Tw[i.Ns::RiUinEs:swind:RIveRrES:

The Anasazi had no written language, and
any hint they left us regarding their society was in the form of pictographs painted on the walls of their
cliffs. In the same way that ancient epics were handed down generation to generation by word of
mouth, so were the stories of the Anasazi -- legen
ds that tell of worshipping the Great Spirit and their belief that ever
ything alive has a soul.

The struggle against colonial oppression not only changes the direction of Western history, but challenges its historicist idea of time as a progressive, ordered whole. The analysis of colonial depersonalization not only alienates the Enlightenment idea of "Man," but challenges the transparency of social reality, as a pre-given image of human knowledge. If the order of Western historicism is disturbed in the colonial state of emergency, even more deeply disturbed is the social and psychic representation of the human subject. (Bha., 41-42)

Doubtless it is paradoxical to tie a truth so intimate as that of self-consciousness (the return of being to full and irreducible sovereignty) to these completely external determinations. Yet it is easy to perceive the deep meaning of these determinations if one returns to the essential without further delay. In the first place, the paradox is carried to an extreme owing to the fact that politics considered in terms of "the dominant international economy" only aims at an improvement of the global standard of living. It is in a sense disappointing and depressing. A point must be uncovered where dry lucidity coincides with a sense of the sacred. This implies the reduction of the sacred world to the component most purely opposed to things, its reduction to pure intimacy. This comes down in fact, as in the experience of the mystics, to intellectual contemplation, "without shape or form," as against the seductive appearance of "visions," divinities and myths. (Bat., 189-190)

the familiar space of the Other (in the process of identification) develops a graphic historical and cultural specificity in the splitting of the postcolonial or migrant subject. In place of that "I" -- institutionalized in the visionary, authorial ideologies of Eng. Lit. or the notion of "experience" in the empiricist accounts of slave history -- there emerges the challenge to see what is invisible, the look that cannot "see me," a certain problem of the object of the gaze that constitutes a problematic referent for the language of the Self. (Bha., 47)

SOURCES

Print
Bataille, Georges.The Accursed Share. Vol. I. 1967. Trans. Robert Hurley. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press/Zone Books, 1988.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Online
Anasazi: The Ancient Ones: Manitou Cliff Dwellings. [http://www.cliffdwellingsmuseum.com/anasazi.htm]
Great Buildings Online: World Trade Center (Minoru Yamasaki). [http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/World_Trade_Center.html]
Manitou Springs Cliff Dwellings. [http://www.coloradofortravelers.com/article1021.html]
New Zealand River Images. [http://www.vnz.co.nz/photos/rivers]

For Maddie and Sophie Henderson.