This comment is interesting to me:
—yes, a pox on poco jargon. Virtually every kind of high culture (be it performance or visual art) in South Asia has been almost entirely reinvented in the past century (with help from white devils), though in the poco academy it remains shrouded in the mists of hoary antiquity, while everything barbarous about modern life is inevitably attributed to the curiously still omnipotent hand of an inchoate colonial influence. It’s a bit like the folks who believe that man learned to do only the bad things (war, aggression) and was born with the blueprint to do only the good things (bonobo conflict resolution).
Nandalal Nagalingam Rasia here points to what seems to me the reality that post-colonial theory has within it the same tendency as the expositors of the “noble savage” concept in the 18th century. In other words, this hyper-critical school in reference to the West is in all likelihood a product of the West itself! Just as post-colonialism transforms the white gods bringing civilization to the coloreds into Promethean demons who tainted the edenic state of colored nature with their particularly pernicious discourse, so it is an inversion of the self-concept of the West. Pride becomes shame, and self-congratulation turns into self-flagellation. The contrast with the noble savage has an ancient pedigree, it is clear in Tacitus’ Germania, but the tendency is not just Western. The same inversion and elevation of the Other crops in some strands of Daoism anarchism for example.
In some ways you can think of it as a self-correcting aspect of any civilization. There must be some internal culture of critique. The problem emerges when the partisans of negation and evisceration confuse their critical role in the ecosystem of ideas for the Idea itself. It is frankly as coherent as building a society on atheism; not too coherent. Atheism is a critique, it is not a positive assertion of anything as such, and so can not serve as the ground of a society in a fully fleshed out sense.