Representations in History both with social change and actual dispossession. The flip side of this 'intemation-alization', which is also a permutation of the old orientalism, are the often equally appropriative and essentializing western representations of Indian folk, tribal and classical forms (seldom contemporary urban forms), in which Indian state institutions often seem to have a collaborative stake. Third, there are attempts, usually from anti-marxist, neo-gandhian positions, to re-establish the difference between us and them (the west) by taking a stand against the values of the Enlightenment 4 (reason, science, progress) using a rhetoric of anti-colonial indigenism; these then set out via a rehash of certain nationalist projects to rediscover an essentially desi India with its very own modes of cognition. Not surprisingly, such projects have often clustered around the most retrogressive events, e.g., widow immolation. Fourth, there is the appearance of an institutionalized 'third-worldism' on the elite academic scene. This makes an attempt to re-annex the colonial subject—now albeit somewhat fragmented and elusive—through the application of recent de-essentializing critical theories pitted against bourgeois, colonial. Enlightenment value systems. Much of this work, emerging (often with the best of intentions) from western academies situates itself within the politics of anti-imperialism, yet takes a metropolitan stance towards its subject matter—through a function of distance, a tendency to concentrate on colonial discourse as a discrete object of enquiry, and a tendency (following Edward Said's Orientalism) to see the discursive and representational forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism as constructed monolithically and unidirectionally rather than in diverse and interactive ways. Most of these analyses address the western academy, inscribing 'third world' cultural products on its consciousness in an ironic mixture of political intractability and cultural availability. These positions have far more intricate social histories and internal and ideological variations than my compacted description is able to suggest. There is an obvious set of overlaps—whether in the recourse to essentialism, or to different versions of anti-Enlightenment or anti-colonialism, or to some idea of the nation. With the exception of the Indian state, all have made a bogey of the Enlightenment. Since they seldom pause to examine to what extent and in what guise these value systems did get established or internalized, given the uneven nature of capitalist development in India, the Enlightenment seems to be a straw man. The question which insistently arises, however, is that if we refuse to grant total interpretative value to linear, western, cognitive modes, then what options do we have apart from reactive indigenisms. The question acquires its peculiar resonance from the fact that in the academic discourses, marxism appears more and more to be subsumed into this category as yet another linear, overly-teleological, near-positivist cognitive mode which can be relegated along with the rest of our Enlightenment baggage. Though historical materialism may have to do some answering on this subject, that is certainly not the same thing as saying that its analytic and political potentials are either exhausted for us or 'discovered' once and for all to be inappropriate. Thus any attempt to reconceptualize this field will confront the complex and volatile field as it is already constructed—academically, politically and internationally. What in practice does the process of reconceptualization involve? We have some prelimi- Joumal of Arts 6' Ideas