To understand postcolonialism in its present-day postmodernist reincarnation requires a simultaneous grasp of the ways in which disparate notions—e.g. tradition as a political-cultural construct in resistance to modernity, neo-traditionalism as the recasting of “tradition” in an age of mass media, heterogeneity as oppositional gesture in a world subject to abstraction and homogenization, not to mention the subsumption of difference to the gravitational field of Orientalism’s spatialized imaginary, and away from a encounter of the present with the past and future as radically distinct social forms—come together in a specific historical conjuncture. The conjuncture in question—the post-1989 collapse of a world order inaugurated by the October Revolution of 1917 and radical anti-colonial struggles in subsequent decades—has, in effect, abolished the future. As an expression of this post-1989 world, and the diminished political possibilities it seems to offer, the “post” in postcolonialism no longer refers exclusively to colonialism as a historical phenomenon but to revolution as a punctual political rupture with the actually existing capitalism.