The title of Ania Loomba's Colonialism/ Postcolonia-lism indicates the lien she will take in introducing us to postcolonial studies: she will not see them as binaries, locked in permanent opposition, but as categories whose boundaries must be broken down so that we can see how the one inheres within the other. In other words, Loomba approaches colonial cultural studies in the wake of deconstruction, and other contemporaneous movements such as feminism and Foucaldian discourse analysis. Her intention, then, is not to give us a superficial picture of a settled site, but a detailed analysis of a fast-evolving subject located at an intriguing intersection of theory.

Loomba, in fact, sees postcolonial studies as a "beleaguered" field and it is her aim in Colonialism/ Postcolo-nialism to present readers with a book which will allow them to focus on key issues which have generated debates about the structures and residues of colonialism and their cultural manifestations. She is aware of the many criticisms levelled against the field: for example, the Marxist critiques which stress the way discussions of post-colonialism elide over questions of economic exploitation. She is conscious too of the reductive and formulaic nature of much of the work done under the rubric of postcolonialism and the tendency to simplify complex ideological formations in discussing colonialism and its aftereffects. Nevertheless, she writes from the conviction that "diagnosing" colonialism's "occlusions and mystifications" is important, as is the notion of approaching the colonial past with "our own developing histories and possibilities."

Loomba divides Colonialism/ Postco-lonialism into three sprawling chapters. The first of these, titled "Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies", defines keywords, then traces the formative stages of colonial discourse analysis, and finally shows how colonisation impacted on literature. Remarkably, Loomba takes a "standard" definition of colonialism such as the one which is to be found in the Oxford English dictionary to demonstrate how it is based on the exclusion of the colonised; this is seen to be paradigmatic of the way colonisers have got about their jobs of arrogating other people's lands and wealth. She, on the other hand, approaches terms such as "colonialism" and "neocolonialism" not to come up with a "simple semantic meaning" since she is a aware of the importance of relating the "shifting meanings" of the term to "historical processes." She is also sensitive to the subtle distinctions that need to be made in situating words such as "postcolonial" since being a postcolonial in, shall we say, Bangladesh, is very different from being a postcolonial in Australia, and even in postcolonial Bangladesh, being a divisional commissioner is quite something else from being a member of some subaltern group. Without a doubt, it is a strength of Loomba's book that it makes us aware again and again of "differences between distinct kinds of colonial situations, or the working of class, gender, location, caste or ideology among people whose lives have been restructure by colonial rule".

Ania Loomba's book is also notable for the rigor, the conciseness, and the lucidity with which she traces the contexts of contemporary colonial discourse analysis. Starting with Maxim's intense critique of the collusion of capital and colonisation, and the way Marxist concepts such as deification found their way into the indictment of colonialism carried out by intellectuals such as Aime Cesair and Frantz Fanon, Loomba moves on to discuss the relevance of Antonio Gramsci's concept of "hegemony" for the analyst of colonisation. She also notes the subterranean ways in which colonial domination was carried out through the unwitting participation of the colonised in the process of their enslavement. Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation has been crucial in this respect as is Foucault's archaeology which focuses attention on the discursive practices of colonial regimes.

Loomba correctly credits Edward Said with pioneering the work of colonial discourse analysis and sees Orientalism (1978) as the inaugural text of postcolonial studies because it was the first sustained attempt to show how "colonial authority functioned by producing a 'discourse' about the Orient." Loomba also traces the growing awareness amidst theorists such as Said that emphasis should be given to stories of resistance and the agency of the subaltern during colonial regimes so that the colonised is not invariably portrayed, pace Foucault, as passive or hopelessly incarcerated in discursive power regimes. In fact, one of the strengths of Colonialism/Postcolonialism is Loomba's ability show how colonial discourse analysis has left behind its origins and come into its own by finding newer and subtler ways of unraveling the workings of colonisation and unmasking the imperialist's gaze while challenging the dominant assumptions of imperialist scholarship.

