Colonial Mentality Quotes

“The ‘modern’, ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, Christian European coloniser could not get himself to acknowledge that the lived experience and traditional knowledge of native societies gathered over millennia could teach him more than a thing or two about living in harmony with nature as opposed to merely salvaging what remained of it in the name of ‘sustainable’ development.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“The spiritual character of the relationship between indigeneity and nature is an emotion that the coloniser can at best exoticise but can never relate to.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“[Women] are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert, or Chas must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est à moi. And, of course, it may be a dog, I thought, remembering Parliament square, the Sieges Allee and other avenues; it may be a piece of land or a man with curly black hair. It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The drive to live in the master’s house is also symbolic of the desire to become like the master. Our colonized consciousness has convinced us that to be is to be like the master. To be Filipino is not good enough—or so we we have been taught (or coerced) to believe. It is a reflection of the internalization of the dark shadows projected by the colonizer onto the colonized. These are shadows from which there is no escape, shadows that will keep haunting until they are withdrawn, atoned for, and integrated within the colonizer’s self”
― Leny Strobel

“The traumas associated with colonization that lasted almost 400 years scarred us all, regardless of our nativity, language, class, or gender. Trauma fragments and fractures the essence of our being and self-knowledge; it disconnects us from each other.” Regardless of your nativity, your memories are colonized. You are born into trauma without an initial understanding of or hermeneutic for your fragmented self and you must work diligently just to explain your own life—to recognize and name your scars, to educate
yourself about your specific cultural history and uncover its connections to your subjectivity. The ideologies of your family are colonized, and even your own thoughts and actions are colonized, despite your initial unawareness of the systematic forces at work in the simple procedures of your daily life.”
― Melinda L de Jesus, Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory

“For many years Canadian writers could not function in their own country - that is, they could not be published in their own country because Canadian publishers wouldn't publish them, and the reason they wouldn't publish them was that they said, or they claimed, that the sales would be too low and it would be uneconomical. This, in fact, was true. Canadian readers weren't reading Canadian books. The reason they weren't reading Canadian books is that they were suffused with what we call 'the Colonial Mentality', which views the mother country or the centre of the Imperial Culture as superior. So Canadian readers were reading American and British books but not Canadian ones, so Canadian writers either had to write according to the dictates of one or other of the Imperial Cultures or not get published.”
― Margaret Atwood

“Until a decolonial approach is employed by experts and ‘intellectuals’, we will continue to see the entrenchment of colonialised identities and fissures, which began with an anti-Brahmin slant but whose rapid movement towards an anti-Dharmic/anti-Hindu position is less veiled with each passing day—thereby revealing the end goal of European coloniality.”
― J Sai Deepak, India that is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation, Constitution

“There are substantial issues that remain, however, related to direction, hierarchy, and paternalism in missional mentalities. The heart and the willingness behind going are to be applauded. Jesus modeled an incarnational gospel and contextual approaches are to be valued over attractional models like those found in the megachurch movement. Concerns abound, though, in the shadow of the colonial legacy. How does one reclaim or reform a concept that has been so thoroughly corrupted and has taken on so much baggage? Is repentance enough? Can the form actually be redeemed and repurposed?”
― Randy Woodley, Decolonizing Evangelicalism: An 11:59 p.m. Conversation

“Even though English is the universal language of earth, due to its primitive colonial escapades, and indeed the most convenient, it is neither the most beautiful nor the most soulful language on earth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“Colonialism is cannibalism.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“Cultural difference, therefore, is predicated not only across space but also across time. The colonial ideology of progress includes the drive for technological process, and figures time as linear, with technologically progressive societies pushing forward and leaving others behind. The dynamic of past and future is therefore complicated and folded over on itself; the colonised are seen almost literally as not only figures from history but as figures from the colonizer's own past, objects of simultaneous reverence and scorn as primitives.”
― Jessica Langer, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction