ABSTRACT
Cultural historians also made some important contributions by employing his ideas, especially in combination with those of Edward Said, to reveal previously unacknowledged dimensions of colonial rule. Theoretical or phenomenal novelties are few and far between as this or that cultural phenomenon is treated as a problem to be ‘solved’ by applying a preconceived set of ideas. The limitations of this procedure have become even clearer to those not content to remain within the bounds of this preconceived framework. Invocations of a closed, orientalist discourse that dates back to the Enlightenment and beyond, structured around a series of binary oppositions: the rational, democratic and progressive West versus a mystical or religious, despotic and stagnant East, have now become as repetitious and unproductive as the clichés of official Soviet condemnations of Western imperialism. Foucauldian postcolonial theorists needed to consign Marxism to the dustbin of Eurocentrism in order to forge a historical myth of postcolonialism’s own radical origin.
