Counter-mythology keeps colonised identity defined in relation to the coloniser

Evidence

The colonised now affirms his or her own culture’s qualities as indiscriminately as the coloniser has despised them. … Suddenly, exactly to the reverse of the colonialist accusation, the colonised, his culture, his country, everything that belongs to him, everything he represents, become perfectly positive elements. … We shall ultimately find ourselves before a countermythology. The negative myth thrust on him by the coloniser is succeeded by a positive myth about himself suggested by the colonised, just as there would seem to be a positive myth of the proletarian opposed to a negative one. To hear the colonised and often his friends, everything is good, everything must be retained among his customs and traditions, his actions and plans; even the anachronous or disorderly, the immoral or mistaken…. The colonised’s self-assertion, born out of a protest, continues to define itself in relation to it. In the midst of revolt, the colonised continues to think, feel and live against, and therefore in relation to, the coloniser and colonisation. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 764

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the binary-thinking critique threads across the polyad reading — postcolonial and decolonial theory (Fanon, Memmi) surfaced in the settler-colonial course. — connects to: Critiquing western nature-devaluation need not mean romanticizing nature — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 161; Colonial exclusion categories sedimented into the national identity of the colonized — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 463; Cultural imposition forces colonized subjects to identify against their own ancestry (+6 more)
• ADDENDUM: Directly enriches the reversal-is-not-liberation thesis relevant to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ reading (Mali anti-colonial dress reclamation as counter-mythology), and parallels the master-identity argument throughout this book.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Colonial exclusion categories sedimented into the national identity of the colonized #corroborates (0.88) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 463
• Cultural imposition forces colonized subjects to identify against their own ancestry #expands (0.85)
• Identity is constituted through relation to what is other and different from itself #corroborates (0.82) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 378
• Identity is constructed through opposition to a continuously reinterpreted other #corroborates (0.80)
• Colonized writers internalize the colonizer’s aesthetic to erase their own identity #expands (0.78) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 330
• Identity is constituted through exclusion of what it is not #corroborates (0.75)
• Civilizational identity is fluid, not fixed or walled off #corroborates (0.72) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 232
• Cultural recognition itself can trap colonized subjects inside their difference #complicates (0.72)