Loomba is a professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and a specialist in renaissance drama, and it is understandable that among the best pages of Colonialism/Postcolonialism are the ones on colonialism and literature. She thus discusses how literary texts have not only reflected colonial tendencies but have also contained elements subversive of such tendencies. It is fascinating to follow Loomba as she traces rape as a key trope in colonial writing and uncovers the devices through which literary texts were taught to prop up racist ideologies and literature itself advocated as a tool for colonisation as in Macualay's famous Minute on Indian Education. This last point, of course, was made by Gauri Viswanathan in Masks of Conquest (1990), but it is the strength of Loomba's work that she will also follow up the argument that our (colonial) education systems were initially designed for further enslaving us with Homi Bhabha's very different observation that mimicry of alien systems led, inevitably, to slippages and ambivalent actions which, in the long run, turned us against our colonisers. To put it somewhat differently, if one of the products of a colonial education is Defoe's Friday who is doomed to carry out the master's will endlessly in pidgin (or for that matter "babu" English), the other, and more powerful one is Shakespeare's Caliban, who had declared famously to his enslaver Prospero: "You gave me language, and my profit on't/Is, I know how to curse".

Loomba is sensitive to the charge that the post-colonial is too textual a category and that too much can be made of English literature's impact on colonisation by expatriate literary scholars from our part of the world who have little or no connection to active politics. "Fighting" our "battles" for us, they have often attained celebrity status in the western academic world through what can only be called textual radicalism. Certainly, to this reviewer reading a postcolonialist of the deconstructionist sort such as Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak is often like being witness to a display of "radicalchic." One corrective to this, Loomba implies, is to relate the text to its economic and historical contexts and to always take stock of the "intricate, subtle, and even contradictory, connections between colonial representations, institutions, and policies."

Chapter 2 of Colonialism/Postco-lonialism discusses issues such as the construction of racial and cultural difference, the roles of gender and sexuality in colonial discourse, and concepts such as hybridity. Following Said, Loomba details the stereotyping inherent in colonialist discourse. For example, she comments on the depiction of the colonised either as barbaric and degenerate on the one hand and childlike and primitive on the other. Either ways, such characterisations were often made to further imperialist projects: the ignoble savage deserved to be conquered and the noble one subjected to a "civilising" scheme! Indeed, Loomba stresses that colonisations was to a great extent an "enlightenment" project, as the discourses of the human sciences such as ethnography (and even of the pseudo-sciences!) were deployed to subjugate other races directly or indirectly. In the process, colonial categories were constructed, such as the one of martial races (as opposed to unreliable, effeminate ones). Similarly, Loomba explains how class division were constituted to serve imperialist projects. For instance, a certain group within colonial society was elevated on the basis of, let us say, their lighter skins, and this group was then privileged as agents of imperial rule and were allowed to lord it over another group.

Recent work in postcolonial studies has shown that psychoanalysis too can be a valuable tool in exploring the colonial past and the agency of colonisation in the present. The portrayal of Africa as the continent where the western mind may regress into madness and the orient as the area of sexual anarchy are two of the motifs Loomba cites in her examination of the ways in which westerners have pathologised their colonial encounters. Reading Loomba's survey of the subject, we become aware of how psychoanalysis, like literature and the human sciences, had become a tool for serving imperialism and perpetuating stereotypes about other cultures. Loomba treats the Martiniquan psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon as an exemplary figure who has seen colonialism as the source of "psychic oppression and trauma." Here, as elsewhere, Loomba cautions against over-theorisation and urges for a practice which combines "socio-political critique and activism with an analysis of colonial and anti-colonial subjectivities."

