ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to situate the preceding discussion in the context of certain contemporary theoretical positions in order to argue for a post-colonised perspective which pays heed to the cultural and political specificities of the contemporary fin de siècle. There are two ‘framing’ positions I want to invoke for the present discussion. The first of these comes from Aijaz Ahmad. ‘Very affluent people may come to believe’, Ahmad says ‘that they have broken free of imperialism through acts of reading, writing, lecturing, and so forth’ (1992:11). For the populations of the ‘backward zones of capital’, he continues, ‘all relationships with imperialism pass through their own nation states, and there is simply no way of breaking out of that imperial dominance without struggling for different kinds of national projects and for a revolutionary restructuring of one’s own nation state’ (ibid.: 11).
