Quotes About Colonialism

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

The canker has so eaten into the society that in many cases the only meaning of education is a knowledge of English.

Now, after the material resources of the colonies have been looted, their spiritual and cultural resources are being transformed into commodities for the world market.

Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair.

that this cultural theft was the last insult of colonialism, and that having raped a country's natural resources and subjected its people to foreign rule the colonial powers could not even leave the subject peoples with their own culture unmolested or unseized.

Home ownership,and the vast consumption of materials and energy it requires, forces some pretty exploitative foreign policy manoeuvres. This makes people in those resource-rich places as mad as natives were at the practices of the colonial empires exploiting them two hundred years ago.

The specific line here is that you must never question Morocco's sovereignty over the Western Sahara, the land claimed in 1975 when 350,000 Moroccans marched into the then-Spanish territory, kicking off a war that lasted sixteen years and only strengthened the Moroccan government's resolve.

Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and even worse, as the fulfillment of God's will.

DneÅ¡ní Francie není zemí rovných pÃ…â"¢íležitostí, rasismus je zde krutou realitou, jako ostatnÄ› vÅ¡ude jinde na svÄ›tÄ›. Ale hulákat, že se nezmÄ›nila od dob kolonializmu, je jako poplivat památku tÄ›ch, kteÃ…â"¢í skute?nÄ› pod vládou koloniálního imperializmu trpÄ›li.

I am increasingly convinced of a slippage, an unremarked analytical gray zone, between what we who devote ourselves to discerning the machinations of colonial practice think we know about those practices and how we imagine they manifest now. Embarking on a tracking of these occlusive processes with an expectation of a repetition of earlier colonial policies is a misguided task.

What has long made the U.S. military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean a "secret history," or the nuclear test sites that have ravaged large swaths of reservation land in the United States a "Native American problem," or consigned the Mariana Islands as outside the field of (post)colonial work? Why have these not been considered nodal points of an imperial history rather than grist for the case that the U.S. remains an imperial exception?

occlusions derive from colonial scripts: some derive from the conceptual habits we bring to them and the implicit assumptions that our conceptual repertoires leave unaddressed. Sometimes that distinction is hard to draw. Occlusions have multiple sources not easily untangled.

One task is to identify what for some time I have referred to as the "epistemic politics" that often sever colonial pasts from their contemporary translations

ask explicitly how the "slow violence" of imperial formations is dislodged from the politics of its making and renamed.

this book attempts to tackle: the temporal and affective space in which colonial inequities endure and the forms in which they do so.

see the interview done by Valentine Daniel for Public Culture (24, no. 3 [Fall 2012]: 487–508).

colonial entailments do not have a life of their own. They wrap around contemporary problems; adhere in the logics of governance; are plaited through racialized distinctions; and hold tight to the less tangible emotional economies of humiliations, indignities, and resentments

Colonial counterinsurgency policies rest undiluted in current security measures. Molten in their form, colonial entailments may lose their visible and identifiable presence in the vocabulary, conceptual grammar, and idioms of current concerns. It is the effort of this venture to halt in the face of these processes of occlusion and submersion, to ask about how they work, their differential effects; and on whom they most palpably act.

An excursion through the politics of conceptual labor is the meat of the chapters that follow. The political effects and practices that imperial formations impose and induce are its marrow.

ask what sorts of rethinking and reformulations might allow a better understanding of the political grammar of colonialism's durable presence, the dispositions it fosters, the indignities it nourishes, the indignations that are responsive to those effects.

thinking otherwise is to inhabit them differently, to envision how to recast the resilient impingements and damages to which imperial forms give rise.

think through the conceptual habits we bring to the study of colonial presence, not least the assumption of "confident access" to what that presence entails: how it manifests and on whom it most impinges.

At least one challenge is not to imagine either "the postcolony" or the postcolonial imperium as replicas of earlier degradations or as the inadvertent, inactive leftovers of more violent colonial relations. It is rather to track how new de-formations and new forms of debris work on matter and mind to eat through people's resources and resiliencies as they embolden new political actors with indignant refusal, forging unanticipated, entangled, and empowered alliances.

a focus on the "supremacy of reason" as the master trope of colonial critique has displaced the enduring affective work that such rationalities perform.