science and Third World politics, while postcolonial theory — in spite of, or perhaps because of, growing out of literary studies — appears to be on the rise. This trend is at least partly due to the fresh and exciting perspective that postcolonial theory brings relative to (or retrospective to) dependency, much like the latter did in the mid-1960s/early 1970s in relation to ‘modernization’. But the contemporaneity and novelty of the one need not blind us to the continuing importance of the other. In fact, I want to suggest that reading dependency alongside and against postcolonial theory can help reinvigorate and re-validate some of the insights of the former, while at the same time supporting the latter’s ascendancy.
