This article uses David Scott’s notion of “colonial governmentality” (from SOCIAL TEXT 43) to make a broader postcolonial intervention into the power structures that shape the theoretical rubrics of contemporary critical intellectual work. Advancing an argument about the governmentality of leftist academic knowledge production, it suggests that Euro-American journals like SOCIAL TEXT be attentive to their ongoing role in the production and effects of tensions between general theoretical ambition and the particularities of politics located in place.
