ABSTRACT
Writing of the disparate projects that seek to establish alternative protocols in disciplinary studies, Edward Said finds their common feature to be that all work out of a secular, marginal and oppositional consciousness, posit ‘nothing less than new objects of knowledge . . . new theoretical models that upset or at the very least radically alter the prevailing paradigmatic norms’, and are ‘political and practical in as much as they intend . . . the end of dominating, coercive systems of knowledge’.1 The policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend, which is condensed in this ecumenical scan of contemporary dissident criticism, can act as a caution against the tendency to disown as necessarily less subversive of the established order, work done within radical traditions other than the most recently enunciated heterodoxies.
