ostcolonial studies—you gotta love it. Supersmart folk of color chanting down white power from within the academy. Supersmart hardly begins to describe the brainpower of the field's star players: Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi Bhabha. Palestinian-born Said can wring Mozart from a piano with one hand while banging out learned considerations of imperialism and Western literature with the other. Spivak, who hails from Bengal, produced a translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology so graceful you imagine she does that kind of thing for fun.

These postcolonial mental giants have risen to prominence as the West ponders its relationship to the Middle East and South Asia. They hold onto their ethnic roots as tightly as their library privileges at the Oxfords and Princetons of the world. They are also among the liveliest, sharpest critics of Euro-American foreign policy in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Relocating Postcolonialism, an anthology of interviews with and essays by these postcolonial giants, joins a fat shelf of books on the subject, but with a critical difference. It is about the field's midlife crisis, a reflection upon its internal debates and external critics and some visionary, if controversial, suggestions as to what lies ahead. The book could not have come at a better time: World events are propelling the field's prominent speakers, especially those from Islamic cultures, into CNN hell.

I like to think that postcolonial studies is where Black studies might have gone had not a creeping parochialism and bourgeois disinterest in deconstructing power, wealth, and the poor gutted the class of late. Ironically, the African American intellectuals have become muted on the international scene as they have become ensconced in the Harvards of the world. This is no passive-aggressive attack on Henry Louis Gates and the now scattering dream team—a worldly bunch to be sure, but they haven't done much lately to bring discussions of race, poverty, and the IMF before "the folk." You cannot reflect upon the careers of W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, MLK, and Huey Newton, and not recognize them as the epitome of the idea to empower locally—think empowerment globally.

The profile of popular African American thought was once both grassroots and internationalist. Why and how it became less so is probably best left as the subject of a future essay. But if you're looking for sophisticated contemporary leftist opinions that are multidisciplinary, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and in the inclusive British sense of the term, pro-Black, the postcolonial studies crew who throw down in this anthology offer up a gold mine of progressive thought. They provide evidence that globally conscious discussions of race, history, and power critical of U.S. militarism and the World Bank can split screen time with Foucauldian-Lacanian-Barthesian analyses of Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison.

Postcolonial studies was built on the multiethnic diaspora of '70s Britain, where everyone not-white became understood as Black British, politically and existentially. This unifying conceit overcomes the ethnic divide and conquer tactics that prevail in the U.S., where there are "Black folk" and there are "people of color" and rarely the twain shall meet. The tradition of state-supported liberal scholarship in England, responsible for such prodigious figures as E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, also manifested a streetwise sociology wing that was far more interested in ethnicity and subcultural style and resistance than anything going in the U.S.

Relocating Postcolonialism Edited by David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson Blackwell Publishing, 371 pp., $29.95 paper

The recovery of Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James as models for younger Afro-Caribbean scholars such as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy converged with the serious consideration poststructuralism was receiving in Thatcher's England. First- and second-generation Black British were coming of age; deconstruction expressed the psychic turbulence of postcolonial progeny who were decolonized but still déclassé. From them came a formidable body of thought that catalyzed Black thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic into widening their frame when it came to looking at Blackness, whiteness, privilege, and hyper-capitalism.

Like its mother tongue, poststructuralism, postcolonialism bites the lily-white hand of liberalism that feeds it. With her impeccable credentials, undeniable charisma, and postcolonial pedigree, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, occupies all kinds of categories simultaneously: Black, feminist, Bengali, English professor, but with a catch: "As part of my History of Literary Criticism, Part 1, I was hesitantly teaching some Bhartrhari to my undergraduates. . . . Since there are many kinds of English-speaking Americans today, it seemed appropriate that my class should read pre-Columbian, Arbi-Farsi, ancient East Asian, African; hence Bhartrhari, the seventh-century philosopher of grammar. There is some hostility to this in my department. I don't get to teach this course often." Saul Bellow, who demanded we cough up the Zulu Tolstoy, would find in Spivak his worst nightmare.

Edward Said's Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism are required reading for anyone who would understand the psychological damage wreaked by colonialism on its colored subjects. That said, this book's interview with Said, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, turns surprisingly comical when he distances himself from p.c. lingo—"first of all, I never use a word like valorization!"—and two key postmodern shamans in the process: "And Baudrillard! It's just nauseating. . . . Both Baudrillard, and what's the name of that other guy—Lyotard—it's a kind of provincial atavism of a very unappealing sort, and I feel the same way about postmodernism. I think it's the bane of Third World intellectuals." He exposes singular chutzpah when he declares, "Logically, the next step would be to enter politics, because I could, and I am sure that I could spearhead a very serious political opposition to Arafat." While Said might not be as bold now as he was in that 2000 discussion, the renown of his political writing in Arabic suggests he wasn't just selling wolf-tickets.

The dialogue between Homi Bhabha, professor of English at Harvard, and John Comaroff, Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Chicago, easily shows the contemporary relevance of postcolonial comprehension. When Bhabha reads the Ayatollah's fatwa against Rushdie as a judgment that took place in a virtual jurisdictional domain—"not restricted by the powers of the nation-state; the power of the fatwah was in the bodily presence of believers wherever they happened to live communally and transnationally"—visions of fundamentalist-piloted airplanes and suicide bombers practically lunge from the pages. The transcript of Bhabha and Comaroff's talk is actually packed with a cornucopia of fresh ideas about Clinton-Lewinsky, the new South Africa ("the African National Congress was perhaps the last great Euronationalist movement"), how Western law is coming to favor tribal law by eschewing criminal proceedings for civic ones because of globalization's need to privatize public space, and the conflict between psychoanalysis and neoliberalism.

The uses of post-revolutionary South Africa to the globalist march Comaroff outlines are especially illuminating: "Here was an instance of liberation through liberalism, liberation apparently facilitated by the rational forces of the market, by a democratic social movement, by the good offices of international institutions. . . . Hidden, sometimes not so hidden, in the process was a great degree of brutality, a civil war in fact, fomented by the apartheid state; a reign of terror now fading into the recesses of memory except among those who suffered its bombs and bullets and beatings."

Perhaps the most thoughtful and provocative single-issue essay in this book also takes South Africa as its starting point. Investigating the process by which amnesia is produced in apartheid's surviving victims is the focus of John Noyes's essay, "Nature, History, and the Failure of Language: The Problem of the Human in Post-Apartheid South Africa." Noyes, a professor of German literature at the University of Toronto, analyzes the way memory was used to undermine the traumas of victims and victimizers during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Noyes questions what becomes of the search for truth, ethics, and history when no space is made for describing or punishing monstrous acts. The essay also raises larger issues about whether forgiveness or retribution belongs in a politics whose stated aim is the redistribution of resources, but whose face is a cosmetic chimera of social justice—exchanging white-ruled overseers for Black ones, and rubbing the snake oil of progress on the blemish of poverty. Noyes represents the best of what p.c. has to offer contemporary political thought—compassionate but hardheaded critiques of Black politics that also take the ethical, socialist, high road.

Greg Tate is the editor of the forthcoming anthology Everything but the Burden: What Whites and Others Are Taking From Black Culture. He is the author of the forthcoming biography Midnight Lightning: Race, Sex, Technology, and Jimi Hendrix.

Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com

E-mail this story to a friend.