In postcolonial studies, the European colonial project is sometimes described as a powerful form of cultural mobility that travels from a metropolitan centre to a colonial periphery, an uneven exchange in which the metropolitan (European) centre exploits its provinces. Likewise, the political and cultural projects of decolonization are often described as a reversal of this movement: a ‘writing back’ from the periphery to the centre in order to highlight the inequities of imperial power and emphasize regional and ontological ‘differences from the assumptions of the imperial center’ to assert the cultural rehabilitation of the periphery (Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin 2). But while the twentieth century is, at times, defined as the century of decolonization, the political independence of former European colonies did not necessarily challenge the asymmetrical power relations (particularly cultural and economic discrepancies) between imperial urban centres such as London and Paris and the former colonies of Europe.