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| joyful face of a sepia woman |
"Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological prowess as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order. These hierarchies opened up new vistas for many, particularly for those exploited or cornered within the traditional order. To them the new order looked like-and here lay its psychological pull-the first step towards a more just and equal world. That was why some of the finest critical minds in Europe-and in the East-were to feel that colonialism, by introducing modern structures into the barbaric world, would open up the non-West to the modern critic-analytic spirit. Like the 'hideous heathen god who refused to drink nectar except from the skulls of murdered men', Karl Marx felt, history would produce out of oppression, violence and cultural dislocation not merely new technological and social forces but also a new social consciousness in Asia and Africa. It would be critical in the sense in which the Western tradition of social criticism-from Vico to Marx-had been critical and it would be rational in the sense in which post Cartesian Europe had been rational. It is thus that the a historical primitives would one day, the expectation went, learn to see themselves as masters of nature and, hence, as masters of their own fate".
Ashis Nandy
The Intimate Enemy; Self and Recovery of Self under Colonialism
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| the poetry of a Jennifer by Igor B. |
Jennifer's pic gallery
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