Instructions
Write a post of 2 pages touching upon the readings below. The post should mimic the sample posted below.
Read the followings
Chapter 8 “Ethnicity, Race, & Nationalism” in Barker & Jane.
Rogers Brubaker “Ethnicity, Race, & Nationalism;”
Homi Bhabha, “Double Vision;”
Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism & Exhibitionary Order”.
Sample Post
This week’s readings highlighted the fact that despite living in a post-imperialist age, most of the world still exists in a reality defined by colonialism and exploitation. Consider the terms “Global South” and “Global North”, a way to divide the world between the rich and poor, and unsurprisingly fits nicely between the colonizers and the colonized. Dependency theory, the idea that poorer countries are trapped into unfair trade deals to provide raw materials to richer nations, paints an easy-to-understand picture of how colonialism shaped the modern world and how it still operates in a modern, globalized context.
Even though the colonized land and people are exploited, there is still agency. After all, why would independence movements and revolutions occur if not for the colonized believing in their agency and demanding freedom? When the French came to Algeria, they came “with premeditation, with cynicism, they imposed a foreign code on the Muslims because they knew that this code could not apply to them and that it could have no other effect than to destroy the internal structures of Algerian society” (Sartre, 132). Colonists knew permitting any sort of native culture to exist would be used to foster independence movements. As Sartre points out though, colonialism eats itself, because for as much effort as the French put into destroying Algerian society and implementing French culture, the French could not bring themselves to allow Algerians to become fully French and seen as equals.
This is the ouroboros nature of the White Man’s Burden in what was seen by its believer as “an obligation and responsibility rooted in a sense of being agents who had a world-historic mission to bring the light of civilization and progress to others inhabiting ‘areas of darkness’.” (Narayan, 135). In an ironic twist, the White Man’s Burden in some ways denied the colonizers their own agency, to a much lesser extent of course. As Sartre notes, the war in Algeria was draining the French of more money than the colony generated at its most productive era. There is no logical reason for continuing to drain your own resources for control unless you fully believe that colonization is required for the betterment of both sides. And even if you succeed in “enlightening” these “areas of darkness”, the White Man’s Burden does not allow for the colonized to ever reach the same status as white people, and therefore necessitates permanent colonies regardless of the manpower and money needed to maintain it.
In our previous readings and discussions on history and memory, we discussed who gets to tell history. Today, the era of colonialism, particularly in the Western former imperialist powers, is mostly seen as an ugly chapter that eventually fell apart into a better world where all people have independence and self-determination. In hindsight this seems like a natural course for history, “but the tragedy is that most of its politicians are trapped in the concept of a world proposed by those who rule it, and these politicians see progress as inevitability. They have forgotten the desperate authority of the man who has nothing” (Walcott, 5). Without the colonized finding some agency in their suffering, then mass colonization would continue up to today. It is unsurprising that across the world, from Ireland to Palestine to Vietnam, no matter who the oppressor is, there is a shared sense of culture by colonized people in finding agency in their subjection and eventually bucking the yoke. Colonization is a system, and in the end one its main products is rebellion.