The persistance of the terms' tradition'and'contemporaneity'as they figure in third world debates are best appreciated if we see them as notations within the cultural polemic of decolonization. They may be used in all earnestness as essential categories and real options but in fact they are largely pragmatic features of nation building. Indeed the terms function in an hyphenated form and mark the double (or multiple) register of a persuasive nationalist discourse. Sufficiently historicized, either tradition or contemporaneity can notate a'radical'purpose in the cultural politics of the third world.