ABSTRACT
The genesis of this essay is diverse and discontinuous; its long march of critical contestation tracks my attempts to clear a space for the 'other' question. To pose the colonial question is to realize that the problematic representation of cultural and racial difference cannot simply be read off from the signs and designs of social authority that are produced in the analyses of class and gender differentiation. As I was writing in 1982, the conceptual boundaries of the west were being busily reinscribed in a clamour of counter-texts – transgressive, semiotic, semanalytic, deconstructionist – none of which pushed those boundaries to their colonial periphery; to that limit where the west must face a peculiarly displaced and decentred image of itself 'in double duty bound' , at once a civilizing mission and a violent subjugating force. It is there, in the colonial margin, that the culture of the west reveals its 'différance', its limit-text, as its practice of authority displays an ambivalence that is one of the most significant discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power – whether racist or sexist, peripheral or metropolitan.
