Colonial ‘scientific study’ projected the very savagery it claimed to find

Evidence

Central Africa, cannibalistic and savage, the inversion of a European colonialism as necessary in its civilizing mission as it supposed itself necessarily brutish in the implementation of its forced labor system. Men protecting women from their men, only to make the saved women “theirs” in one sense of domestication or another. The scientific study of Africa reveals in the first instance nothing more than the barbarity, cruelty, primitivism it supposed to exist when it set out upon its civilizing mission. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 887

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the reflexive logic of the civilizing mission repeating elsewhere in post/colonial critique literatures. — connects to: English colonists associated Indian savagery with female lust and witchcraft. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 557
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that scientific investigation discovers only what it already presupposed — epistemic projection as institutional practice — is a dense, paradigm-shifting point about how knowledge production under empire works.