A Colonial War in a Postcolonial Era

Adas, Michael; Daum, Andreas W.; Gardner, Lloyd C.; Mausbach, Wilfried

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139052368.002

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…23 By the nineteenth century, terms like savage, primitive, traditional, underdeveloped, and medieval came to denote the Other "as a fossil of an earlier period" 24 who are understood to possess a "whole range of attributes" such as being superstitious and reactionary while the Europeans "represented themselves as rational, energetic, in control, progressiveminded, disciplined, punctual, and efficient." 25 What is important to note here is that by positing the Other as located in a distant past, this new way of framing history was able to provide an ontology that made it appear that the Other is distant from the modern self even though they both exist contemporaneous to each other. The colonizer's temporal template, possessing the power of a gifted magician, actually performs a stunt on the mind so as to distantiate the contemporary populations of the global south from their Western counterparts right in front of the viewer's eyes.…”

Section: The Colonizer's Islamophobic Temporal Templatementioning

confidence: 96%

Islamophobia and the Time and Space of the Muslim Other

Samman¹

2012

Islamophobia Studies Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

humanity's great cultural diversity but its historical as well. It is as though H.G. Wells had really invented his time machine allowing us, as we travel across the world's different cultural landscapes, to visit places of far-away time. Americans can cross their southern border and visit their "distant neighbor" as one book title advertizes. Or we could visit, as a promotional travel brochure claims, Morocco and encounter, on camel back, "ancient ruins" and an "age-old culture" where "life is much as it was centuries ago."We could, at this very moment, for instance, stand in Manhattan, look towards Iran, and declare, with the slightest hint of irony at such a claim, that because it is ruled by Mullahs it is "still feudal" and "stuck" in the fourteenth-century. We do, of course, realize that Mexico, Morocco, and Iran are all here in our very presence. But because of the dominance of a linear temporal perspective, which categorizes "societies" as containing their own space and time, this time-like travel myth has now continued for several centuries, and we have now become accustomed to see cultures or civilizations as possessing their own launching pads with some unable to even ignite their engines while others are deep into the way yonder. In this sense, our minds have been colonized by a nineteenth-century, if not earlier, dogma that prescribes a linear historical progress through which all "societies," although at radically different speeds and at varying points, have traveled. Some may "still" be at a "traditional" or agricultural/rural phase while others are "nearer" to modernity, living in Middle age or feudal-like societies, but as soon as "they" get their true renaissance or religious and secular reformers-their equivalents of "our" philosophers and Luthersthey too can join the more "advanced" societies.This temporal lens, with its peculiar epistemological ways of seeing the world of difference, was only slightly revised in the hands of the colonized, with much of it being accommodated by the political and intellectual elites-both secular and Islamists alike. While the colonizers constructed this historical imagination in their desire to dominate the global south so as to make it appear that their rule over the natives was a natural result of history's call for the realization of rationality, the Spirit, democracy, the liberation of women, or human rights, the colonized scrambled to renarrate this very same discourse so as to place themselves as the vanguards for the emancipation of their societies. By removing the colonizers from their midst and replacing them with "indigenous" leaders who have the best interest of their people in mind, they will be well-positioned, so they claim, to deliver their societies-which they admit are "still" in the grips of a stagnant mentality-to this glorious future. As Ali Mirsepassi recently argued, the colonizer's gaze "defines contemporary conditions in the [colonized] in terms of abstracted conditions of European historical experience" where the colonized is positioned t...

show abstract

Section: The Colonizer's Islamophobic Temporal Templatementioning

confidence: 96%

Islamophobia and the Time and Space of the Muslim Other

Samman¹

2012

Islamophobia Studies Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

A Colonial War in a Postcolonial Era

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Islamophobia and the Time and Space of the Muslim Other

Islamophobia and the Time and Space of the Muslim Other

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About