When understanding the world we live in becomes as difficult as it is today, works like that of Indian author and politically engaged intellectual Aijaz Ahmad are a small blessing. In the exhaustion and confusion that has long overwhelmed Western thought, sometimes it takes an "alien" eye to point out a few obvious things. Although the book seems to be built on two independently written critiques, on Frederic Jameson and especially on Edward Said, these cases serve as examples for Ahmad of what he really aims at: the conformism of Western thought, and especially of Anglo-American academia, as reflected in its inability to grasp what really happened in the distant corners of the world that became theaters of bloody and desperate struggles for decolonization throughout the entire post-war thirty-year period. The ambiguous and ambivalent radicalism of the '60s found a special expression in the field of literary studies, and especially in the current that from the '70s was called "postcolonial theory" (and later "subaltern studies"). The theoretical shifts in the above field reflect, as Ahmad reads it, the ideological flip-flops of metropolitan thought - from superficial engagement, as seduction by an imaginary "Third World," to the nihilistic stance that was specifically associated with the currents of poststructuralism in the Humanities and with the navel-gazing rhetoric of the so-called "postmodern." As he rightly points out, this shift signaled the great ideological counterattack of global elites, in the form of a rabid anticommunism that has deeply confused weakened anticapitalist movements everywhere in the world.