SOCIAL SCIENTIST and repurcussions, thus placing postcolonial studies within a bigger history of theoretical enunciations and debates. And despite the breadth of canvas, crossreferences remain informed, meaningful and responsible. In fact the diligent striving at a comprehensive marshalling of materials and references will help make this a valuable reference volume on the subject. Yet while all this obviously makes Colonialism/Postcolonialism a first-rate publication, in any such excursus into large and chequered terrain some elements of discomfort/dubiety are hardly avoidable. A case in point is the occasional impression of insufficiently demarcated boundaries and differentiations, a reluctance to apply the brakes in time vis-a-vis the crossreferential horizons. Consequently, the study -due in part, perhaps, to the indistinct borders of the domain itself -seems sometimes to get into 'too many things' and go 'all over the place', apparently hesitant to pause and dwell at warranted length on a given problem. And if in the process disciplinary rigour and a sustained analysis of demarcated zones become an occasional casualty, then it is worth asking whether a more delimitive concentration on selected foci (while offloading worthy 'expendables') might not have been more apropos. As it is, the book is at its most compelling in the places where it 'rests' awhile to pursue in some detail a lit.crit./ discourse-analysis type of topological critique of specific objects within the broad field. Such concrete analyses, moreover, assume significance in as much as literary/culture-studies practices fulcrumed upon social-scientific referents such as 'class' , 'gender' or 'coloniality', unless approached with due subtlety and imagination - and an unflagging aliveness to the autonomous intrinsic logic of the concerned medium - risk ending up in mechanistic and reductionist illustrationism. Of course, in their maximal versions such applications can also resonantly enrich the history of generic forms and the semantic-syntactic text-urings of discourse. In its discursive 'case studies' Loomba's study manages in several places to convey this sort of suggestive richness of evocation. In constructing the reference-frame of postcolonial studies, the author not only outlines a synoptic historical overview of colonialism and the various ways of conceptualising it, but also packs into her 'background' reliably accurate snapshot accounts of several seminal theoretical formulations on ideology, discourse analysis, culture, race and gender which she takes as having formatively impacted postcolonial studies. Pacy and light in touch, these theory-recaps are also assured, intensive and well-informed. But apart from the issue