SOCIAL SCIENTIST culture of the West/' in which the "white man takes his own mythology, his own logos ... the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason" (p.7). Declaring these mythologies as "white" alerts us to the normative, Archimedean center inhabited by the white, bourgeois, male subject, through a series of exclusions, excisions, measurements of deviations and discriminations, and practices of othering. The vanishing of the hopes and expectations of the formerly colonized, that had been fostered by territorial decolonization, and had constellated around narratives of progress, development and nationhood, has led to an insistent questioning of the panoply of political concepts -sovereignty, history, subject, culture, modernity, citizenship - that have organized the Western sensibility, and for that matter, in so far as the history of the formerly colonized cannot be extricated from that of the West, various "local" predicaments. Notwithstanding the presence and cogency of earlier dissensions, there has been a marked foregrounding of the multiple strategies, sites, practices, and knowledges whereby and wherein the hegemony of the West was and continues to be secured. And while it might be contested that these revisions have come at the cost of maintaining the steady thrust of Marxist critiques that have minimally kept the horizon of capitalism as their point of entry into social theory, it cannot be denied that the congeries of discourses, now encapsulated, for better or worse, under the rubric of v post-colonial' studies and more generally 'cultural studies', have broadened, at least for our time, the framework of Marxist critique, which by itself has inadequately gestured towards any realizable emancipatory projects. While the reconfiguration of the terrain of social antagonisms has been theorized in various political languages, and while the particular locations from where post-colonial theory has been staged has vital bearing to its epistemological and political efficacy, it has indubitably transformed, howsoever slightly, the study of various academic disciplines in the West. In the context of the Western academy, if less certainly elsewhere, White Mythologies, effectively summarized, its particular shortcomings notwithstanding, the new cannonicities of interpretive moves and readings consolidated by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and others. The claiming of nationhood has always been a profoundly cultural enterprise, and has crucially relied upon the proclaimed verities of the naturalizing tropes of the "unchosen" - race, history, and ancestry, among