Colonized people can reclaim the conqueror’s passion and turn it against empire

Evidence

In England, she is on alien soil; in Antigua, an island where none of the people and few of the plants are native, the soil constitutes the historic ground of her alienation. In Kincaid’s words: “I come from a people with a wretched historical relationship to growing things.” However, despite that relationship, Kincaid retains a huge passion for botany and gardening—a passion that she recognizes as part of her English inheritance through conquest. Yet she turns that inheritance against itself by insisting that her botanical enthusiasms be refracted through the prism of colonial history. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 765

Categorization

• SEED: Kincaid’s refusal to renounce gardening despite its colonial provenance gives a subtle aesthetic-political strategy: accept the inheritance, wield it against itself.
• XREF: connects to: The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 165; Resistance itself transforms the colonized subject so that colonial rule becomes unmaintainable

Broader Connections

• The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance #expands (0.85) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 165
• Resistance itself transforms the colonized subject so that colonial rule becomes unmaintainable #expands (0.82)