The Third World Academic in Other Places; Or, the Postcolonial Intellectual Revisited

Abstract

In the contemporary crises of intellectual production it seems that we are called upon to attempt a rethinking of the geographies of intellectual labor, as several recent discussions of postcolonial make apparent. As a way of entering into the concerns indicated by my title(s), I propose to set up an exchange among texts and names. Generically different textsthe novel, the academic essay, the critical interview will be invoked to this end, and there will be a mix of species names and proper names in the assembled cast of characters. Out of this colloquy will emerge, it is my hope, certain preoccupations and equally significant repressions within the discourse. It will be my contention that it is not only the large events and overarching conditions ethnic conflict, centerperiphery hierarchies, migrancy, global capital but also the lesser but more immediate issues professional rewards and penalties, institutional sites of pressures and permissions, the disciplinary aspects of theory that govern intellectual labor. To identify discriminations among the various practices within postcolonial work, I turn to some of the conditions