Strategic identification with the oppressor’s viewpoint exposes colonial racism’s contradictions

Evidence

With these words Suwardi was able to turn Dutch history against the Dutch, by scraping boldly at the weld between Dutch nationalism and imperialism. Furthermore, by the imaginary transformation of himself into a temporary Dutchman (which invited a reciprocal transformation of his Dutch readers into temporary Indonesians), he undermined all the racist fatalities that underlay Dutch colonial ideology. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 455

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘reciprocal transformation’ mechanism resonates with how colonized subjects must adopt the colonizer’s gaze — connected to the critical-theory toolkit on representation and the construction of the Other. — connects to: the MOC “The Shape-Shifting Self: How Western Identity Keeps Becoming Something New”; the MOC “The Mirror That Never Reflects Them: How Colonial Subjects Learned to Desire the Self They Couldn’t Have”; the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”

Related

• Rhetorical role-reversal can weaponize an empire’s own history against it (similarity 0.83)