basic research and clinical data in an attempt to derive a cohesive model which explains the behavioral effects of the drug. Johnson is an experimental psychologist, and his work underlies many of the chapters which suggest that lithium decreases the behavioral response to novel external stimuli. He then utilizes this foundation to propose a cognitive model for lithium's anti-manic action, its inhibition of violent impulsivity, and its prophylactic effects in recurrent depression. Previous formulations which were clinically based, such as that of Mabel Blake Cohen and her associates, stressed the primacy of depression and noted the \"manic defense\" as an attempt to ward off intolerable depression. In direct contrast, Johnson views mania as the primary disturbance in bipolar disorder. He considers depression in bipolar disease as an over-zealous homeostatic inhibitory responsf to a maniaassociated cognitive overload. Consistent with this, he believes, lit lum exerts its anti-manic effect by decreasing cognitive processing in a manner analogous to his animal studies. Johnson also suggests that lithium exerts its prophylactic effect in recurrent depressions by treating subclinical mania. These concepts are supported by the work of Johnson's associate, Kukopulos, to whom the book is dedicated. The bulk of the research which describes the cognitive disturbance in mania is complex, however, and uncomfortably open to multiple interpretations. Recognized as a preliminary effort, Johnson's formulation may help to guide further research. Although Johnson clearly traces lithium actions through a broad range of subjects, his discussion of the neurophysiological aspects of this drug is notably spotty. In particular, Johnson ignores the work of Svensson, DeMontigny, Aghajanian, and others who suggest that serotonergic systems may play an important role in the antidepressant actions of lithium. As a result, he fails to discuss one of the most important current uses of lithium: as an agent used in conjunction with antidepressant medications to increase treatment response in medication-resistant forms of depression. Lithium augmentation of antidepressant medication also challenges the formulation presented by Johnson. This formulation suggests that lithium should have no therapeutic value in patients, such as those with endogenous depression, who already \"under-process\" cognitive information. The omission of lithium augmentation in depression is clearly unfortunate in this text. Overall, this volume demonstrates the benefits of a single-authored text. It it clearly organized and readable. The bibliography is also broad and useful. In this book, Johnson primarily addresses a research audience, and his model seems designed to stimulate thought rather than to improve clinical technique. In this capacity, his book will be of most interest to behavioral psychologists. Other books, focusing purely on clinical data, may be more useful to clinicians. Nevertheless, the clear organization, the large bibliography, and the thoughtful presentation may make this text a useful addition to a clinical library as well.

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.

On Linguistic Imperialism

Écrits: A Selection

Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference

Slavery and the Culture of Taste

O NCE UPON A TIME, WHEN I WAS DREAMING OF BECOMING A writer, I used to envy Virginia Woolf. I envied her not because she had the audacity and authority to declare that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” (“Character” 38), nor because she invented modernist style, but because she had the good fortune to live in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum and its famous Reading Room (ig. 1). In my imagination, Woolf ’s London homes—46 Gordon Square, 52 Tavistock Square, and 37 Mecklenburgh Square—were not just places in the social geography of London, or simple markers on the literary map of Bloomsbury; rather, they were outposts in a cartography of reading whose epicenter was the British Museum’s room, which Woolf had described in A Room of One’s Own as “the vast dome . . . the huge, bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names” (33). I always imagined Woolf walking the short distance from one of her homes to the British Museum, passing through Sydney Smirke’s iron gates, past the Roman and Greek igures, and arriving at the Reading Room with bated breath, ready to commune with the major authors in the En glish canon, which I, a child of late empire, would come to know as Beowulf to Woolf. Mastering Beowulf to Woolf was once a rite of passage, the gateway to Matthew Arnold’s kingdom of culture—“the best which has been thought and said in the world” (5). Since I could never visit Woolf ’s “band of famous names,” I dreamed about what the colonial library meant for those who belonged to it through an enforced language and culture but were out of it because of the stain of subjection. And because the Reading Room of the British Museum was so far removed from my ordinary Editor’s Column

