Empires affect vast regions while their home populations remain unaware those places exist.

Evidence

It is a pervasive condition of empires that they affect great swathes of the planet without the empire’s populace being aware of that impact—indeed, without being aware that many of the affected places even exist. How many Americans are aware of the continuing socioenvironmental fallout from U.S. militarism and foreign policy decisions made three or four decades ago in, say, Angola or Laos? How many could even place those nation-states on a map? The imperial gap between foreign policy power and on-the-street awareness calls to mind George Lamming’s shock, on arriving in Britain in the early 1950s, that most Londoners he met had never heard of his native Barbados and lumped together all Caribbean immigrants as “Jamaicans.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 99

Categorization

• XREF: The Lamming ‘lumped as Jamaicans’ anecdote resonates with the racial erasure themes in this reader’s Naqvi/Home Boy holdings and colonial archive work. — connects to: Empire produces and maintains strategic ignorance as a ruling technology; A place’s underlying geography can be overlooked even by its lifelong residents; Colonial empire determines subjective life yet stays beyond lived experience — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 878 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Empire produces and maintains strategic ignorance as a ruling technology #corroborates (0.90)
• Colonial empire determines subjective life yet stays beyond lived experience #corroborates (0.90) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 878
• Empire operates through cultivated ignorance, not just distorted knowledge. #corroborates (0.85) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1335
• Imperial power produces ignorance through acts of refusal to notice #expands (0.80)
• Empire’s knowing operates through inattention and averted gaze, not panoptic surveillance #expands (0.80) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1384
• A place’s underlying geography can be overlooked even by its lifelong residents #exemplifies (0.75)
• Colonial power in the Middle East was modeled as an invisible, unobserved gaze #epitomizes (0.70)