Postcolonialism Quotes

“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit”
― Edward Said

“The abiding western dominology can with religion sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. 'God had made us master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.' From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write 'carte blanche for chaos.' Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings -- those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse.”
― Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming

“A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“And the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons. Often taking their time, stored up in the genes like baldness or testicular carcinoma, but sometimes on the very same day.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“What I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal's deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal's point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted one me.”
― Jamaica Kincaid

“Przydaje się wtedy formuła mająca wszystkie wątpliwości rozwiać, a wszelkie winy unieważnić. Cudowne zaklęcie, trzy słowa, które dobrze brzmią w każdej epoce i pod każdą szerokością geograficzną.
Ta-kie by-ły cza-sy.
Mawia się też: to cena postępu, przykry odprysk wielkiej dziejowej historii. To, co prawda, niefortunne, ale jednak odizolowane przypadki.”
― Joanna Gierak-Onoszko, 27 śmierci Toby'ego Obeda

“Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.”
― Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems

“Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, The Double Comfort Safari Club

“Those who mismanage our affairs would silence our criticism by pretending they have facts not avaliable to the rest of us. Our best weapon against them is not to marshal facts, of which they are truly managers, but passion. Passion is our hope and strenght."
”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah

“Bei dieser Passage gibt es nur ein einziges Problem: Es stimmt nicht. »Der Mensch« hat keineswegs den Atem angehalten angesichts dieses Kontinents, denn wenn wir uns »den Menschen« als die gesamte Menschheit vorstellen, dann hat »der Mensch« die Gegend schon gekannt, ja bereits seit Zehntausenden von Jahren bewohnt. Die Verwendung von »der Mensch« verrät uns am Ende viel darüber, wen genau der Erzähler als Person anerkennt und von welchem Standpunkt die Geschichte erzählt wird.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Collective guilt, the damaging impact of cultural appropriation, our servility to amorphous power structures, the primacy of identity politics; all of these concepts and more are now uncritically accepted by many of those in positions of authority. When politicians use phrases such as 'white privilege' and 'systemic racism', for instance, they are deploying the language of Critical Race Theory without necessarily understanding the full implications of the ideas behind the buzzwords. They are the unsuspecting agents of applied postmodernism.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“That racism still exists is taken as evidence of the failure of the liberal project, but of course nobody has made the case that it has been eradicated. If a disease is cured but a few symptoms linger, one does not claim that the treatment was ineffective. Social liberalism is an ongoing process because it recognizes the imperfectability of human nature.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Pour sa génération, réussir, ça voulait dire épouser un zoreil, parler français, partir en métropole... Les inégalités de la colonisation ne sont pas tout à fait effacées.”
― Lou Lubie, Racines

“Enquanto não se puser fim à funesta ideia da desigualdade das raças e da seleção entre diferentes espécies humanas, a luta dos povos de origem africana por aquilo que poderíamos chamar de “igualdade das partes” — e, portanto, dos direitos e das responsabilidades —, continuará a ser uma luta legítima.”
― Achille Mbembe

“Gone are the days for the Law of Supply and Demand. For now, the world operates on "DOP" i.e. Demand and Overpowered. The demand arisen in the third world countries get them overpowered by first world and the "DOP Colonization" enjoys its full swing.”
― Murtaza Ali, Puppet

“Since they look at oppression only in terms of colonialism, colonialism is all these scholars and activists are equipped to find. As a result, not only do they hamstring their ability to understand - and therefore ameliorate - the problems they are seeking to solve, but they also tend to make them worse. This commonly results in a marked tendency to neglect the rights of women and of sexual and religious minorities, unless they are threatened by white Westerners. This goes against achieving social justice - bit it's integral to the ideology called Social Justice.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“We all seem to know the dilemma of speaking within authorized boundaries, and yet the urge to orientalize the Oriental and to africanize the African continues to lurk behind many Westerners' wellintended attempts to promote better understanding of cultural difference.”
― Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here

“These stories relieve me of the pain of belonging nowhere and give me the key to everywhere. As I once longed for a singular place, a singular ethnicity or plot of land over generations, I now long for its opposite, for a space beyond belonging. I have travelled to many places in order to scope a sense of ownership or repatriation, but as I try to square my politics with my privilege, it seems that my only true inheritance is that I am always running somewhere else.”
― Tessa McWatt, Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