In addition to being a literary scholar, Loomba is an ardent feminist, and her commitment to gender issues is obvious throughout Colonialism/Postcolonialism. There are thus fascinating pages in the book on the complex and contradictory colonial responses to sati. For example, we come to realise through her discussion that in the nineteenth century widow burning became a contentious issue not only because it revealed male cruelty in Eastern societies but also because it was used to justify English intervention. On some occasions the burning widow was used by white males to draw an example of wifely devotion for white women. On the other hand, to some Indians the widow who burnt herself despite the ban on sati by the English became exemplary for an anti-colonial gesture. Loomba also notes the equation of the dark women with the dark continent in some colonial texts and the frequency with which images of rape become "an abiding and recurrent metaphor for colonial relations." Combining feminist and postcolonial perspectives frequently, Loomba makes a pitch for a mode of analysis which will alert us as often as possible to the way race, gender, and sexuality are factors to be taken into consideration in studying colonialism and its legacies. Moreover, she advocates greater participation of women in postcolonial political and social movements.

Loomba pays particular attention to two concepts which have achieved prominence in recent considerations of postcoloniality: hybridity and of diasporas. The colonialist may be contemptuous of hybrids and may strive to preserve the purity of his race in the colonised territory, but cross-fertilisation almost always is a result of his arrival and he is changed as much as the colonised as he comes into contact with the colonised race. The fact is that there can be no question of purity in contact zones and both the colonialist and the nationalist are myopic when they insist on racial/cultural purity. Students of postcolonialism are thus able to see that the colonial encounter complicates our lives endlessly and results in fluidity and movements back and forth across the colonial divide.

Loomba's final chapter deals with the resistance movements which sprung up all over the world in this century to challenge colonialism. Quite understandably, she begins this chapter with a review of Benedict Anderson's world and notes his observation that nationalism in Asia and Africa was modelled on European experiences, but she also considers Partha Chatterjee's critique of this view and his emphasis on local cultural elements in the construction of nationalist discourse. She also shows how nationalist movements have groped for an usable past, that is to say, after a cultural heritage which could be utilised as a source of inspiration in reconstructing societies devastated by colonisation. In addition, Loomba focuses on the way postcolonial writers have questioned colonialist histories and have demolished myths created about their societies. However, here as elsewhere in Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Loomba reveals that she endorses only the type of nationalism which is liberal and broad enough to include all categories in society and which is aware of the dangers of neocolonialism and suspicious of elites who replace the colonial masters only to become tyrants themselves.

Loomba ends Colonialism/Postcolonialism by reviewing the work of scholars who have written on "the failure of the postcolonial nation-state." She does not agree with Aijaz Ahmed that too much has been made of "national oppression" and too little of "class conflicts" in recent work on postcoloniality and sees nationalism as a crucial element in the makeup of the contemporary world. She is undoubtedly right in dismissing Salman Rushdie's "wild assertion" in his New Yorker piece on the superiority of the literature produced in the English language in India over the writing being done in the vernacular languages of the sub-continent. Loomba cautions too against uncritical valorisation of nationalist agendas. True to her commitment to providing nuanced views of issues now being contested by writers on, she refuses to endorse Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak's view that women in colonial India were subalterns who could never speak for themselves.

"Nuanced", indeed, is a key word for Loomba and it is remarkable how often she worries her way through competing arguments to make important distinctions and give us what is on the whole a balanced view of colonialism and its intricate association with postcolonialism. Any reader of her book is bound to profit from her tough-minded but wide-ranging forays into contested terrains, even though I cannot help but feel feminism is a hobbyhorse for her at times. But if I have one major reservation about her book it is that she privileges theory over practice and is mostly uninterested in analysing colonial and postcolonial writing. It is as if she has locked herself for the most part of the book in a hermetic space where postcolonial theorists chop logic endlessly and qualify each others views in a kind of intellectual parlor game. The point is reinforced when we compare Loomba's book to Elleke Boehmer's Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995). Although similar in size and scope, Boehmer's book is particularly helpful because it combines theory and practice and does literary-critical readings of key texts time and again to illustrate crucial theoretical concepts. "I would, therefore recommend Ania Loomba's Colonialism/Postcolonialism to anyone interested in knowing about the theoretical debates centering on postcoloniality but I would think that the book would be much for meaningful when read in conjunction with Boeh-mer's work." In fact, the two books complement each other nicely and both could be required reading for students beginning to study colonialism and its aftereffects.