a simple flash
Reading Ashis Nandy’s The Savage Freud helps bring a third dimension to my understanding of British colonialism in India. Surrounded by colonial logics, this dimension houses the Indian middle classes who both bought into their Western training and appropriated it, ran it through indigenous cultural prisms and produced new colorful texts. Between Nandy and Bret Benjamin, I’ve learned that nothing gets imposed or resisted cleanly but refashioned continuously. This is as true of the World Bank’s response to the critiques waged against it as it is of colonials subjected to imperial hierarchies.
Well, I started rambling. I simply wanted to note this clause from Nandy; “…implicit theory of oppression” (210).
A simple flash struck me. Familiarity with colonial tropes cloud my experience of texts so that I’m missing their ‘theories of oppression’. I love this phrase and all its exigetic promise.
