Language’s irreducible privacy, rooted in mortality, fuels colonial rage at the colonized

Evidence

If every language is acquirable, its acquisition requires a real portion of a person’s life: each new conquest is measured against shortening days. What limits one’s access to other languages is not their imperviousness but one’s own mortality. Hence a certain privacy to all languages. French and American imperialists governed, exploited, and killed Vietnamese over many years. But whatever else they made off with, the Vietnamese language stayed put. Accordingly, only too often, a rage at Vietnamese ‘inscrutability,’ and that obscure despair which engenders the venomous argots of dying colonialisms: ‘gooks,’ ‘ratons’, etc. (In the longer run, the only responses to the vast privacy of the language of the oppressed are retreat or further massacre.) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 567

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Scaffolding Theory toolkit: this is the linguistic face of the colonized ‘Other’ being unassimilable, feeding into the Islamophobia readings on untranslatable difference. — connects to: Formerly colonized peoples risk adopting the dominating discourse against themselves; Colonial hysteria manifested in murderous acts for settlers but suicide-like self-exposure for the colonized; The colonized also wield knowledge-as-power discourses against those they colonize (+8 more)

Related

• Formerly colonized peoples risk adopting the dominating discourse against themselves (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial powers replaced native scripts to sever colonies from their heritage and elite. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial intelligentsias are structurally compelled toward the colonizer’s language in public life (similarity 0.79)
• The colonized also wield knowledge-as-power discourses against those they colonize (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial interests actively erase precolonial Vietnamese cultural achievement. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial language legacies still govern which texts circulate. (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial discourse manufactures silence around colonized peoples’ precolonial civilizations. (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial language can be repurposed into a new anticolonial literary language (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial psychology shifts blame for colonial violence onto the colonized #expands (0.82) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 161
• Colonial subjects act out violently to end unbearable psychological tension #expands (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 553
• The colonized perceive life as permanent struggle against omnipresent death #expands (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 415
• Colonial rule systematically instills an inferiority complex in the colonized #expands (0.80) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 59
• Formerly colonized peoples risk adopting the dominating discourse against themselves #qualifies (0.75)
• The colonized also wield knowledge-as-power discourses against those they colonize #expands (0.75)
• Colonial hysteria manifested in murderous acts for settlers but suicide-like self-exposure for the colonized #expands (0.72)
• Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism #qualifies (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 667
• Centuries of oppression produce physiological violence in the colonized #expands (0.72) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 71