ABSTRACT
Dabashi comes from a tradition of scholars who are involved in a prominent debate about the nature of Western scholarship concerning the developing world. This academic discipline, known as postcolonial studies, aims to analyze, explain, and develop a response to the legacy of colonialism* and imperialism.* It examines the long-term consequences of situations where one country has controlled another, especially in cases where the native populations were exploited economically and denied their own forms of rule. A key focus of postcolonial studies is the politics of knowledge (concerning how ideas are created, used, and spread). Postcolonial scholars see this as being influenced by the knowledge the colonizing* nation had about the people it controlled and the dialectical* relationship (a relationship founded on opposites such as white/black or good/evil, for example)
that developed between the colonizer and the colonized. Dabashi, like other postcolonial scholars, tends to focus heavily on literature.
