Colonial discourse manufactures silence around colonized peoples’ precolonial civilizations.

Evidence

These Madagascans who are being tortured today, less than a century ago were poets, artists, administrators? Shhhhh! Keep your lips buttoned! And silence falls, silence as deep as a safe! Fortunately, there are still the Negroes. Ah! the Negroes! Let’s talk about the Negroes! … About the Sudanese empires? About the bronzes of Benin? Shango sculpture? — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 118

Categorization

• XREF: Foreshadows how the Islamophobia literature will treat selective memory: which colonial subjects get to have a history is itself politically engineered — resonates with Said’s Orientalism and with the ‘forgetting machine’ mechanism of colonial knowledge production. — connects to: Colonial authority pre-emptively silences the colonized’s own testimony; Even unifying antiracist categories impose their own internal silences.; Universalizing discourse silences the specific wounds of the colonized. (+7 more)
• DEFINE: Illustrates the mechanism whereby colonial discourse silences inconvenient precolonial culture and redirects attention onto stereotyping tropes.

Related

• Universalizing discourse silences the specific wounds of the colonized. (similarity 0.84)
• Formerly colonized peoples risk adopting the dominating discourse against themselves (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial authority pre-emptively silences the colonized’s own testimony (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-colonial ethnography reframed colonized peoples as dialogue partners rather than natives (similarity 0.80)
• Civilization annexes the excluded by making them speak their own disappearance (similarity 0.80)
• The colonized also wield knowledge-as-power discourses against those they colonize (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial ‘discoveries’ of native origins were projections of colonists’ own notions (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial language legacies still govern which texts circulate. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial ethnography reduces African rites to obscene primitive spectacle (similarity 0.78)
• Language’s irreducible privacy, rooted in mortality, fuels colonial rage at the colonized (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial discourse lets the colonizer speak for the colonized while silencing them (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial intelligentsias are structurally compelled toward the colonizer’s language in public life (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Universalizing discourse silences the specific wounds of the colonized. #expands (0.85)
• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions #expands (0.82) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 421
• Colonial authority depends on the colonized hearing no other voice #corroborates (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 329
• Colonial doctrines of justification push colonized peoples toward rigid counter-proposals #expands (0.78)
• Colonial segregation suppressed even private political talk between settlers and Muslims #exemplifies (0.75)
• Anti-colonial ethnography reframed colonized peoples as dialogue partners rather than natives #responds-to (0.72) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 217