“Las personas que tan apasionadamente desprecian a la mitad de sus compatriotas son incapaces de sentir el mínimo autorrespeto.”
― Kate Millett, Sexual Politics

“The issue of reparations now comes clown not to descendants of one group paying money to descendants of another group. Rather, it comes down to people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who look like the people who may have done the wrong. lt is hard to imagine anything more likely to rip apart a society than attempting a wealth transfer based on this principle.”
― Douglas Murray, The War on the West

“Mauritian Giving is when you give something great to someone who doesn't really deserve it. Well, Scottish Giving is when the gift is so much greater than the recipient deserves that it dignifies the receiver.”
― Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams

“The time for building bridges is over. For the few that are willing to swim across to our side, we will welcome them with open arms. We’ll even dispatch life rafts. But we have entered a new phase where we should be prioritizing direct action.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“But wouldn’t it be more effective in the end to appeal to the moral consciousness of the citizens of the wealthy and powerful nations of the world, rather than antagonize them?”
“Sure, and I suppose the fly, in navigating the web so thoughtfully spun for it, should always take care to appeal to the spider’s moral sensibilities whenever it comes skittering around.”
― Casey Fisher, The Subtle Cause

“The state of cultural and social chaos through which we are passing at present distinctly shows that the balancing forces which once were responsible for the greatness of the Islamic world are nearly exhausted today. We are drifting; and no one knows to what cultural end. No intellectual courage remains, no will to resist or to avert that torrent of foreign influences destructive to our religion and society. We have thrown aside the best moral teachings which the world has ever known. We belie our faith, whereas to our distant forebears it was a living urge; we are ashamed, whereas they were proud; we are mean and self-centred, whereas they generously opened themselves out to the world; we are empty, whereas they were full.”
― Muhammad Asad, Islam at the Crossroads

“The state of cultural and social chaos through which we are passing at present distinctly shows that the balancing forces which once were responsible for the greatness of the Islamic world are nearly exhausted today. We are drifting; and no one knows to what cultural end. No intellectual courage remains, no will to resist or to avert that torrent of foreign influences destructive to our religion and society . We have thrown aside the best moral teachings which the world has ever known. We belie our faith, whereas to our distant forebears it was a living urge; we are ashamed, whereas they were proud; we are mean and self-centred, whereas they generously opened themselves out to the world; we are empty, whereas they were full.”
― Muhammad Asad, Islam at the Crossroads

“Although their constitutions called for an Islamic form of government, the word "Muslim" or "Islamic" was just in name. Socially, the Muslim countries resorted to corrupt practices. Economically, they were insolvent, although they had immense natural resources; and politically, they were uncertain. Internationally, they were inactive, existing simply as an isolated, spent force. Individually, they became disruptive and collectively anarchic.”
― Jaaber, Final Chapter: I Buried Malcolm

“Although their constitutions called for an Islamic form of government, the word 'Muslim' or 'Islamic' was just in name. Socially, the Muslim countries resorted to corrupt practices. Economically, they were insolvent, although they had immense natural resources; and politically, they were uncertain. Internationally, they were inactive, existing simply as an isolated, spent force. Individually, they became disruptive and collectively anarchic.”
― Jaaber, Final Chapter: I Buried Malcolm

“Intellectual life on American campuses has, over the course of the past half century, been fundamentally reshaped by the ascendancy of the “identity synthesis.” Inspired by postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory, a new generation of scholars succeeded in welding a diverse set of influences into one coherent ideology.

Despite the real variation within and between different academic departments, this synthesis is characterized by a widespread adherence to seven fundamental propositions: a deep skepticism about objective truth inspired by Michel Foucault; the use of a form of discourse analysis for explicitly political ends inspired by Edward Said; an embrace of essentialist categories of identity inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; a proud pessimism about the state of Western societies as well as a preference for public policies that explicitly make how someone is treated depend on the group to which they belong, both inspired by Derrick Bell; and an embrace of an intersectional logic for political activism as well as a deep-seated skepticism about the ability of members of different identity groups to understand each other, both associated with Kimberlé Crenshaw.”
― Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

“The approach sets out from the presupposition according to which a genuine deconstruction of the world of our time begins with the full recognition of the perforce provincial status of our discourses and the necessarily regional character of our concepts—and therefore with a critique of every form of abstract universalism.”
― Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics