skeletons who allegorically represent 'the exploitation of the ill-fed, ill-clothed masses'. South, p. 23. 8. In The Fragrance ofGuava. Marquez says.'I know very ordinary people who've read One Hundred Years Of Solitude carefully and with a lot of pleasure, but with no surprise at all because, when all is said and done, I'm telling them nothing that hasn't happened in their own lives' (p. 36). • 9. In The Fragrance ofGuava Marquez claims that 'the multiple monologue allows several unidentified vofces to interrupt, just as it happens in real history. For example, think of those massive Caribbean conspiracies full of endless secrets which everyone knows about' (p. 86). 10. I owe this point to Ruth Frankenburg who develops it in an unpublished paper on feminist issues (1984). 11. Edward Said. 'In the Shadow of the West'. Wedge. 7/8. Winter/Spring 1985. p.4. 12. Alejo Carpentier describes hearing an illiterate black poet recite 'the wonderful story of Charlemagne in a version similar to that of the Song of Roland, in a small fishing village on the Caribbean coast, and points out how the search for an "authentic" regional essence reveals that a "particular folkloric dance was only the contemporary manifestation of an age-old ritual or liturgy which.... had travelled from the Mediterranean to the New World via Africa", or that "a peasant folksong was almost word for word an old frontier ballad from the days of the Moorish occupation of Spain", or how a researcher recently heard "peasants deep in the Cuban interior reciting past Hindustani eulogies to Count Lucanor and even a version of King Leaf. See 'The Latin American Novel', New Left Review. 154 Nov./Dec. 1985, pp. 100. 106. 13. Marquez, South, p. 22. 14. C.V. Subbarao writes : 'It is through oral traditions that peasants preserve their history.... History is for them not discontinuous. Each insurgency brings not only fresh history but also fresh ways of remembering and preserving it. .And it is the history as remembered by them that can help change history. The peasant is thus not only a subject of history but also a historian, presumably with his own historiography'. Unpublished essay. 1984. 15. Trans., Gregory Rabassa New York : Alfred Knopf, 1983. p. 96. 16. See James Clifford, 'Power and Dialogue in Ethnography in Observers Observed: Essays in Ethnographic Fieldwork, ed., George Stocking. Wisconsin : University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. p. 147. 17. See Harry Magdoff, Imperialism : From the Colonial Age to the Present. London and New York : Monthly Review Press, 1978. p. 222 18. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans., Richard Howard New York. London et al: Harper and Row, 1984, p. 19. 19. Todorov, pp. 111-12. 20. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans., Gerald Fitzgerald, London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 75. 21. Nicos Hadjinicolaou, 'On the ideology of avant-gardism'. Praxis, 6, 1982, p. 56. 22. For a more detailed discussion see Kumkum Sangari, The Changing Te\i\ Journal of Arts and Ideas. 8. July-Sep. 1984, pp. 73-74. 23. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, The Consuming Vision of Henry James' in The Culture of Consumption : Critical Essays in American History, eds., Richard Wrightman Fox and TJ. Jackson Lears, New YOrk : Pantheon, 1983. p. 74. 24. James Clifford. 'Review of Edward Said's Orientalism. History and Theory. 12, No. 2 1980, p. 220. 25. See Arturo Escobar, 'Discourse and Power in Development: Michel Foucault and the Relevance of His Work to the Third World'. Alternatives, 10, No. 3, Winter 1984-85. p. 387. 58 January-June 1985