SOURCE: “Mythologies of Migrancy: Postcolonialism, Postmodernism and the Politics of (Dis)Location,” in Ariel, Vol. 26, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 125-46.

In the following essay, Krishnaswamy traces the ideological lineage of postcolonial theory, noting that postcolonial celebratory novels that focused on nationalism have given way to works of delegitimation.

A new type of “Third World”¹ intellectual, cross-pollinated by postmodernism and postcolonialism, has arrived: a migrant who, having dispensed with territorial affiliations, travels unencumbered through the cultures of the world bearing only the burden of a unique yet representative sensibility that refracts the fragmented and contingent condition of both postmodernity and postcoloniality. Journeying from the “peripheries” to the metropolitan “centre,” this itinerant intellectual becomes an international figure who at once feels at home nowhere and everywhere. No longer disempowered by cultural schizophrenia or confined within collectivities such as race, class, or nation, the nomadic postcolonial intellectual is said to “write back...