ABSTRACT
Living on the edges can become a way of making a living off marginalisation – a charge brought against some academic exponents of hybridity, including Homi Bhabha. For example, Ramachandra talks of such postcolonial theorists as ‘affluent, self-exiled Asians ensconced in the Western academy’. They play on ‘postcolonial Western guilt’ and also on ‘the romantic image of the intellectual “exile”, epitomizing the fissured identities and hybridities generated by colonial dislocations and celebrated in some postmodern works’.1 Even its more creative exponents, like Sandercock, can weave powerful narratives criticising contemporary urban living and developing alternatives as mongrel cities – yet examples of the latter are often ephemeral and fragile. For Baker, ‘her cosmopolis still works powerfully as an activating concept rather than a practical guide’. Depressingly, for Baker, her practical case studies of feasible alternatives ‘are almost all short-lived’.2
