Scandalous Subjects

Abstract

This essay explores the problems and possibilities of the postcolonial as word and orientation, as category and entity. It sieves postcolonial expressions through critical filters to make two tasks palpable. On the one hand, faced forthwith are the scandals of the nation and the West as well as the outrage of the postcolonial itself. On the other hand, brought to the front are protocols of probing that do not merely lead to an undoing of “foundations” but point to procedures of critical affirmation embedded within a history without guarantee. Here are to be found dispositions that carefully question and prudently elaborate issues of power and difference, authority and alterity, including through critical considerations of modernity and its philosophical and historical discussions in the West.