Provincial isolation can coexist with civilization’s unearned confidence

Evidence

Baldwin’s anger and insight flow from his experience of what one might call empowered parochialism. The Swiss villagers have never encountered a black person before; they lead untraveled lives, holed up in their icy redoubt, severed from the larger world. Yet Baldwin recognizes these hyperparochial people are powerfully connected in their severance, unconsciously emboldened by the broad currents of Western culture—Dante, Michelangelo, the cathedral at Chartres—that afford them an assumed racial superiority and ease. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 532

Categorization

• DEFINE: Coins ‘empowered parochialism’ — the provincial who carries the unconscious ballast of a dominant civilization.
• XREF: Parallels Nixon’s ch.7 claim (home empires unaware their colonies exist) and modernist ‘provincial cosmopolitanism’ that recurs across the book.