Post Colonial Quotes

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.

Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.

Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history.

Throughout my life, I have never stopped to strategize about my next steps. I often just keep walking along, through whichever door opens. I have been on a journey and this journey has never stopped. When the journey is acknowledged and sustained by those I work with, they are a source of inspiration, energy and encouragement. They are the reasons I kept walking, and will keep walking, as long as my knees hold out.

But artists aren’t the only marginalized folks controlling real estate. Think about the colonizing role that wealthy white gay men have played in communities of color; they’re often the first group to gentrify poor and working-class neighborhoods. Harlem is a good example. Gays have moved in and driven up rents, as have renegade young white students, who want to be cool and hip. This is colonization, post-colonial-style. After all, the people who are “sent back” to recover the territory are always those who don’t mind associating with the colored people! And it’s a double bind, because some of these people could be allies. Some gay white men are proactive about racism, even while being entrepreneurial. But in the end, they take spaces, redo them, sell them for a certain amount of money, while the people who have been there are displaced. And in some cases, the people of color who are there are perceived as enemies by white newcomers.

The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgements are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming.

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all.

Israel’s settler colonialism differed from its predecessors’ in another way. Where European powers colonized from a position of strength and a claim to God-given superiority, the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the reverse: on Jewish victimization and vulnerability. The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus—an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and your settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot. If you cleared your land of its Indigenous inhabitants, or did so in your colonies, then it is anti-Semitic to say that we cannot. It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide.

But there was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. One could not even give up hope. The wind would blow, the sand would settle, and in some as yet unforeseen manner time would bring about a change which could only be terrifying, since it would not be a continuation of the present.

...she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head.

Has not the country become independent? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar. This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do.

He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking.

Stanley’s Congo expedition fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. Before his trip, white outsiders had spent hundreds of years nibbling at Africa’s edges, claiming land around the coastline, but rarely venturing inland. Disease, hostile tribes and the lack of any clear commercial potential in Africa meant that hundreds of years after white explorers first circumnavigated its coastline, it was still referred to in mysterious terms as the Dark Continent, a source of slaves, ivory and other goods, but not a place white men thought worthy of colonisation. It was Leopold’s jostling for the Congo that forced other European powers to stake claims to Africa’s interior, and within two decades the entire continent had effectively been carved up by the white man. The modern history of Africa – decades of colonial exploitation and post-independence chaos – was begun by a Telegraph reporter battling down the Congo River.

Over there is like here, neither better or worse. But I am from here, just as the date palm standing in the courtyard of our house has grown in our house and not in anyone else's.

The immediate issue here is whether the Pooh animals realise they constitute a de facto nudist colony.

I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division say, of men into "us" (Westerners) and "they" (Orientals). For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends.

Ah, sahib. I know you just come to comfort a old man left to live by hisself. Soomintra say I too old-fashion. And Leela, she always by you. Why you don’t sit down, sahib? It ain’t dirty. Is just how it does look.’ Ganesh didn’t sit down. ‘Ramlogan, I come to buy over your taxis.

Honor, justice and humanity call upon us to hold and to transmit to our posterity, that liberty, which we received from our ancestors. It is not our duty to leave wealth to our children; but it is our duty to leave liberty to them. No infamy, iniquity, or cruelty can exceed our own if we, born and educated in a country of freedom, entitled to its blessings and knowing their value, pusillanimously deserting the post assigned us by Divine Providence, surrender succeeding generations to a condition of wretchedness from which no human efforts, in all probability, will be sufficient to extricate them; the experience of all states mournfully demonstrating to us that when arbitrary power has been established over them, even the wisest and bravest nations that ever flourished have, in a few years, degenerated into abject and wretched vassals.

and from afar you watch as we do to ourselves the very things you used to do to us.

I imagine that existential dread probably ought to get a devil. A devil of post-colonial angst. A devil of complicated grief.

I've gone and hired myself out. I've hired myself out to Death.

There was no denying the fact that the death of sugarcane was sounding the knell for something else in the country. What can we call it?

The British colonial empire has done more to fight poverty than all post-war development aid combined.

According to statistics compiled by the Washington Post, in 2015 a full quarter of those shot and killed by police were suffering from mental illness.

—I don't believe in that shit, Oscar. That's our parents' shit. —It's ours too, he said.

But when did this anger take root? When snakes first appeared on the national scene? When water in the bowels of the earth turned bitter? Or when he visited America and failed to land an interview with Global Network News on its famous program Meet the Global Mighty? It is said that when he was told that he could not be granted even a minute on the air, he could hardly believe his ears or even understand what they were talking about, knowing that in his country he was always on TV; his every moment - eating, shitting, sneezing, or blowing his nose - captured on camera.

It is also difficult to maintain that post-colonial Africa hasn’t seen violence and suffering. The Africans who- oh wry irony- step into rickety boats in order to find a safe haven in the Europe of the former colonial powers.

The USSR indeed had nothing more to gain from Zionism—the British empire was dying—and everything to gain in terms of placating the new, post-colonial governments, securing its vulnerable southern border, and threatening the West’s oil supplies.

I exhausted myself trying to take it all in, noting every little variation and departure from how things were supposed to be. My notion of home and everything in it as ideal, archetypal, was being overthrown. It was as though the definitions of all the words in my vocabulary were expanding at once. Cape Breton was much like Newfoundland, yet everything seemed slightly off. Light, colours, surface textures, dimensions – objects like telegraph poles, fence posts, mail boxes, which you would think would be the same everywhere, were bigger or smaller or wider by a hair than they were back home. That I was able to detect such subtle differences made me realize how circumscribed my life had been, how little of the world I had seen.

The epistemological separation of colony from metropolis, the systemic occultation of the colonial labour on which imperial prosperity is based, results in a situation in which... the truth of metropolitan existence is not visible in the metropolis itself

The Whiteman told of another country beyond the sea where a powerful woman sat on a throne while men and women danced under the shadow of her authority and benevolence. She was ready to spread the shadow to cover the Agikuyu. They laughed at this eccentric man whose skin had been so scalded that the black outside had peeled off. The hot water must have gone into his head. Nevertheless, his words about a woman on the throne echoed something in the heart, deep down in their history. It was many, many years ago. Then women ruled the land of the Agikuyu. Men had no property, they were only there to serve the whims and needs of the women. Those were hard years. So they waited for women to go to war, they plotted a revolt, taking an oath of secrecy to keep them bound each to each in the common pursuit of freedom. They would sleep with all the women at once, for didn't they know the heroines would return hungry for love and relaxation? Fate did the rest; women were pregnant; the takeover met with little resistance.

the mind is like an ant’s nest, individual neurons, like ant workers, weighing in on either side of any given issue until a tipping point is reached and the brain, or the colony, thinks, I have made a decision and here (post facto) are my rational reasons.

It still shocks me to see countless academics who consider themselves intelligent, deep, or critical who constantly post and share articles from places like NYTimes, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and other such sources that, at the surface, appear to be intelligent, objective, and critical even of the power under which they operate (the Western elites), but if you dig deeper, you will discover that they are, one way or another, in perfect harmony with the imperial and colonial agenda of the West against the rest.

It was not long after that Ganesh saw a big new notice in the shop, painted on cardboard. ‘Is Leela self who write that,’ Ramlogan said. ‘I didn’t ask she to write it, mind you. She just sit down quiet quiet one morning after tea and write it off.’ It read: NOTICE NOTICE, IS. HEREBY; PROVIDED: THAT, SEATS! ARE, PROVIDED. FOR; FEMALE: SHOP, ASSISTANTS! Ganesh said, ‘Leela know a lot of punctuation marks.’ That is it, sahib. All day the girl just sitting down and talking about these puncturation marks. She is like that, sahib.

Decolonization is the process whereby we intend the conditions we want to live and social relations we wish to have. We have to supplant the colonial logic of the state itself. German philosopher Gustav Landauer wrote almost a hundred years ago that "the State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships." Decolonization requires us to exercise our sovereignties differently, and reconfigure our communities based on shared experiences, ideals, and visions. Almost all indigenous formulations of sovereignty--such as the Two Row Wampum agreement of peace, friendship, and respect between the Haudenosaunee nations and settlers--are premised on revolutionary notions of respectful coexistence and stewardship of the land, which goes far beyond any Western liberal democratic ideal. Original blog post: Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory and Practice. Quoted In: Decolonize Together: Moving beyond a Politics of Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization. Taking Sides.

The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to transport troops; the schools were started so as to teach us how to say "Yes" in their language. They imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world had never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago. Yes, my dear sirs, I came as an invader into your very homes: a drop of the poison which you have injected in the the veins of history.

You call yourself a gentleman, yet you stare at me.” “I never called myself a gentleman.” “You are a gentleman and you still stare.” “If I do, the fault is your own. You are a complicated lass, Lael Click.” She set the dishes down with a clatter. Complicated? She wouldn’t ask him to explain himself. She didn’t have to. He leaned back against a porch post, stretched his legs, and crossed his shiny black boots. “You went tae one of the finest finishing schools in the colonies, yet I find you barefoot and bonnetless and making social calls tae Indians, wi’ your hair down tae boot. And unchaperoned, as weel.

The post-anthropocentric shift away from the hierarchical relations that had privileged ‘Man’ requires a form of estrangement and a radical repositioning on the part of the subject. The best method to accomplish this is through the strategy of de-familiarization or critical distance from the dominant vision of the subject. Dis-identification involves the loss of familiar habits of thought and representation in order to pave the way for creative alternatives. Deleuze would call it an active ‘deterritorialization’. Race and post-colonial theories have also made important contributions to the methodology and the political strategy of de-familiarization (Gilroy, 2005).

Invaders did not stay invaders for ever. Eventually, they became no different from every other tribe or people in a land. Languages muddied, blended, surrendered. Habits were exchanged like currency, and before too long everyone saw the world the same way as everyone else. And if that way was wrong, then misery was assured, for virtually everyone, for virtually ever.

Then you can say: those people had a bad conscience. But perhaps those people, in that time and context, really believed this to be the best choice for their country. Regardless of its limitations the colonial world offered more opportunities and protection than indigenous governance would have done. And the post-colonial experience has taught us that those people were right!

The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined--perhaps even regulated--traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed a the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

To people unfamiliar with the last thirty years of post-colonial academics, this might seem a ridiculous word, without meaning or substance. They may be right. It’s a fancy word for racist, but implies much more: an Orientalist is someone who invents exotic fictions about the East to prove a point about western superiority. Orientalism is a very serious charge to lay at the doorstep of a left-leaning academic.

Because leftists are more likely to believe in the innate, inner quality of all people, they attribute the world's inequalities to outer, structural injustices. In particular, the left sees many power hierarchies as unmerited and exploitative. Leftist morality is rooted in the imperative to equalize, to various extents, discrepancies in power (especially through education). Compared with conservatives, leftists have a lower tolerance for inequality. In this leftist worldview, evil comes primarily from undeserved inequalities in strength or power: from capitalists who exploit workers, unscrupulous corporations that deceive consumers, colonialists who leach off third-world countries, soldiers and police who abuse civilians, men who mistreat women, humans who disrespect the animals and plants in their environment, and so on.

The new Pennsylvania Fireplaces, as he called them, were initially somewhat popular, at £5 apiece, and papers around the colonies were filled with testimonials. “They ought to be called, both in justice and gratitude, Mr. Franklin’s stoves,” declared one letter writer in the Boston Evening Post. “I believe all who have experienced the comfort and benefit of them will join with me that the author of this happy invention merits a statue.” The governor of Pennsylvania was among the enthusiastic, and he offered Franklin what could have been a lucrative patent. “But I declined it,” Franklin noted in his autobiography. “As we enjoy great advantages from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.” It was a noble and sincere sentiment.

Noisy shuddering little commuter trains, debatable links: Shaw spent half a day joining one cross-country service to another; hard enough work just to arrive mid-afternoon on the brown edge of Wales. The town, with its undecodable medieval topography and commanding position above the River Severn, had done well out of sheep; then out of brewing; and finally out of coal. Now, like most of those old places, post-colonial, post-industrial and – in the sense that its past had now become its present – fully post-historical, it was curating a collection of original burgage plots, timber-framed heritage structures and quaintly squalid street names. It had been pleased with itself for 700 years.

And, despite the number of bigots in our grandfathers’ day deriding Australians as the children of criminals, remarkably few Australians pointed out the obvious contrary fact that, whatever other conclusions one might draw from our weird national origins, the post-colonial history of Australia utterly exploded the theory of genetic criminal inheritance. Here was a community of people, handpicked over decades for their “criminal propensities” and for no other reason, whose offspring turned out to form one of the most law-abiding societies in the world. At a time when neo-conservative social idealogues are trying to revive the old bogey of hereditary disposition to crime, this may still be worth pondering.

Finally, Europe’s post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities—particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna—were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called ‘the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe’ was periodically rent with riots, massacres and pogroms—but it was real, and it survived into living memory. Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities the Jews in France, for example—represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union—an empire, not a country and anyway only part-European, as already noted—stood aside from this new, serially homogenous Europe. But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future. Between them refugees; guest-workers; the denizens of Europe’s former colonies drawn back to the imperial metropole by the prospect of jobs and freedom; and the voluntary and involuntary migrants from failed or repressive states at Europe’s expanded margins have turned London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan and a dozen other places into cosmopolitan world cities whether they like it or not.

In spite of this firestorm, and even with Israel’s extensive aerial surveillance capabilities and its many hundreds of agents and spies planted in Lebanon16 (the war took place before the age of the reconnaissance drone), not one of the PLO’s several functioning underground command and control posts or its multiple communications centers, was ever hit. Nor was a single PLO leader killed in the attacks, although many civilians died when the Israeli air force missed its targets. This is surprising, given just how extensive were Israel’s efforts to liquidate them.17 Israel’s leaders were clearly unconcerned about killing civilians trying to do so: after an air attack in July 1981 destroyed a building in Beirut with heavy civilian casualties, Begin’s office had stated that “Israel was no longer refraining from attacking guerrilla targets in civilian areas.”18

learn how to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.” Teachers are then encouraged to drive their pupils to participate in “social movements that struggle for social justice” and “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.”28 R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original cochair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, cited in the state’s official reference guide, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.

The authors [Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick] see the post-World War 2 development of the United States into the world's sole superpower as a sharp divergence from the founders' original intent and historical development prior to the mid-twentieth century. They quote an Independence Day speech by President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British colonialism and claimed that the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." Stone and Kuznick fail to mention that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, colonizing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century. In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an imperialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding.

This is the cardinal virtue of an Objective narrative. Given its timeless nature, there is no need to assemble it with rackets and ruses. With the envy of eunuchs and ingenuity fanned by resentment, men incapable of profound insights deny the Objective nature of the written word in the despairing hope of dissuading those who know the Truth and have the courage to write it. I, Petronius Jablonski, hereby forbid any and all Freudian, structural, post-structural, post-post-structural, post-colonial, post-anything analysis or deconstruction of my annals and condemn any and all such enterprises. All theorizing based on class, gender, and ethnicity is strictly prohibited. An Objective narrative is not a Rorschach blot for one to project his pathologies and sundry whines. If the Reader insists on “reading into” the narrative, he should fill the margins with sketches of penises, vaginas, and stick-figures engaged in coitus.

In this postcolonial context, my contention is that interreligious engagement is enhanced by renewed attention to the particularity of religious traditions. From a European (Anglican) standpoint, a revised particularist theology of religions is proposed as an appropriate Christian theology for our time that respects the integrity of Christianity and of other religious traditions. This particularist approach concerns Christian terms of engagement with other religious traditions, as these may be understood in Christian theological terms. Having regard to questions raised in the opening paragraph above, centred in trinitarian thinking, as capable of hospitality to the liberative and interreligious concerns of post-colonial, Asian and feminist theologies; respectful interreligious engagement and the pursuit of gender justice amid increasing global diversity need not require repudiation of orthodox trinitarian thought and its liturgical expressions.

And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital "T," which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small "t," which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the other, either. If I, as a Japanese, find this new historical situation a bit tragic, it's not because Japanese people now had a live in two temporalities. It's rather because as a result of having to do so, they had no choice but to enter the asymmetrical relationship that had marked and continues to mark the modern world—the asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West, which is tantamount, however abstractly, to the asymmetrical relationship between what is universal and all the rest that is merely particular.

You will tell me that there always exists a chasm between the world depicted in novels and films and the world that people actually live in. It is the chasm between the world mediated by art and the world unmediated by art, formless and drab. You are absolutely right. The gap that my mother felt was not necessarily any deeper than the gap felt by a European girl who loved books and films. Yet there is one critical difference. For in my mother's case, the chasm between the world of art and real life also symbolized something more: the asymmetrical relationship I mentioned earlier—the asymmetrical relationship between those who live only in a universal temporality and those who live in both a universal and a particular one. To make this discussion a little more concrete, let me introduce a character named Francoise. Francoise is a young Parisienne living before World War II. Like my mother, she loves reading books and watching films. Also like my mother, she lives in a small apartment with her mother, who is old, shabby looking, and illiterate. One day Francoise, full of artistic aspirations, writes an autobiographical novel. It is the tale of her life torn between the world of art and the world of reality. (Not an original tale, I must say.) The novel is well received in France. Several hundred Japanese living in Japan read this novel in French, and one of them decides to translate it into Japanese. My mother reads the novel. She identifies with the heroine and says to herself, "This girl is just like me!" Moved, my mother, also full of artistic aspirations, writes her own autobiography. That novel is well received in Japan but is not translated into French—or any other European language, for that matter. The number of Europeans who read Japanese is just too small. Therefore, only Japanese readers can share the plight of my mother's life. For other readers in the world, it's as if her novel never existed. It's as if she herself never existed. Even if my mother had written her novel first, Francoise would never have read it and been moved by it.

A SOLAR OASIS Like everywhere else in Puerto Rico, the small mountain city of Adjuntas was plunged into total darkness by Hurricane Maria. When residents left their homes to take stock of the damage, they found themselves not only without power and water, but also totally cut off from the rest of the island. Every single road was blocked, either by mounds of mud washed down from the surrounding peaks, or by fallen trees and branches. Yet amid this devastation, there was one bright spot. Just off the main square, a large, pink colonial-style house had light shining through every window. It glowed like a beacon in the terrifying darkness. The pink house was Casa Pueblo, a community and ecology center with deep roots in this part of the island. Twenty years ago, its founders, a family of scientists and engineers, installed solar panels on the center’s roof, a move that seemed rather hippy-dippy at the time. Somehow, those panels (upgraded over the years) managed to survive Maria’s hurricane-force winds and falling debris. Which meant that in a sea of post-storm darkness, Casa Pueblo had the only sustained power for miles around. And like moths to a flame, people from all over the hills of Adjuntas made their way to the warm and welcoming light.

Age of Extremes" delivers its fundamental argument in the form of a periodisation. The ‘short 20th century’ between 1914 and 1991 can be divided into three phases. The first, ‘The Age of Catastrophe’, extends from the slaughter of the First World War, through the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism, to the cataclysm of the Second World War and its immediate consequences, including the end of European empires. The second, ‘The Golden Age’, stretching approximately from 1950 to 1973, saw historically unprecedented rates of growth and a new popular prosperity in the advanced capitalist world, with the spread of mixed economies and social security systems; accompanied by rising living standards in the Soviet bloc and the ‘end of the Middle Ages’ in the Third World, as the peasantry streamed off the land into modern cities in post-colonial states. The third phase, ‘Landslide’, starting with the oil crisis and onset of recession in 1973, and continuing into the present, has witnessed economic stagnation and political atrophy in the West, the collapse of the USSR in the East, socio-cultural anomie across the whole of the North, and the spread of vicious ethnic conflicts in the South. The signs of these times are: less growth, less order, less security. The barometer of human welfare is falling.

She picked up the book beside her. Jane Eyre. Used, bought recently in a bookshop in Camden Passage, shabby nineteenth-century binding, pages bearing vague stains, fingered, smoothed. She opened the book to the place she left it when the taxicab pulled up. “My daughter, flee temptation.” “Mother, I will,” Jane responded, as the moon turned to woman. The fiction had tricked her. Drawn her in so that she became Jane. Yes. The parallels were there. Was she not heroic Jane? Betrayed. Left to wander. Solitary. Motherless. Yes, and with no relations to speak of except an uncle across the water. She occupied her mind. Comforted for a time, she came to. Then, with a sharpness, reprimanded herself. No, she told herself. No, she could not be Jane. Small and pale. English. No, she paused. No, my girl, try Bertha. Wild-maned Bertha. Clare thought of her father. Forever after her to train her hair. His visions of orderly pageboy. Coming home from work with something called Tame. She refused it; he called her Medusa. Do you intend to turn men to stone, daughter? She held to her curls, which turned kinks in the damp of London. Beloved racial characteristic. Her only sign, except for dark spaces here and there where melanin touched her. Yes, Bertha was closer to the mark. Captive. Ragôut. Mixture. Confused. Jamaican. Caliban. Carib. Cannibal. Cimarron. All Bertha. All Clare.

Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox said in 2016, in the run-up to the EU referendum, that ‘the United Kingdom is one of the few countries in the European Union that does not need to bury its twentieth-century history.’ Funny, because Britain is in fact one of the few countries in the world that literally did bury a good portion of its twentieth-century history. During the period of decolonisation, the British state embarked upon a systematic process of destroying the evidence of its crimes. Codenamed ‘Operation Legacy’, the state intelligence agencies and the Foreign Office conspired to literally burn, bury at sea or hide vast amounts of documents containing potentially sensitive details of things done in the colonies under British rule.25 Anything that might embarrass the government, that would show religious or racial intolerance or be used ‘unethically’ by a post-independence government was ordered destroyed or hidden. The Foreign Office were forced to admit in court about having hidden documents, then were unforthcoming about the scale of what was hidden, to the point that you’d be a fool to trust anything that is now said. But from what we know, hundreds of thousands of pages of documents were destroyed and over a million hidden, not just starting in the colonial period but dating all the way back to 1662. This operation was only exposed to the public in 2011 as part of a court case between the survivors of British concentration camps in Kenya and the government.

Today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numnious, something almost impossible to grasp. We connect to the cloud; we work in it; we store and retrieve stuff from it; we think through it. We pay for it and only notice it when it breaks. It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works. It is something we are training ourselves to rely upon with only the haziest of notions about what is being entrusted, and what it is being entrusted to. Downtime aside, the first criticism of this cloud is that it is a very bad metaphor. The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapor and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn't just have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are many of the previously weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialize, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and less amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation. Another criticism is that this lack of understanding is deliberate. There are good reasons, from national security to corporate secrecy to many kinds of malfeasance, for obscuring what's inside the cloud. What evaporates is agency and ownership: most of your emails, photos, status updates, business documents, library and voting data, health records, credit ratings, likes, memories, experiences, personal preferences, and unspoken desires are in the cloud, on somebody else's infrastructure. There's a reason Google and Facebook like to build data centers in Ireland (low taxes) and Scandinavia (cheap energy and cooling). There's a reason global, supposedly post-colonial empires hold onto bits of disputed territory like Diego Garcia and Cyprus, and it's because the cloud touches down in these places, and their ambiguous status can be exploited. The cloud shapes itself to geographies of power and influence, and it serves to reinforce them. The cloud is a power relationship, and most people are not on top of it. These are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where is shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centers and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it to give up some of its stories. As it fades away, certain secrets may be revealed. By understanding the way the figure of the cloud is used to obscure the real operation of technology, we can start to understand the many ways in which technology itself hides its own agency - through opaque machines and inscrutable code, as well as physical distance and legal constructs. And in turn, we may learn something about the operation of power itself, which was doing this sort of thing long before it had clouds and black boxes in which to hide itself.

The leading post-Zionists’ lack of solidarity with Palestinian citizens results from their reticence to confront the core nature of Israel as a settler colonial state and society.

In this context, a critique of the Zionist colonial project that brought about the 1948 Nakba is essential; it targets the very identity of the state and those committed to it. Yet post-Zionists have been cautious to address the pre-state Zionist colonization period and the Nakba.

Watching the red and yellow flowers in the sun thinking of nothing, it was as if a door opened and I was somewhere else, something else. Not myself any longer. I knew the time of day when though it is hot and blue and there are no clouds, the sky can have a very black look.

he was confounded by the shocking state of affairs. It was a true fall from grace – Philadelphia's crime and incarceration rates were the highest of all the colonial cities. Prostitutes stalked the streets as canoodling couples posted in every corner showed grossly public displays of affection. Sloppy drunkards drifted from one pub to another in broad daylight. Men, women, and children were shortly fused, and wild, impromptu brawls had become the norm.

An rud is annamh is iontach. A uniquely Irish phrase, not just in language but in attitude. We’re a post-colonial nation, and in many ways we don’t expect – or even, in a stubborn way, want – too many nice things. Going without will make the having, whenever it comes along, all the sweeter. That’s the reasoning, anyway. It’s why culturally we love when teams end famines and are deeply suspicious of anything more than a three-in-a-row.

This post-Oslo confinement was most constricting in the Gaza Strip. In the decades following 1993, the strip was cut off from the rest of the world in stages, encircled by troops on land and the Israeli navy by sea.3 Entering and leaving required rarely issued permits and became possible only through massive fortified checkpoints resembling human cattle pens, while arbitrary Israeli closures frequently interrupted the shipment of goods in and out of the strip. The economic results of what was in effect a siege of the Gaza Strip were particularly damaging. Most Gazans depended on work in Israel or on exporting goods. With stringent restrictions on doing both, economic life underwent a slow strangulation.

The Arcadian dreamscape celebrated by the colonial pioneers was, in fact, a post-apocalyptic one.

Hiba S. is one of the pioneer Iraqi women academics and authors in the field of media and journalism, currently exiled in Amman. During a visit to her office in summer 2014, Hiba shared that the early days of the occupation in 2003 were the most difficult she had ever experienced. She recollected: ‘I was sitting in my garden smoking when I suddenly saw a huge American tank driving through the street. I saw a Black soldier on the top of the tank. He looked at me and did the victory sign with his fingers. Had I had a pistol in my hand, I would have immediately shot myself in the head right then and there. The pain I felt upon seeing that image is indescribable. I felt as though all the years we had spent building our country, educating our students to make them better humans were gone with the wind.’ Hiba’s description carries strong feelings of loss, defeat, and humiliation. Also significant in her narrative is that the first American soldier she encountered in post-invasion Iraq was a Black soldier making the victory sign. This is perhaps one of the most ironic and paradoxical images of the occupation. A Black soldier from a historically and consistently oppressed group in American society, who, one might imagine had no choice but to join the military, coming to Iraq and making the victory sign to a humiliated Iraqi academic whose country was ravaged by war. In a way, this image is worthy of a long pause. It is an encounter of two oppressed and defeated groups of people—Iraqis and African Americans meeting as enemies in a warzone. But, if one digs deeper, are these people really 'enemies' or allies struggling against the same oppressors? Do the real enemies ever come to the battlefield? Or do they hide behind closed doors planning wars and invasions while sending other 'oppressed' and 'diverse' faces to the battlefield to fight wars on their behalf? Hiba then recalled the early months of the occupation at the University of Baghdad where she taught. She noted that the first thing the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) tried to do was to change the curriculum Iraqi academics had designed, taught, and improved over the decades. While the Americans succeeded in doing this at the primary and high school levels, Hiba believed that they did not succeed as much at the university level. Iraqi professors knew better than to allow the 'Americanization of the curriculum' to take place. 'We knew the materials we were teaching were excellent even compared to international standards,' she said. 'They [the occupiers] tried to immediately inject subjects like "democracy" and "human rights" as if we Iraqis didn’t know what these concepts meant.' It is clear from Hiba’s testimony, also articulated by several other interviewees, that the Iraqi education system was one of the occupying forces’ earliest targets in their desire to reshape and restructure Iraqi society and peoples’ collective consciousness.

Trading posts and colonies, gentlemen, have not only strengthened the commercial positions of the peoples concerned; these nations owe their greatness to these institutions.

It is not about Belgian colonies. It is about establishing a new state that is as large as possible and about its governance. It should be clear that in this project there can be no question of granting the Negroes the slightest form of political power. That would be ridiculous. The whites, who lead the posts, have all the power.

when looking at the literature currently available, there seems to be much discussion on practical contemporary issues such as the sharing of resources or personnel, but very little on the history of Global/World relationships. Partnership is only mentioned in brief passages in David Bosch’s Transforming Mission or Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder’s Constants in Context. In J. Andrew Kirk’s What is Mission? an entire chapter is dedicated to this subject (chapter 10— “Sharing in Partnership”); however, only a few paragraphs are dedicated to how partnership has been understood historically. To date, the most complete study on this topic has been done by Lothar Bauerochse in his book Learning to Live Together: Interchurch Partnerships as Ecumenical Communities of Learning. Although Bauerochse’s main focus involves case studies on the relationships between German Protestant churches and their African partners, the first section entails an historical analysis of the term “partnership.” In his analysis, Bauerochse states that “the term partnership is a term of the colonial era . . . It is a formula of the former ‘rulers,’ who with it wished to both signal a relinquishment of power and also to secure their influence in the future. Therefore, the term can also serve both in colonial policy and mission policy to justify continuing rights of the white minority.”5 This understanding then serves as the lens through which he interprets the partnership discourse, reminding the reader that although the term was meant to connote an eventual leveling of power dynamics in relationships, it was also used by those with power to “secure their influence in the future.” This analysis is largely true. As we will see in chapter three, when the term partnership was introduced into the colonial debate, it was closely aligned with the concept of trusteeship. Later, as will be discussed in chapter six, the term partnership was also used in the late colonial period by the British as a way to maintain their colonies while offering the hope of freedom in the future; a step forward from trusteeship, but short of autonomy and independence. During colonial times, once the term partnership was introduced into ecumenical discussions, many arguments identical to those used by colonial powers for the retention of their colonies were used by church and missionary leaders to deny autonomy to the younger churches. Later, when looking at partnership in the post-World War

It was a sort of reverse colonialism: just as we had once descended on the courts of Asia to offer them an over-elaborate civil-service model, a long-lasting sense of inferiority and the interesting idea that it might be sensible to stop burning widows, taking from them in exchange various gross baubles and an ingrained sense of post-colonial guilt, so our unfortunate subjects’ descendants were now turning up in Knightsbridge with fully charged credit cards to acquire some tat.

On 2 November 1917, five weeks before Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate, the government in London had issued a document that was to have a fateful and lasting impact on the Holy Land, the Middle East and the world. The foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, representing the World Zionist Organization, to inform him that: His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. The sixty-seven typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances and a colonial mindset, as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as the writer Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably – neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy – ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’.8 Lloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in post-war arrangements in the Levant9 and the impulse to use Palestine’s strategic location – its ‘fatal geography’ – to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India.10 Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilize Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its final discussion of the issue on 31 October: ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America.’11 Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour’s public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia about post-war spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his ‘revolt in the desert’ against the Turks. The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive.

Travelling in the Americas, the Caribbean and the African continent itself, one is struck by the effect of post-colonial economic and cultural conditions that have attempted to dehumanize and destroy the social and economic bases of Black society. Yet paradoxically, the trauma of subjugation has not led to total despair. Instead it has produced an insistent interrogation and resistance by Black people all over the world.

The system is premised on a rhetoric of a war on Muslim “terrorism” that the Chinese state has imported from the US and its allies post–September 11, 2001. As recently as 2017, Xinjiang authorities hosted British counter-terrorism experts as part of a diplomatic exchange called “Countering the root causes of violent extremism undermining growth and stability in China’s Xinjiang Region by sharing UK best practice.” In the Chinese context, countering violent extremism—something that British experts refer to simply as Prevent—is premised on detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims deemed “untrustworthy” in camps and prisons, and placing still other Muslim adults in jobs far from their homes.

slavery while on a sales trip to the New World in 1829. Traveling through Mexico, Florida, Louisiana, and Cuba, he was especially horrified by the racial character of slavery. On his return to France, he condemned the exploitation of slaves in an article titled “Des Noirs,” but he stopped short of calling for immediate emancipation, suggesting instead a gradual process of manumission over some forty to sixty years. It was only when he learned that plantation owners refused to educate their slaves that he turned against gradualism and came out in favor of “the immediate abolition of slavery”—the subtitle of his 1842 account of his trip to the West Indies. Tireless in his advocacy of abolition, he served as undersecretary for the colonies and president of the Commission on Slavery, and became, in effect, the architect of the post-slavery order in the Antilles. The novelist Victor Hugo offered a telling description of the ceremony at which Schœlcher announced the final abolition of slavery, held in Guadeloupe on May 19, 1848:

His five novellas, notably Men in the Sun (1963) and Return to Haifa (1969), are widely popular, perhaps because they depict so vividly the dilemmas faced by Palestinians: the travails of exile and the pain of life in post-1967 Palestine, now entirely under Israeli control.

A Fearful Demagogue SAVARKAR AND THE MUSLIM QUESTION AS I SUGGESTED in the introduction, only a kaleidoscopic view gives us the full picture of Savarkar’s life and thought. This is particularly important when approaching the development of his anti-Muslim views, which have over the last century become the normative views of the current Hindu right wing. In this chapter, I will weave together not one, not two, but six different strands of Savarkar’s anti-Muslim braid.1 The first strand is the Gandhi-helmed anticolonial nationalist movement in India in the post-World War I period when the colonial government put out yet another “reform” package. The second is the Caliphate as a theory, mourned ideal, and practice in its last iteration in Ottoman and Republican Turkey. The third takes us to the debates in India about the Caliphate, referred to as Khilafat in India, and, relatedly, the discussions of the proposed hijrat (migration) to Afghanistan in India among Muslim intellectuals, leaders, and businessmen.2 The fourth strand returns us to Turkey and Mustafa Kemal’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. In the fifth we follow, in summary, the progress of the Indian Khilafat movement (the only such movement in the world). The sixth is the immediate cause for Savarkar’s expostulations, namely his anger about Gandhi’s support for the Khilafat movement. Savarkar, from house arrest, attacked virtually every iteration of the ideas and events laid out above—the idea of the Khilafat, the movement and its leaders, Gandhi, Muslims, and all Hindus who supported Khilafat. While he did not criticize the reform package, he insisted that Muslims were taking advantage of it. Once I trace the trajectory of each of these strands, I will move on to what Savarkar had to say about the Muslim question. I do this for two reasons. First, the strands allow us a broader look at the regional, national, and global context that framed Savarkar’s views. Second, Savarkar’s views about Muslims build on all of these strands, especially the way in which the Khilafat movement revealed for him the fundamental disloyalty of Muslims to India. But this was not all, for he came to see Muslims as a monolithic community that was defined as much by its proclivity for violence as by its foundational claims for a distinctive—and exclusive—political sovereignty of its own. In both cases, he felt lay extraordinary dangers for Hindus.

No society wants you to be wise. It’s a painstaking fact. As the winds gather momentum and their energy is felt on the bellies of the wise, the fools are led to the epicenter of death. The world has changed so many books were hidden from a black man, under the skies of colonialism the majority forced from knowledge and we built a culture of straight education which is not education but instilling slogans of slavery. Lone reading, lone understanding, lone accumulation is what we fought for, just a social forgery we are still under post colonialism barbarism

Churchill said India wasn't a nation, just an abstraction. John Kenneth Galbraith more affectionately and more memorably, described it as a 'functioning anarchy'. Both of them, in my view, underestimated the strength of the India-idea. It may be the most innovative national philosophy to have emerged in the post-colonial period. It deserves to be celebrated because it is an idea that has enemies, within India as well as outside her frontiers, and to celebrate it is also to defend it against its foes.

Timoshevski gaped. “You have a Cornucopia machine?” he demanded breathlessly. Burya bit his tongue; an interruption it might be, but a perfectly understandable one. “Yes.” “Will you give us one? Along with instructions for using it and a colony design library?” asked Burya, his pulse pounding. “Maybe. What will you give us?” “Mmm. How about a post-Marxist theory of post-technological political economy, and a proof that the dictatorship of the hereditary peerage can only be maintained by the systematic oppression and exploitation of the workers and engineers, and cannot survive once the people acquire the self-replicating means of production?

The time for building bridges is over. For the few that are willing to swim across to our side, we will welcome them with open arms. We’ll even dispatch life rafts. But we have entered a new phase where we should be prioritizing direct action.

But wouldn’t it be more effective in the end to appeal to the moral consciousness of the citizens of the wealthy and powerful nations of the world, rather than antagonize them?” “Sure, and I suppose the fly, in navigating the web so thoughtfully spun for it, should always take care to appeal to the spider’s moral sensibilities whenever it comes skittering around.

The World Bank and IMF continue to encourage post-colonial nations to maintain high levels of predatorily securitized debt today. By maintaining financial control, they operate as de facto governing bodies, tying needed aid to politically distorting conditions.33

Neither the French Constitution of 1791 nor the Jacobin Constitution of 1793 abolished slavery, while the 1799 Constitution actually paved the way for the reintroduction of slavery in the French colonies in 1802,” Kaisary pointed out. “In fact, … the only French Revolutionary Constitution that contained a provision abolishing slavery was the otherwise conservative post-Thermidorian constitution of 1795.”38 Thus it was that the 1801 constitution made the Saint-

Attempts were made to ascertain the reasons for these drastic provisions directed to exclude every Arab from the land purchased. The Executive of the General Federation of Jewish Labour were perfectly frank on the subject. They pointed out that the Jewish colonies were founded and established by Jewish capital, and that the subscriptions of which this capital is composed were given with the intention that Jews should emigrate to Palestine and be settled therethat these subscriptions would never have been given had it been thought that they would be employed to support Arab labourersthat it was the business of the Zionist Organisation to cause immigration into Palestine of as many Jews as possible, and that, if Arabs were employed, posts would thus be filled up for which Jews might have immigratedthat the position of agricultural labourer in the colonies, when occupied by a Jew, serves as a training for the immigrant and prepares him to take over a holding himself at a later dateand, finally, that if these posts were left open to the ordinary competition of the labour market, the standard of life of the Jewish labourer would be liable to fall to the lower standard of the Arab.

The land list of 1625 specified that he had a 200 acre grant in this vicinity. Perhaps, he was established here well before the massacre. When the Indians descended on his place, he must have been away, for his wife stood her ground as she did later when the Colony officials sought to force her to vacate the now isolated post. It is reported that "Mistress Proctor, a proper, civill, modest gentlewoman ... ["fortified and lived in despite of the enemy"] till perforce the English officers forced her and all them with her to goe with them, or they would fire her house themselves, as the salvages did when they were gone....

Now Archer and Ratcliffe and, to a lesser degree, John Martin, another of the original settlers whose laziness had angered Smith in the colony’s early days, and who had departed in 1608 only to return on the Falcon, all saw their chance to repay Smith for his cheek by stripping him of his office. Of course, Smith was not about to give up without a fight. He said, with justification, that since the colony’s new leaders and the new charter authorizing the change in leadership were somewhere out on the Atlantic (or at its bottom), there was neither need nor authority for him to give up his post. And he certainly did not want to turn the leadership of the colony over to men he knew were ill suited to guarantee its safety or survival. For his part, if Smith had known what lay in store in the next few weeks, he might well have simply thrown up his hands and ceded control to the men he found so distasteful. As it was, at one point, he said he would give up his commission to Martin, a man he apparently found slightly less offensive than Ratcliffe and Archer. Martin accepted, but kept the job for only three hours before deciding the responsibility was more than he wanted to shoulder and turning the task back to Smith. As much as Smith disliked Ratcliffe, Archer, and Martin, he felt no better when he surveyed the new settlers dispatched by the Virginia Company. They were, in Smith’s view, a pretty sorry lot.

In the nights though, I couldn't help but weave the golden cloth of my dreams. Each stitch from heart to thought, and thought to heart, was painful to bear, even if it was joyous at times. Because each thread was fraught with the fears of being broken midway, lost and never found again. Nida

