ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a story, a counterspell, a protest, a parade, and a series of reflections on the intellectual practices of "Third World" women. It explores a twisted ethnography of postmodernism in which postmodernism stands for the culture of late, postindustrial capitalism and for the paradigmatic philosophy of influential intellectual inhabitants of the First World. Autoexoticism plays an essential part in this regenerative process of identification, performing that value that exudes a surplus without which there is no survival. For decolonization already took place in a dramatic although unglamorous way, self fulfilling the prophecies on the colonizer rather than the colonized side. Translated into tango-tongue, the postmodern desire would be something like a fearful passion, and the postmodern attitude, a "sentimental education" in cultivating a passion for fear. Every feminist who deserves the title has gone through the ritual of watching at least one documentary on Third World women's subordination to some kind of native patriarchy.
