Imperial conquest depends on manufacturing native consent to its own helplessness
Evidence
The project that has occasioned these native informers is of course nothing new in the history of European colonialism and American imperialism. From the scramble for Africa to the conquest of Asia to the plundering of Latin America, the white man’s burden has included the necessity of persuading “the natives” that they can never be the agents of their own history. The project of Orientalism, as Said has diagnosed it, was instrumental in manufacturing this consent. But the aggressive globalization of imperial conquest has, if anything, increased the importance of the ideological machinery that works to make the conquest of the world appear as a humane project, a liberation. Next to national-security interests, human rights and women’s rights in particular are now routinely cited as the principal objectives of American imperial interventions. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 191
Categorization
- XREF: Extends Said’s Orientalism critique and Fanon’s analysis of colonial self-loathing into the present — ties to the book’s core argument and to broader postcolonial theory.