Baroque Shapes and Scarce Contents. Postmodernism, Postcolonial Studies and the Approximation to Truth in the Social Sciences

Abstract

Edward Said and the postcolonial studies analyze the complex links between academic activities and political power: scientific and literary knowledge about foreign cultures could have prepared the occupation and the conquest of them by the European states. Those activities have built an immutable image of the East as if it were plainly the Other with regard to the European. But the postcolonial studies also embrace unbearable generalizations and evident contradictions about the proper history of the Third World. They overlook the authoritarian aspects of the political and cultural traditions of African, Asian and Latin American countries.