Extensions of the Freudian concept of fetishism to premodern, nonWestern situations are commonplace in postcolonial literature. On close inspection, it emerges that the application of such concepts is often grounded in overgeneralized structural homologies rather than criteria properly derived from Freudian theory. Homi Bhabha, for instance, leaps without argument from the existence of contradictory beliefs concerning lack and wholeness to fetishistic disavowal in the technical Freudian sense, which focuses on the mother's lack of a penis: