Western liberal values function as a dividing line that masks empire’s material arrangements.
Evidence
What I have tried to make clear, to repeat Talal Asad’s point discussed in chapter 5, is that modernity is a project that certain people in power seek to achieve. Freedom of the market, freedom of choice, secularism, individualism, and gender equality are ideas harnessed to the project of empire. They are made to function as a kind of dividing line between those who are modern and those who are not. What is so terrible about this? I contend that this framing of what is wrong with the world leaves no room for interrogating the more insidious ways in which modern states secure their power, the economic, social, and political arrangements on which human rights, individualism, and gender equality rest, arrangements that have required the domination of the North over the South and the eviction of large numbers of people from political community. Meaningful gender-equality strategies elude us when we isolate the problem as one of culture and fail to consider the social, economic, and political conditions under which equality thrives. Afghan women today are free of Taliban rule, but their lives have remained relatively unchanged in the ways that count the most; their personal security and that of their families are not assured. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 401
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- XREF: Mirrors Talal Asad’s critique of secular modernity and the binary of modern/pre-modern subjects; extends the chapter 5 discussion this conclusion deliberately recaps.