Articles by Pranab Kanti Basu

Recent analyses of the discursive exclusion of the "world of the third" from the development discourse are theoretically acute and provoke one to rethink postcoloniality. These constitute the rich literature on India's postcolonial experience and can be traced from Subaltern Studies, which adopted a distinctly structural approach. The recent interventions adopt a modifi ed Lacanian frame where the theoretical focus is on foreclosure and foregrounding. The substantive contention is that major population segments of the now poor countries have been dislocated physically through and discursively in the course of modernisation and globalisation. Development theory has tried to include the dislocated through its inclusive development programmes. The included "Third World" is however a denigrated representation of the actual. Its emancipation can come through alternately imagining itself.