The Postcolonial Alien in Us All: Identity in the Global Division of Intellectual Labor (original) (raw)

This essay is a combination of two unlikely topics. One is a long commentary on the work of Naoki Sakai, given at a workshop in Taiwan. 1 The other is a critique of latent ethnocentrism in current notions of globalization, from a paper given at a boundary 2 conference in Hong Kong. 2 It is not apparent at first glance why the two are related, but certain unsettling themes underlie both, tied together by a presumed reliance upon the centrality of identity. Sakai's recent work posits an implicit ethnocentrism in core axioms of humanistic understanding that have become, for him, a basis for postcolonial sensitivity. The boundary 2 conference was prompted by a call to find common intellectual ground among participants of apparently different identities. Both cases assumed identity's positionality without really problematizing its situatedness in other things. In anthropology, "writing culture" and debates surrounding the authority of native ethnographic positions 16:3