This article simply examines the representation of the Islamic Orient in the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, and suggests two things: 1) that Borges's different representations of Islam in his texts—Arab philosophers, Persian myths, Sufi motifs, quotations from the Koran—are best understood by a different set of Orientalist voices that Borges employs, from context to context, to best communicate his Oriental content and 2) that Borges's stories, understood in a chronological sequence, ultimately demonstrate an awareness of the artificial nature of his Orient—and a gradual disillusionment with the whole idea of representing Islam.

In this essay, previous attempts to dismantle the idea of Europe as a self-contained space are briefly examined. Five strategies for deconstructing the idea of Europe are considered: re-origination, re-configuration, provincialization/de-universalization, fissuring through internal Othering and strategies of commonality. Each of these strategies, be they philosophical, philological, historical or geographical, tries to undermine the notion of ‘Europe’ as a self-contained space, either by alienating its origins, splitting it into alternative topographies, reducing it to just another language game, revealing its internal differences or showing how many of its features spill over into adjacent cultural spaces. The essay ends with some thoughts on what the consequences of a deconstructed Europe might be.

The article undertakes an examination of melancholy and sadness in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, concentrating on the forlorn figures of Tridip and the narrator in an attempt to analyse and evaluate the melancholy atmosphere of the novel. Bearing in mind Freud's own understanding of melancholy as the unconscious mourning for a lost love object, the article suggests the moments of sadness in Ghosh's text could be better understood as a form of postcolonial melancholy for the lost colonial object – not in any nostalgic sense, but rather the sadness which arises from the crisis of identity both Tridip and, in a larger sense, the postcolonial intellectual faces who wishes to avoid both the imperial identity forced upon him by colonial powers and, at the same time, the narrow, bullying hegemony of an artificially constructed nationalism. The sadness of The Shadow Lines, the article suggests, does spring from the irresolvability of this dilemma.

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