Colonial assimilation always stopped short of permitting rule over the colonizer
Evidence
In almost every case, official nationalism concealed a discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm. Hence a world-wide contradiction: Slovaks were to be Magyarized, Indians Anglicized, and Koreans Japanified, but they would not be permitted to join pilgrimages which would allow them to administer Magyars, Englishmen, or Japanese. The banquet to which they were invited always turned out to be a Barmecide feast. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 402
Categorization
- XREF: The ‘Barmecide feast’ of impossible assimilation echoes Frantz Fanon’s and postcolonial theory’s account of colonized assimilation as permanently deferred.
- SEED: An essay angle: the ‘Barmecide feast’ as a theory of why assimilationist promise always fails — the structural ‘one more step’ withheld in multicultural policies today.