ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the ongoing effort in contemporary cultural criticism to comprehend the reconfiguration of global relations under conditions of what might be described synoptically as global postmodernity. It examines from a diversity of perspectives problems in the new ideological formations, or the critiques of ideology, that have accompanied the economic, social, political and cultural remapping of the world, especially that part of the world that was encompassed earlier by the term Third World. The changes that made the motions of Third World intellectuals possible, and enabled them to acquire a hearing in First World institutions, point to the historical circumstances of the emergence of postcolonialism as a radical intellectual and political contender in contemporary thought and ideology. The desocialized approach to difference in postcolonial criticism which homegenizes difference has its counterpart in the dehistoricization of difference on a temporal dimension, and the claiming for postcoloniality of the totality of modern history, if not all human history.
