Any study today of a literary work published a hundred years ago may be understood as an undertaking in archival research, but the changes in the field of literary studies have been so severe, cataclysmic almost, from the last quarter of the twentieth century onward that reading The Waste Land and its attendant critical exegesis again – a century after its publication – for what it used to signify (when literature still mattered) feels a lot like stepping back in time. The literary value system engendered by Eliot and his cohorts persisted in the consciousness of world literary studies well into the 1970s, ending almost abruptly after the advent of theory and neoliberalism from the next decade onward. Today, after an examination of a literary work has been proclaimed to be no different than the anthropological and ethnographic study of a Balinese cock fight, following which postcolonial studies has given way to world literature studies, the literary ethos surrounding and represented by The Waste Land seems strangely familiar but impossibly remotely located in a foreign country called the past.

How then to approach The Waste Land today? Location would be key. In the time of the advent of postcolonial studies, John Mackenzie, characterising developments in the academic study of colonialism, defined the traditional point of view as a ‘centrifugal’ tendency: ‘Imperial history and the imperial idea have been examined almost entirely in a centrifugal manner, as the radiation of influences from Britain into its wider hinterland.’ If we think of the manner in which The Waste Land was disseminated and the mode of criticism that dealt with its ‘impact’ and ‘influence’ on the colonies through the decades following its publication, we see an almost exact correspondence to the traditional study of imperialism as Mackenzie defines it. Eliot's poetry, produced in England and Europe, was seen ‘radiating outward’ from the centre to the periphery where, presumably, it would be studied, imbibed and imitated. Postcolonial theorists from the mid-’80s onward, straining to move away from readings that mapped such a ‘centrifugal tendency’, wished, rather, to offer ways of dismantling colonialism's signifying system and exposing its operation in the silencing and oppression of the colonial subject, interpreting colonialism rather as a discourse, a text without an author. Derrida and Foucault were the instruments through which the turning of the text of colonialism into an array of effects was accomplished.