ABSTRACT
On the contested cultural turf of today, not only are we not ‘past the last post’1 but the ‘posts’ seem to want to proliferate. Over the last decade, the ‘postmodern’ has become the polemical terrain of fierce debate as well as glib generalization; the ‘postcolonial’ may well face the same fate —but the stakes may be even higher. Debates about historiography and reflexivity, and their role in the politics of cultural representation, can likely never be innocent ones; nor can they be uncontroversial in either the postmodern or postcolonial arenas. These are shared issues, even if the articulation, interpretation, and deployment of them differ considerably. What most theorists (however they define the ‘post’s) seem to agree upon is that the reason for these mutual concerns is their common oppositional grounding in-or, rather, against-what has been generalized and usually demonized into this thing called ‘modernity’.
