Renaming colonized subjects is a political act that declares a new epoch
Evidence
This sentence does for ‘Indians’ and/or ‘natives’ what the Convention in Paris had done for the Christian calendar – it abolished the old time-dishonoured naming and inaugurated a completely new epoch. ‘Peruvians’ and ‘Year One’ thus mark rhetorically a profound rupture with the existing world. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 723
Categorization
- XREF: Renaming as symbolic epoch-marking parallels how postcolonial and Islamophobia scholarship treats naming as power — compare to how ‘Muslim’ vs. ‘Mohammedan’ naming debates function. — connects to: Naming conventions of rulers encode the shift from monarchy to citizen-republic — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 130; Columbus’s renaming of land exemplified incorporating difference into the empire of same — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 592
Related
- Naming conventions of rulers encode the shift from monarchy to citizen-republic (similarity 0.80)
- Columbus’s renaming of land exemplified incorporating difference into the empire of same (similarity 0.78)
- Old World colonial place-naming treated new sites as siblings, not successors (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Naming conventions of rulers encode the shift from monarchy to citizen-republic
#expands(0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 130