Between identity and location : the cultural politics of theory

What is thinking and what is theory? What is theoretical thinking and how does such a thought find its balance between specialist erudition and commonsensical intention? How is the relationship of theory to itself mediated by its practical commitment to instrumental Reason? What is the connection between theory and the proliferating discourses of "postality"? Is academic-institutional theory capable of recognizing the reality of a world structured in dominance: between the West and the Rest, between the so called first and third worlds? How do the politics of location and subject positionality complicate and problematize the valence between representation and the object of representation? How do intellectual and pedagogical paradigms function in a global world that is simultaneously expanding and shrinking; between homes and locations, nationalisms and diasporas, ways of being and modes of knowing? Situated at the intersections of postcoloniality and poststructuralism, the essays in this book raise these questions as ongoing answers in the dialectic between intimacy and distance, solidarity and critique, between the language of being and the being of language.