Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location

A series of meditations on the relationship between theory and practice. In the heated, often rancorous debates that are the 'culture wars', identity politics has been at the center of both popular and academic discussion. In this series of meditations on the relationship between theory and practice, R. Radhakrishnan probes the intersections of poststructuralism and postcoloniality that lie at the heart of contemporary controversies over identity and difference. 'Diasporic Mediations' records Radhakrishnan's attempt to make theory accountable to the world, even while eschewing narrow methodologies or 'isms'. Rather than embracing one totalizing point of view, these essays move in the spaces 'between' to establish a productive dialogue between different disciplines and critical practices-to elaborate what the author calls 'common ground'. Considering issues of location, language, tradition, gender, ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, culture, and history, Radhakrishnan reclaims poststructuralism as a tool for both understanding postcolonial reality and working for social change. Momentous and wise, 'Diasporic Mediations' provides thought-provoking considerations of contemporary issues surrounding identity, serving as a map of the postcolonial condition, or, in the author's words, of how to be 'both past- and future-oriented within the history of the present'.