Colonial powers denied cultural influence from below while absorbing it everywhere

Evidence

If early modes of cross-racial sexual intercourse could more or less be acknowledged, cultural influence was thought to run in one direction. Those considering themselves superior do not admit to cultural influence or impression from below. By the same token, the impact on Europeans by the indigenous and imported is in many ways obvious: food, clothing, language, visual art, music, perhaps occasionally also survival skills in unfriendly environments. The robustness of cultural mixing is reflected in the fact that at the onset of the eighteenth century the languages that could be heard at the Cape included Dutch and Khoikhoi, to be sure, but in addition French, Portuguese, Hindi, Malay, Malagasy, Mandarin, and Javanese, not to mention a local patois. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1329

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s orientalism and the broader theme of colonial denial of bidirectional cultural influence; also to Goldberg’s own argument about euro-mimesis in this same chapter.
• CANDY: The Cape in 1700 hosting eight languages simultaneously is a striking, tweetable image of imperial cultural mixing.