The Post Colonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.

By Arif Dirlik. Boulder (Colorado): Westview Press. 1997. xiii, 252pp. US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 0-8133-3248-6.

Arif Dirlik is something of an intellectual phenomenon. The Amazon website lists nine books either edited or written by him since 1989, which, given his intellectual insights and breadth of reading, is something of an achievement. I approached this new book of essays with some trepidation, having been jolted out of a self-induced complacency about developments in the so-called Pacific Rim by his edited volume, What is in a Rim ? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (1993), which I reviewed in a previous issue of Pacific Affairs. In the light of the current fiscal crisis in several NICs of the East Asian edge, many of the essays seem remarkably prescient.

This collection of essays gathered in The Post Colonial Aura are rather different. First, they are all written by Dirlik. Second, they are concerned with the intellectual ideas that are being used to map the current process of globalization. The title might suggest that Dirlik has embraced the current fad of post-modernity, but in fact, the thrust of his ideas is much more subtle and in my judgment quite threatening to the banalities of post-modernism and "its off-European-American offshoot, postcolonialism" (p. viii). Dirlik persistently reminds us that, at a global scale, there are "alternate modernities" emerging from the structural conditions of global capitalism. He writes, "An underlying premise of the essays, of which they may be viewed as demonstrations in a variety of locations, is the existence of a structural resonance between postmodernity as a historical condition generated by transformations in capitalism and post-modernism as a way of speaking about that condition" (p. 1). Dirlik is clearly much more at home with the former than the latter trope.

The essays in this volume are wide-ranging. All should be read, but those that may interest Pacific Affairs readers most are concerned with "Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism" (chapter 5), "There is More in the Rim than Meets the Eye: Thoughts on the Pacific Idea" (chapter 6) and "Three Worlds or One or Many? The Reconfiguration of Global Relations under Contemporary Capitalism" (chapter 7). Together they represent a forceful indictment of how intellectuals, Euro-Americans and their white settler outposts of Australia and New Zealand constructed a theory of historical and regional space that has marginalized the local and indigenous.

The other essays are much more concerned with how indigenous intellectuals have begun to develop their own alternate modernities and scepticism of "post colonial approaches." Dirlik is particularly sharp in his understanding of this term "indigenous intellectual" (my term, not his), for he understands how problematic this term is; for example, he recognizes that much of the postcolonial aura emanates from the "in-between" intellectuals from Third World countries who reside in the First World (Said, Spivak, et al., who have appropriated the Third World "voice").

This is a book about ideas that presents alternative intellectual constructs for analyzing processes of change in a globalizing era and which should be read by all. It has the potential to reshape the intellectual paradigms that are used to study social and economic change in the twenty-first century.

TERRY G. MCGEE University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada