Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose . When Kenneth Coutts-Smith's article was first published in Black Phoenix (No. 2 Summer 1978), the forerunner of Third Text , the world was dividing into two ideological blocs. But, culturally, a single outlook - that of Westernisation - dominated the globe. All cultural production was measured by the yardstick of Western civilisation. Twenty years on, in a world dominated by a single hyper-power, little has changed. Coutts-Smith's analysis - reprinted here - seems just as prescient as when it first appeared.