The kinds of games people play against "The colonial" (an archetype in their minds):
"Ah, you WANT to be mysterious... you fail to communicate your problems. Please, tell me again, what were they?? Oh! I see, rather petty compared to the natives that suffered under you, old chap, haw, haw, dontcha think?? And if you really expect us to "understand" you, as you keep begging us to do, well wouldn't a little effort on your part be worth the cost, you little high and mighty Lady of the Manor, haw, haw, haw."
"The colonial" has to do penance to prove his or her humanity, otherwise it is presumed not to exist. Asking me to work overtime to communicate beyond what I have done for twenty years to explain why it is wrong to treat others as less-than-human is part of this. "Your humanity hasn't quite come across to us over here. Keep trying." Twenty years on.
"Ah, you WANT to be mysterious... you fail to communicate your problems. Please, tell me again, what were they?? Oh! I see, rather petty compared to the natives that suffered under you, old chap, haw, haw, dontcha think?? And if you really expect us to "understand" you, as you keep begging us to do, well wouldn't a little effort on your part be worth the cost, you little high and mighty Lady of the Manor, haw, haw, haw."
"The colonial" has to do penance to prove his or her humanity, otherwise it is presumed not to exist. Asking me to work overtime to communicate beyond what I have done for twenty years to explain why it is wrong to treat others as less-than-human is part of this. "Your humanity hasn't quite come across to us over here. Keep trying." Twenty years on.
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What I fantasize for this book (although I know you don't want to commercialize, so don't listen to me) is an introduction by someone established, and a press that puts it in book fairs; this so that more people get wind of it and with some context; why? because the experience of reading and thinking about it is valuable and isn't in every book.
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Things I'd do to teach it (and I keep thinking about teaching because I am so backlogged with writing projects it is a terrible shame) might include reading on memory, trauma, loss, representation of time, historical and theoretical context of course, but also something about painting, because it's quite painting like, I find; it would be fun to look at modern paintings that represent landscapes in different ways and work with perspective in different ways; cities too.
Ah, and also: an assignment on it, for students able to do this, could be to make a video (not with photos, something less documentary), just on how things look, and working with pacing; a video that would give the feeling of the slowness and speed and perspectives in the book.
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Anyway the striking thing to me about the whole story is loss of something that was positive and sustaining which is suddenly gone and which is also re-encoded as having been a bad thing. So that's all really fragmenting and yadda yadda. Representing that visually, symbolically, seems to be the best way to get that across, which is what you do, and I think it would be really interesting to see what people would come up with, painting the feelings and sensations (not so much the images, they're already there) in the book.
So, Wordpress cut off the first part of my comment which said, I am proceeding at my own risk; I don't have the kind of teaching assignment that would let me teach the courses I'd like to put this book in, but it would be a GREAT one for various of these, for various reasons but starting with the super-compelling prose! (I had this written in more detail, but it got lost in this WordPress blip.)
So, Wordpress cut off the first part of my comment which said, I am proceeding at my own risk; I don't have the kind of teaching assignment that would let me teach the courses I'd like to put this book in, but it would be a GREAT one for various of these, for various reasons but starting with the super-compelling prose! (I had this written in more detail, but it got lost in this WordPress blip.)
And, I get the sort of reaction you talk about in this post a lot from students, re different books that are from other countries. They need context, for one thing, and for another it can be sort of hit or miss, the question of what they will be able to grock.
For example, there's this Cuban modernist, Alejo Carpentier, who is difficult but who "flies" here with audiences, because Louisiana is in the Caribbean too and there is a lot in Carpentier's work that is familiar on an intuitive level (heat, slavery, sugar cane, French and Spanish culture, historical connections to Haiti and migration from there, African cultures). So people are able to deal with the difficulty of the dense prose. But when I tried to teach him in Oregon, everything in him was so unfamiliar that he had to be graduate level only.
I've got an opposite example from Peru, very foreign here but works in Oregon, etc., but the comment function isn't working too well (I think my electricity is browning out a little or something) so I'll stop here.
"The Colonial" has to do penance to prove his or her humanity, otherwise it is presumed not to exist.
***Well, yes and no. Spaniards still look down on South Americans generally, yes. And the British condescend to the US still. And many, say, Guatemalans and Bolivians of European descent still do not believe the indigenous peoples they are still colonizing, are fully human.
BUT. Virtually every South American, if they are not Native American, is a "colonial," if you will, although that post colonial moment Africa had in the late 20th century was in the early 19th for most of us.
I wonder how analogous your situation might be of that to Miami Cubans. They are the ones that left when Fidel came in, and they tend to have been whiter and more conservative families. It is a very weird universe they live in. It's was traumatic for a certain younger generation that was away from Cuba (and if you're a US citizen, US makes it hard to get exit visa if you're going to Cuba) AND had these ultra right wing grieving parents AND etc.
I just got a book notice for Vargas Llosa's latest. Now, HE is a "Western" writer for sure, even though he's from Peru which isn't in your definition of the West, but is in mine since it contains people like Vargas Llosa. It's about Roger Casement, the Congo, and Amazonia. It may or may not be good but I am interested in it. What will he do with this material.
Casement went to both places and criticized the colonial situations. The Congo WAS a colony at the time; this was the Heart of Darkness era. Amazonia hadn't been a colony any more, officially, for 100 years but internal colonialism was going strong and stronger.
I wonder how analogous your situation might be of that to Miami Cubans. They are the ones that left when Fidel came in, and they tend to have been whiter and more conservative families. It is a very weird universe they live in. It's was traumatic for a certain younger generation that was away from Cuba (and if you're a US citizen, US makes it hard to get exit visa if you're going to Cuba) AND had these ultra right wing grieving parents AND etc.
The reason I say that most of identity politics is based on a false epistemology is that there really is no attention paid to individual attitudes, and less than none to dispositions of "left" or "right".
Even when I had just arrived from Zimbabwe to Australia, I was already much more "liberal" (far more left wing) than most Australians I encountered. Culturally, I was conservative, but politically and temperamentally I was virtually anarchistic.
The Australians' insistence on treating me as if I were a right winger who needed every attitude to be reformed was the basis for my understanding that they are working with a false epistemology.
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