[2] My term "English America" gestures towards Sara Suleri's rich use of the term "English India:" The term "English India" demands an explication that would render it both literal and figurative at the same time: English India is not synonymous with the history of British rule in the subcontinent, even while it is suborned to the strictures of such a history. At the same time English India is not solely a linguistic concept, a spillage from history into language, one that made difficult oppositions betwen the rhetorical and actual. The idiom of English India expresses a disinterest in the continuity of tense, so that the distinction between colonial and postcolonial histories becomes less radical, less historically "new." (3)

[3] "Yet the mimetic basis remains, dependent, above all, on an alterity that follows the ideological gradient decisive for world history of savagery vis à vis civilization. If Florencio, the Indian, gains healing power by virtue of the "painting" of the Nation-State's golden army, and the poor colonist, emergent from the State, gains healing power through the "painting" of the Indian as devil, then we must needs be sensitive to the crucial circulation of imageric power between these sorts of selves and these sorts of anti-selves, their ominous need for and their feeding off each other's correspondence--interlocking dream-images guiding the reproduction of social life no less that the production of sacred powers." (Taussig: 65) Here ,telegraphically, I am drawing on the excellent work by the following scholars: Frantzen (1990); Frantzen and Vengonie (1986); Colls and Dodd 1986)

[4] see also Pratt,, p. 100.

[5]or in Goldberg's words, I tried not to "foreclose and dematerialize their operations and their limits" (398). [6] The work of Viswanathan has provided me with tools for thinking about the masking effects of curriculum: "The curriculum is conceived here not in the perennialist sense of an objective, essentialized entity but rather as discourse, activity, process--as one of the mechanisms through which knowledge is socially distributed and culturally validated" (3).

[7] Callaghan: xx, for a further meditation on this cultural hunger artistry see Ellmann (1993)

[8] My use of the pastoral as a political, peformative space is influenced by Patterson, (1987); Stallybrass (1989)

[9] Gilroy (1987): 40: Thus today's British racism, anchored in national decline rather than imperial expansion overseas, does not necessarily proceed through readily apparent notions uf superiority and inferiority. The order of racial power relations has become more subtle and elusive than that. Recognizing this fundamental development provides part of the key to understanding how racial and conservative, socialist and openly racist theories and explanations of 'race' have been able to converge dramatically. This coming together is a characteristic feature of contemporary 'race' politics in Britain..."

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[10] See Patterson for a warning to resist defining the pastoral: "It is not what pastoral is that should matter to us. On that, agreement is impossible, and its discussion inevitably leads to the narrowing strictures of normative criticism, statements of what constituted the"genuine" and the "true" to the exclusion of exemplars that the critic regards as "perverse." (7). What interests me here is how the pastoral provokes just such questions of the "true" and "genuine" and exclusion. History is a form of writing not immune to the dissemination of the pastoral

[11]My analysis here can be read with Viswanathan (1991)

[12] Salman Rushdie criticized the film in his review in the Guardian, December 1, 1987.