Leia’s Reviews > Culture and Imperialism > Status Update

slow and steady wins the race

slow going but we’re persevering fr fr

But why is this a matter of what to read and about where? Very simply, because critical discourse has taken no cognizance of the enormously exciting, varied post-colonial literature produced in resistance to the imperialist expansion of Europe and the US in the past two centuries. To tead Austen without also reading Fanon and Cabral - and so on and on - is to disaffiliate modern culture from its engagements

One responsebin the West to the new conjunctures, then, has been profoundly reactionary: the effort to reassert old authorities and canons, the effort to reinstate ten or twenty or thirty essential Western books without which a Westerner would not be educated - these efforts are couched in the rhetoric of embattled patriotism.

Duuuude. Dude!

Culture is exonerated of any entanglements with power, reresentations are considered only as apolitical images to be parsed and construed as so many grammars of exchange, and the divorce of the present from the past is assumed to be complete. And yet, far from this separation of spheres being a neutral or accidental choice, its real meaning is as an act of complicity, ..

Crazy!!!!! What have 30 years done?? nothing

With few exceptions, the women’s as well as the working-class movement was pro-empire. And, while one must alwaus be at great pains to show that different imaginations, sensibilities, ideas, and philosophies were at work, and that each work of literature or art is special, there was virtual unity of purpose on this score: the empire must be maintained, and it was maintained.

So excellent