1. Thomas B. Macaulay, “Minute on Indian Education,” in Selected Prose, ed. John Clive (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 241.

2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1952), 10.

3. Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” diacritics 24 (Summer-Fall 1994): 21.

4. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Bhabha’s response to Fanon’s theoretical/political work is the fascinatingly conflictual one of the disciple to the teacher; see his “Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative,” in The Location of Culture, 40–65. Henry Louis Gates Jr. faults Bhabha for attempting to recast the Antillean psychoanalyst and revolutionary as a latter-day poststructuralist (“Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17 [Spring 1991]: 457–70). Even if one concedes (as I do not) that there is a more historically persuasive Fanon that exists apart from the one Bhabha gives us, it seems to me that critical work can proceed only through such violent “translations”; what fascinates me more is something that Gates notes, albeit censoriously: Bhabha’s obvious anguish and impatience with Fanon’s “failures” to sustain “his most radical theoretical insights.”

5. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 147.

6. The histories of these often contiguous, overlapping, yet not-identical theorizations of identity formation are both too long and too well known to need an elaborate recapitulation here. The following is a very provisional list of some of the key statements on these questions: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1952); Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (London: Methuen, 1986); Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 17–32; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” Transition 58 (1995): 4–32; Nella Larsen, Passing (New York and London: Knopf, 1929), and Quicksand (New York and London: Knopf, 1928); James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (New York: Sherman, French, 1912); Deborah McDowell, “‘That Nameless…Shameful Impulse’: Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing,” in Studies in Black American Literature III: Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory, ed. Joe Weixlmann and Houston A. Baker Jr. (Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill Publishing, 1988); Valerie Smith, “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing,” diacritics 24 (Summer-Fall 1994): 43–57; Sue-Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” In Making a Spectacle, ed. Lynda Hart (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Morris Meyer, ed. The Politics and Poetics of Camp (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Vito Russo, “Camp,” Gay Men: The Sociology of Male Homosexuality, ed. Martin Levine (New York: Harper & Row, 1979); Jenny Livingston, dir. Paris Is Burning, 1991; Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 1994); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992); Carole-Anne Tyler, “Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed, Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1990).

7. Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982; reprinted in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri C. Spivak [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988]), 43.

8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991 [1983]).

9. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 22.

10. For a compelling account of the transformation of a purportedly modular notion/genre (in this case the realist novel) on Indian terrain, see Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1985]).

11. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). This book will be discussed more fully in chapter 5. I am in substantial agreement with Chatterjee’s arguments, but it should be noted on Anderson’s behalf that what he emphasizes is the modularity of the idea of nationness; he does not insist that nation-states or other national formations everywhere will be identical. Hence his important rejection—one which marks him out from earlier theorists of the nation—of any distinction between “true” and “false” forms of nationhood. For some of the key statements on the nation and on nationalism, see John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

12. Some instances of an engagement with this problematic are provided by the following works: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Open Space/Public Space: Garbage, Modernity and India,” South Asia 14, no. 1 (1991): 15–31; and “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 1–26; Gyan Prakash, “Science ‘Gone Native’ in Colonial India,” Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 1–26; and R. Radhakrishnan, “Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity,” Callaloo 16, no. 4 (1993): 750–71. If it appears that terms like “originality” and “authenticity” are being used interchangeably, it is because I see them as part of the same associative continuum for the debates in question.

13. Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” 3.

14. See, for instance, Bette London, “Of Mimicry and English Men: E. M. Forster and the Performance of Masculinity,” in A Passage to India, ed. Tony Davies and Nigel Wood, Theory in Practice Series (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 1994). Also see Young, “Ambivalence of Bhabha,” in White Mythologies.

15. Jenny Sharpe, “Figures of Colonial Resistance,” Modern Fiction Studies 35 (Spring 1989): 138 (emphasis mine). Sharpe notes that the nature of colonial discourse actively encourages the cloaking of subalternity and class identity, its aim being “to substitute metonymically the educated colonial for the native as such” (p. 139). The Benita Parry essay in question is the widely read metacritical statement, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9, no. 1–2 (1987): 27–58.

16. I use the term catachresis in Spivak’s sense: “a metaphor without an adequate literal referent, in the last instance a model for all metaphors, all names.” See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The New Historicism: Political Commitment and the Postmodern Critic,” in The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 154.

17. I would like to reinvoke the notion of ambivalence that attends Bhabha’s initial theorization of this question.

18. This is not to deny that Kim’s Irishness, and his poor-white status, make him distinct from more privileged whites.

19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Political Economy of Women as Seen by a Literary Critic,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (London: Routledge, 1989), 227. Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between East and West (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), which contests the academic representation of a nonwest that is evacuated of “fantasy, desires, and contradictory emotions” (p. xiii) is of interest here (though it is by no means completely congruent with the trajectory of Spivak’s demand for other “psycho-biographies”).

20. Carole-Anne Tyler, “Passing: Narcissism, Identity, and Difference,” differences 6 (Summer-Fall 1994): 212–48. Also see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

21. One of my models for such an enterprise (though his project is very different from my own) is Arjun Appadurai’s brilliant (and now classic) essay, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2 (Spring 1990): 1–23.

22. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value,” in Literary Theory Today, ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 223.

23. Paul Gilroy has provocatively described the triangulations, traffic, and mutual transformations of Africa, the Americas, and Europe in the moment of modernity (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993]). A puzzling feature of this otherwise pivotal work is its elision of any consideration in The Black Atlantic of the Asian diaspora in England, Africa, and the Caribbean.

24. Among the best contemporary accounts of the western woman’s occasional (sometimes willed) subordination in nationalist or postcolonial contexts is Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). In this novel Suleri movingly describes the unceasing yet unavailing effort of her Welsh mother to become Pakistani (pp. 163–64):

Did she really think that she could assume the burden of empire, that if she let my father colonize her body and her name she would perform some slight reparation for the race from which she came? Could she not see that his desire for her was quickened with empire’s ghosts, that his need to possess was a clear index of how he was still possessed?…What could that world [Pakistan] do with a woman who called herself a Pakistani but who looked suspiciously like the past it sought to forget? Then my mother learned the ironies of nationhood—of what can and cannot be willed—when she had to walk through her new context in the shape of a memory erased.…She let commitment and belonging become my father’s domain, learning instead the way of walking with tact on other people’s land.

25. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s landmark essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991]), forcefully demonstrates the imbrication of much (though not all) western feminist scholarship on the “Third World” with the assumptions of colonial discourse. The burden of Mohanty’s argument is substantiated in the analysis by (among others) Antoinette Burton of “imperial feminism” in Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Also of interest are Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Deirdre David, Rule Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Laura E. Donaldson, Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). See, too, Sandhya Shetty, “(Dis)Locating Gender Space and Medical Discourse in Colonial India,” Genders 20 (1994): 188–230, for a splendid account of the instrumentality of colonial rule and reason for white women seeking membership in a hitherto closed medical fraternity. Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule (New York and London: Routledge, 1995) provides a rather different but significant point of entry into this vexed question, pointing up as it does the significant commitment of some western women to a variety of causes not necessarily congruent with colonialism or an Eurocentric feminism. For further details, see chapter 4.

26. Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (January 1992): 141–67; Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura,” Critical Inquiry (1993): 328–56; and Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). (Ahmad is not a historian but a literary scholar by training; nonetheless, his archaeology of certain theoretical developments is similar enough to those of the historians listed here that the association is not unwarranted.) For responses to Ahmad’s influential book, see Public Culture 6 (Fall 1993), especially the essays by Vivek Dhareshwar (“Marxism, Location Politics, and the Possibility of Critique,” 41–54) and Nivedita Menon (“Orientalism and After,” 65–76). See also Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, “At the Margins of Postcolonial Studies,” Ariel 26, no. 3 (1995): 47–71; and Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, “Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies: Beyond the Marxism/Poststructuralism/Feminism Divides,” positions 2, no. 2 (1994): 430–45.

27. Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 2 (1990): 383–408.

28. Gyan Prakash, “Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride? A Reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (January 1992): 168.

29. Conversation with Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Toronto, December 1993.

30. Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’” Social Text 31/32, 10, nos. 2–3 (1992): 84–98; and Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” Social Text 31/32, 10, nos. 2–3 (1992): 99–113. It seems to me somewhat unfair to make Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), serve a representative function; both essays accord it that kind of centrality. R. Radhakrishnan points to the ways in which “the spatiality of the ‘post’ has to be simultaneously critiqued and endorsed” (“Postcoloniality,” 752).

31. Stuart Hall, “When Was the ‘Post-Colonial?’ Thinking at the Limit,” in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 254. See, too, Gyan Prakash’s witty description of postcoloniality’s deviation from a cumulative temporality: “Containing a link to the experience of colonialism but not contained by it, postcoloniality can be thought of as a form of realignment that emerges in media res, critically undoing and redrawing colonialism’s contingent boundaries” (“Who’s Afraid of Postcoloniality?” Social Text 49, 14, no. 4 [1996]: 188–89).

32. I use the essays by McClintock and Shohat only as representative instances here, as the proper name for the discontent generated by the term in a number of scholars. See, for instance, Tejumola Olaniyan, “On ‘Post-Colonial Discourse’: An Introduction,” Callaloo 16, no. 4 (1993): 743–48; Graham Huggan, “Postcolonialism and Its Discontents,” Transition 62 (1993): 130–35; Linda Hutcheon, “Introduction. Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition: Complexities Abounding,” PMLA 110, no. 1 (1995): 7–16; Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, “Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and the Politics of Location,” Cultural Studies 7 (May 1993): 292–310; and Michael Sprinker, “Introduction,” in Late Imperial Culture, ed. Roman de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London and New York: Verso, 1995).

33. Spivak, “Political Economy of Women,” 221.

34. Ellen Rooney, “What Is to Be Done?” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989), 235.

35. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 254.

36. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution”, Post-Colonial Critic, 15.

37. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 284.