Editor’s Column—The Fantasy of the Library

What are we to do with english? Of all the major languages of the world, it causes the most anxiety. Its words seem to want to invade the citadels of other languages, forcing institutions such as the Académie Française to call for barricades against it; in the enclaves of Englishness, a Celtic fringe struggles to hold on to the remnants of the mother tongue; and in most parts of the world those without the ostensibly anointed language often see themselves as permanently locked out of the spring-wells of modernity. Sometimes the global linguistic map appears to be a simple division between those with English and those without it. In the reaches of the former British Empire, a swath of the globe stretching from Vancouver east to the Malay Peninsula, English has come to be seen as an advantage in the competitive world of global politics and trade; in the emerging powers of East Asia, most notably China and South Korea, the consumption of global English is evident in the huge sale of books on English as a second language; in parts of the world traditionally cut off from English, including eastern Europe, the mastery of the language marks the moment of arrival. Most linguistic research on English is carried out in institutions in the Germanic and Nordic zones of northern Europe. In popular books on language and in serious linguistic studies, a powerful myth of English as the global language has taken hold. We are presented not with a world at the end of history but with one in which English sits at the center of a new global community: “English-speaking people and their culture are more widespread in numbers and influence than any civilization the world has ever seen,” claims Robert McCrum (257).

Editor’s Column—Provincializing English

For Abiola Irele, friend, mentor, maitre.
 Language for me is the soul of the text. I love the Arabic language, and I adore writing in it. It is the linguistic mold that I want to fill my personal stories and culture in, distinguished from that of Arabs.
 —Stella Gaitano
 I Will Start with Two Stories About This Thing Called Literature and the world it claims to name and possess.
 The first takes place in Shillong, in the northeast corner of India, a place far removed from the Indian heartland, closer to Bangladesh, Burma, and China than to New Delhi. The setting is the Shillong campus of the English and Foreign Languages University, where I have come to teach a seminar to junior academics and graduate students on decolonization as a theoretical problem. My students and I will embark on a two-week systematic rereading of the philosophical claims made for decolonization in the writings of canonical postcolonial writers, from Mahatma Gandhi's writing on nonviolence to Aime Cesaire's and Leopold Sedar Senghor's on negritude to Frantz Fanon's on the pitfalls of national consciousness to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's and Trinh T. Minh-Ha's on the figure of woman in difference. Although my students are attentive, their relation to these texts is ambivalent: they recognize the importance of these texts to understanding the making of the modern world, yet colonialism, as a world-historical event, occurred too long ago to be part of their lived experience. Their ambivalence is compounded by the fact that the urgency with which the authors of decolonization write, the sense that they are operating at the end of time—the time of Europe—belongs to a moment that no longer resonates with people struggling to survive in a more complex, globalized world. It is hard for my students to make the connection between Senghor's negritude and his incarceration in a Nazi prison camp in Poitiers during World War II or to see that event, the imprisonment of an African fighting for France, as connected to a paradigmatic break in the discourse of empire.

Introduction-Another Way in the World

W HEN I LEFT HOME TO ATTEND THE UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI to study literature, my maternal grandmother, a semi­ literate woman, posed two questions that have driven and haunted my life since: what is this thing called literature? what work does it do? It was not hard to comprehend where these ques­ tions came from or why they were important to my grandmother. Like most members of the extended maternal side of my family, she hoped that I would go into the law. hey expected that once I gradu­ ated from the university, trained to understand the laws of the En­ glish Commonwealth and duly admitted into the bar, I would take over a protracted land case, one that had been going on as long as anyone could remember. In those days, the mid­ 1970s, litigation had become a crucial part of postcolonial life as black families and com­ munities sought to buy land from white settlers; having a lawyer in the family was equivalent to having a son in the priesthood. he law did not hold much interest for me, but in the summer before I took my A­ level exams, I was briely tempted by the possibil­ ity of becoming a barrister. I was eighteen years old, lost in what was bound to be the last summer of my childhood; I was reading George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss and trying to understand the structure of the bil dungs ro man but also privately relishing the happy mornings that Maggie and Tom Tulliver were spending together “with no thought that life would ever change much for them” (45). “Life did change for Tom and Maggie,” and when the idyllic dream of childhood was broken, I wondered whether Eliot’s wrenching narrative of loss and sufering could have been averted if Tom had had the sense and ed­ ucation to be what was denied Maggie because of her gender—“a match for the lawyers” (222). It briely occurred to me that many 1 2 7 . 1 ]

Editor’s Column—This Thing Called Literature . . . What Work Does It Do?

Deining itself against the Harlem Renaissance and deeply rooted in black cultural nationalism, the Black Arts writers imagined themselves as the artistic wing of the Black Power movement. Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and Sonia Sanchez viewed black art as a matter less of aesthetics than of protest; its function was to serve the political liberation of black people from white racism. Erected on a shiting foundation of revolutionary politics, this “renaissance” was the most shortlived of all. By 1975, with the Black Arts Movement dead, black culture seemed to be undergoing a profound identity crisis.

Editor's Column: Looking Back on the Black Aesthetic

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