Quotes About Colonialism

Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.

What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were - and still are - condescended to by the English.

What colonialism does is cause an identity crisis about one's own culture.

Whenever you talk about Chinese dragons, emperors, palaces, concubines - they conjure up a whole colonial argle-bargle that has nothing to do with historical reality.

My obsessions stay the same - historical memory and historical erasure. I am particularly interested in the Americas and how a history that is rooted in colonialism, the language and iconography of empire, disenfranchisement, the enslavement of peoples, and the way that people were sectioned off because of blood.

A Passage to India. It is my favourite movie.

The first Black Migration to this country was forced migration. It was the Middle Passage.

'A Passage To India' by E. M. Forster - It opened my mind to a world I'd never known before.

Of India he (Sir John Strachey) had pronounced (and in reissues of "India: Its Administration and Progress" continually repeated) that nothing by that name existed. "This is the first and most essential fact about India that can be learned.

The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.

Others such as Baden-Powell and Kipling were concerned that western civilisation would dissolve if its white blood was thinned.

The Vietnamese never asked themselves, any more than had the French, whether the Cambodians wanted the new system they were introducing. They acted in the unassailable certitude of a superior truth.

Britain and Churchill fought not solely in the name of liberty and democracy, but also with the intention of maintaining the empire, defending vital interests and remaining a great power.

Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

So Geographers in Afric-maps With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps; And o'er uninhabitable Downs Place Elephants for want of Towns

he hated the white men who interfered with the manly pursuits of throat-cutting, kidnapping, slave-dealing, and fire-raising

It is written that the earth belongs to those who have fair skins and hard but foolish hearts.

Top hats in Paris and London were paid for with genocide along the Great Lakes of the wilderness.

Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Abdulrazak Gurnah

"The sun," said Mr. Bull, "never sets on English dominion. Do you understand how that is?" "oh, yes" said the Indian, "that is because God is afraid to trust them in the dark."

The reader, knowing nothing about the 'dark continent,' filled in the blanks. Pictured Stone in a tent, kerosene lamp held up by a Hottentot providing the only light, elephants stampeding outside while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another.

I am convinced that one can buy in Harrods of London a kit that allows an enterprising Englishman to create a British school anywhere in the third world. It comes with black robes, preprinted report cards for Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter terms, as well as hymnals, Prefect Badges, and a syllabus. Assembly required.