The supermarket ideal of consuming all global cultures tracks the shift to modern imperialism.

Evidence

This idea of the availability of all cultures of the world for consumption by an individual consciousness was, of course, a much older European idea, growing in tandem with the history of colonialism as such, but the perfection and extended use of it in the very fabrication of modernism (not just Pound and Eliot, but a whole range of modernists, from Herman Hesse to StJohn Perse) signalled a real shift, from the age of old colonialism per se to the age of modern imperialism proper, which was reflected also in the daily lives of the metropolitan consumers in a new kind of shopping: the supermarket. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 500

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s project: Ahmad reads cosmopolitian ‘excess of belonging’ as a material/imperial position, not emancipation — the same move he’ll likely make against strategic essentialism’s celebratory rootlessness. — connects to: Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of cultural universalism. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 860
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay only faintly — stronger as a parallel to the marketplace/consumption frames implied by cultural commodification; probably not a direct fit.

Broader Connections

• Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of cultural universalism. #corroborates (0.84) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 860