Gayatri Spivak remarks with some justification in [A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present] that a good deal of US post-colonial theory is ‘bogus’, but this gesture is de rigueur when it comes to one post-colonial critic writing about the rest. Besides, for a ‘Third World’ theorist to break this news to her American colleagues is in one sense deeply unwelcome, and in another sense exactly what they want to hear. Nothing is more voguish in guilt-ridden US academica than to point to the inevitable bad faith of one’s position. It is the nearest a postmodernist can come to authenticity.
– Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent, Verso, London, 2003, p. 158
