ABSTRACT
The term 'resistance' recently found itself at the centre of a similar controversy, when it was discovered how very thoroughly a failure in resistance characterized some of the earlier political writing of the great theorist of textual resistance, Paul de Man. Sharpe's argument, that is, underscores the way in which literary resistance is necessarily in a place of ambivalence: between systems, between discursive worlds, implicit and complicit in both of them. The first is a political concern: namely, that centre/periphery notions of resistance can actually work to re-inscribe centre/periphery relations and can 'serve institutional function of securing dominant narratives'. This internalization of the object of resistance in Second-World literatures, this internalization of the self/other binary of colonialist relations, explains why it is that it has always been Second-World literary writing rather than Second-World critical writing which has occupied the vanguard of a Second-World post-colonial literary or critical theory.
