This kind of objection to the stark opposition of colonizer and colonized is a common critique of post-colonial writing that is made by various scholars. Another relatively sympathetic critic, Frederick Cooper, brings up the issue of complicity among the colonized elites who often embraced Western ideas and the need to recognize that Orientalist categories were jointly produced by colonizers and native elites. In an American Historical Review forum on subaltern studies, he proposed that that the categories of colonialism and nationalism be treated with more flexibility and sensitivity to their context. Thus not only should notions of modernity, citizenship, liberalism, equality, etc., be seen in their changing context, but subaltern agency can perhaps be found in the ways that “natives” often disassemble these categories and make something else of them.14 Several of these comments are useful, but I see them more as enriching the project since the basic point – the assumption of a stark opposition between colonizer and colonized – is applicable, if at all, only to an early version of postcolonial writing, as for instance, in Said's Orientalism and the early subaltern historical writings. In truth, in the last ten years or so, postcolonial writing has become full of such terms as hybridity, heterogeneity, and that favorite expression of literary theorists: catachresis, defined by Gayatri Spivak as “reversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding