Status Updates From Culture and Imperialism

you 🫵🏻 try reading Said while the World Cup is on. i 👈🏻 did. report: today, the colonizers won. tomorrow? who can say

a good 50 or so pages of this is just endnotes, so i'm more than halfway through at least 🎉

the ending of the camus chapter left me more confused than anything. i need mr Said to explain this to me again like i'm an adhd child

canicule !

“We are entitled to ask how this body of humanistic ideas co-existed so comfortably with imperialism, and why there was little significant opposition to empire at home. … In the great, humane ideas and values promulgated by mainstream European culture, we have precisely that ‘mould of ideas or conditioned reflexes’ of which Kiernan speaks, into which the whole business of empire later flowed.”

"Even oppositional thinkers like Marx and Engels were no less capable of such pronouncements [...]. [They] relied on colonial documents, the fully encoded discourse of Orientalism [...]. [When] Engels spoke of the Moors of Algeria [...] he was merely quoting French colonial theory."

was not expecting this!!! shots fired!! 🍿

i know it seems like i'm trudging along this book with my clown self logging in every 10-page progress but it's substantially more enjoyable than i originally thought. the reality is that i am simply not a fast reader.

anyway, i did not know the great game and the white man's burden were concepts coined by rudyard kipling. the invention of tradition. huh. man sure was busy.

"BP's ideas about 'boyology' fed these images directly into a grand scheme of imperial authority culminating in the great Boy Scout structure 'fortifying the wall of empire', which confirmed this inventive conjunction of fun and service in row after row of bright-eyed, eager and resourceful little middle-class servants of empire."

savage takedown of the boy scouts by mr said

'And it is certainly true that many great aesthetic objects if empire are remembered and admired without the baggage of domination that they carried through the process from gestation to production. Yet the empire remains, in inflection and traces, to be read, seen, and heard.'

bars!!

me reading about aida while having never seen or heard aida