The deconstruction of the West: an unaccomplished task. Towards “the politics of imagining the West”

Despite the ambition of Postcolonial Studies to place deconstruction of “the West” at the heart of contemporary social sciences and humanities, the authority of this notion has never been so strong, and the West appears today to belong to a “natural order” of thinking and speaking about our current reality. Having pointed out the limits of the postcolonial critique of the West, this study then individuates and connects several lines of research to a common epistemological basis in order to map the contours of an emerging field: “the politics of imagining the West”. From this perspective, the West is no longer conceived of as a subject of history but as a historically determined narrative articulated by individuals and social groups with strategic aims in the context of wider discourses.