Introduction.

'A second epoch of colonisation' this is how Wole Soyinka characterises Western theoretical practice as it applies itself, even with the best of intentions, to the cultural productions of the non-Western world. And it would be fair to say that post-colonial writing by which we mean writing that is grounded in the cultural realities of those societies whose subjectivity has been constituted at least in part by the subordinating power of European colonialism contains hundreds of such statements: statements which lay bare the material, often devastating, consequences of a centuries-long imposition of Euro-American conceptual patterns onto a world that is at once 'out there' and yet thoroughly assimilable to the psychic grasp of Western cognition. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol11/iss1/3 STEPHEN SLEMON and HELEN TIFFIN