Indigenous culture cannot be a unified site of anti-imperialist resistance
Evidence
Cultural domination is doubtless a major aspect of imperialist domination as such, and ‘culture’ is always, therefore, a major site for resistance, but cultural contradictions within the imperialized formations tend to be so very numerous – sometimes along class lines but also in cross-class configurations, as in the case of patriarchal cultural forms or the religious modes of social authorization – that the totality of indigenous culture can hardly be posited as a unified, transparent site of anti-imperialist resistance. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 18
Categorization
- SEED: Pull-quote-worthy rejoinder to romanticized versions of cultural resistance — challenges the reflexive equation of native culture with progressive politics, especially in postcolonial discourse.
- XREF: Echoes the discussion in books like Things Fall Apart where culture simultaneously resists and reproduces internal hierarchies (patriarchy, religious authority). — connects to: Wilderness ethics cannot transfer to subsistence peasant communities whose land is under assault. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 781
Related
- Indigenous cultures resist, contain, and adapt Western imports rather than being replaced (similarity 0.80)
- Indigenous survival required a culture of resistance that blended assimilation and defiance. (similarity 0.79)
- Cultural nationalism collapses into inverse racism because culture is singularized far from the economy (similarity 0.79)
- Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of cultural universalism. (similarity 0.78)
- Cultural nationalism assumes speaking from one’s own tradition is anti-imperialist resistance (similarity 0.78)