ABSTRACT
The most persuasive accounts of the post-modern are those like Jameson's essay Post-modernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism. This chapter proposes that post-modernity ought not to be conceived of as a cultural dominant. It argues that it is just as rewarding to construe literary post-modernism as an enemy of post-modernity as to consider it as its expression and help meet. The chapter explains that post-colonialism is regarded as the need, in nations or groups which have been victims of imperialism, to achieve an identity uncontaminated by Universalist or Eurocentric concepts and images. The post-colonial desire is the desire of decolonized communities for an identity. Post-colonial nationalism articulates itself in the narrative mythic which constructs an immutable cultural origin. It neutralizes the phrase as event, and it projects a home in which difference is suspended; its greatest modern exemplar is Nazism.
