84 SOCIAL SCIENTIST In the case of India and the African countries, the nations of the South Pacific, and the indigenous peoples of North America, New Zealand and Australia, writers were and are able to challenge European perspectives with their own metaphysical systems. In areas like the Caribbean, or for non-indigenous peoples of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, there are no such formulated systems which may be recuperated to challenge the imported or imposed European one, and here writers have had to act subversively through what Michal Dash has termed 'the counter culture of the imagination.' (173) Interestingly, she places Canada, Australia, and New Zealand outside and in opposition to Europe, which anticipates my next point. This and other essays are collected in The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989) edited by Tifflin, Bill Ashcroft, and Gareth Griffiths. 'Appropriation' and 'abrogation' are identified as the two processes by which post-colonial writing adapts the English language to the colonized space. What the authors identify as techniques for the acculturation of language can, I argue, be extended to all types of cultural interaction. This paper was written before the publication of the book and what I note here about it has* been derived from a review in The Literary Criterion 15.2 (1990). 9. These ideas, doubtless, owe much to Said's Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), but also rely on one of the crucial methodological theses of orthodox Marxism, that is the idea of the interpenetration of opposites. Perhaps, the deeper bedrock on which they are firmed is the Advaitic notion of non-duality: 'There is only the Self; no Other.'