How does one approach the texts of colonialism—texts overtly marked with the violence of expropriation? The methodological question concerning how we should initially approach and subsequently pursue a given subject matter leads to problems that complicate the security of the process of analysis: for example, from where one takes such texts is part of the problem at issue; as is the question of who is addressing this question, and to whom; and of course, how one approaches this questioning is as much a matter of intellectual tradition and protocol as it is of motivation and intention. From the very beginning the subject of colonialism folds back on the activity of analysis, both as the name of an activity (at once materialistic and rhetorical), and as the name of an epoch (localizable and generalizable), undermining any desire to naturalize the processes of intellectual production. It is not just that the very concepts used to comprehend historical processes are themselves produced by history; even naming is not neutral, for what in essence is colonialism but the power to name, the authority to authorize how something should be known? So we begin with the knowledge that our knowledge is structured by questions of location, personnel, and method that are not something outside the commodities that have circulated within the colonial system and its successors.