Green will typically look at history, for example, and whenever it finds a society in which there is a widespread lack of green values, it assumes that these green values would normally and naturally be present were it not for the fact that they have been maliciously oppressed by the dominator hierarchies found in that society. All individuals would possess worldcentric green values of pluralism, radical egalitarianism, and total equality, except for the oppressive controlling powers that crushed those values wherever they appeared. […] The existence of strong and widespread oppressive forces cannot be doubted. The problem comes in the claim to know what their source and cause is. For green postmodernism, the cause of the lack of worldcentric green values in any culture is due to an aggressive and intensively active repressive and oppressive force (usually the male sex; or a particular race— white in most parts of the world, coupled with a rampant colonialism— and/or due to a particular creed—usually religious fundamentalism of one sort or another; or various prejudices—against gays, against women, against whatever minority that is oppressed). In short, lack of green values (egalitarian, group freedom, gender equality, human care and sensitivity) is due to a presence of oppression. […] The major problem with that view taken by itself is that it completely overlooks the central role of growth, development, and evolution. We’ve already seen that human moral identity grows and develops from egocentric (red) to ethnocentric (amber) to worldcentric (orange then green) to integral (turquoise; and this is true individually as well as collectively/historically). Thus, the main reason that slavery was present, say, 2000 years ago, is not because there was an oppressive force preventing worldcentric freedom, but that a worldcentric notion of freedom had not even emerged yet anywhere on the planet. It wasn’t present and then oppressed, as green imagines, it simply had not yet emerged in the first place—there was nothing to oppress. This is why, as only one example, all of the world’s great religions, who otherwise teach love and compassion and treating all beings kindly, nonetheless—precisely because they were created during the great ethnocentric Mythic Age of traditional civilization —had no extensive and widespread conception of the fundamental worldcentric freedom of human beings—or the belief that all humans, regardless of race, sex, color, or creed, were born equal—and thus not one of them strenuously objected to the fact that a very large portion of their own population were slaves. Athens and Greek society, vaunted home of democracy, had 1 out of 3 of their people who were slaves—and no major complaint on a culture-wide scale. Nor was there a widespread culturally effective complaint from Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism et al. It wasn’t until the emergence of the worldcentric Age of Reason that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” actually came into existence—emerged evolutionarily—and thus started to be believed by the average and typical member of that culture.

the immigrants who secure rights thanks to the anti-racist anti-colonial struggle might be securing the right to free capitalist enterprise, refusing to see, refusing to ‘open your eyes’, as the angry black yelled at the post-colonial immigrant. This right to free enterprise is another way to capital accumulation powered by the post-colonial entrepreneur: it produces ‘unfree labour’ and racialized class relations in the name of challenging the colonial rule of difference […] There is a closet Ayn Randian class position underpinning the anti-racism of hyperbolic anti-colonialists – it is then not difficult to see that the non-modern, radical alterity upon which the anti-colonial is premised now stands for the capitalist universal.

Indeed, post-colonial theory first emerged in the wake of the failure of the Third World nations to go it alone. It marked the end of the era of Third World revolutions and the first glimmerings of what we now know as globalization.

There was a time when slavery was good. It did its work, and when it finished creating capital it withered and died a natural death. Colonialism was good. It spread industrial culture of shared resources and markets. But to revive colonialism now would be an error. There was a time when the cold war dicated our every calculation in domestic and international relations. It is over. We are in the post-cold war era, and our calculations are affected by the laws and needs of globalization. The history of capital can be summed up in one phrase: in search of freedom. Freedom to expand, and now it has the chance at the entire globe for its theater. It needs a democratic space to move as its own logic demands.

A second important difference between the international environment that shaped Western states and the one that is now shaping post-colonial Middle Eastern states is that many in the latter category can trade petrodollars (or strategic rents) for Western arms, which artificially increases the ability of the rulers to coerce the ruled.[8] At the turn of the century, the Middle East already spent more of its GDP per capita on defence than any other region. Between 1999 and 2008, that spending increased by another 34%.[9] With this difference in mind, it is unrealistic to insist, as Western diplomats and leaders have done following the removal of Mubarak, that transitions from dictatorships to fledgling democracies must be orderly. This is particularly unrealistic given that the international weapons trade, the international reliance on oil and the Western tendency to view the region through a lens of counter-terrorism objectives have all helped to sustain these regimes, but cannot realistically be altered by those who take to the street in protest.

Yet the notion that Hokkaido and Okinawa constitute “internal colonies” stems from an ex post facto axiom naturalizing these territories as part of Japan proper, a practice cultural studies scholar Michele Mason characterizes as ranking territories under a “hierarchy of colonial authenticity.

If the new belligerent discourses about the alleged superiority of the West are expressed in terms of the legacy of secular Humanism, while the most vehement opposition to them takes the form of post-secular practices of politicized religion, where can an anti-humanist position rest? To be simply secular would be complicitous with neo-colonial Western supremacist positions, while rejecting the Enlightenment legacy would be inherently contradictory for any critical project. The vicious circle is stifling.

as in Leopold’s colony, both the French territories and the German Cameroons were wracked by long, fierce rebellions against the rubber regime. The French scholar Catherine Coquéry-Vidrovitch has published a chilling graph showing how, at one French Congo post, Salanga, between 1904 and 1907, the month-by-month rise and fall in rubber production correlated almost exactly to the rise and fall in the number of bullets used up by company “sentries”—nearly four hundred in a busy month.

The Rise of the US and Germany By the time the United States was strong enough to join the imperialist land grab, very few territories remained. Beyond its small island bases in Puerto Rico and Hawaii, the US did little except relieve Spain of its last colonial post in the Philippines, and to force Japan to open itself to foreign trade.

Back in NCO school, I had to read a ton of papers by mostly clueless theoreticians, prattling on about the “changing nature of modern warfare,” and the need for the modern, post–Terran Commonwealth Defense Corps to be tooled and trained for “low-intensity colonial actions.” In truth, warfare has changed very little since our great-great-grandfathers killed each other at places like Gettysburg, the Somme, Normandy, or Baghdad. It’s still mostly about scared men with rifles charging into places defended by other scared men with rifles.

Cotton Mather lusted all his life for the presidency of Harvard, a post his father had held, and which the son affected to despise, especially after others were chosen; he was a prig and a meddler; an unscrupulous ideologue and a windy orator; a scribbler who praised simplicity in flowery circumlocutions, so anxious to see his production in print that it might be said of him, with little fear of exaggeration, that he would rather lose his soul than misplace a manuscript.

I ain't know what it is to be a girl Mistress Grandsol. I pass straight from child to woman without even a pause for girl between. Girl is a privilege I never know.