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200 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1994
鈥� The calculated cultivation of culture to keep the masses under colonial occupation passive and subjugated; often springs from the education system that is structurally forced to replace native modes of learning. The "master's" culture is taught in great detail to the natives, leading to interesting situations like when the proper study of English literature in academic institutions can be traced back to India long before it becomes a thing in England itself.
鈥� The necessity of reading texts from the colonial era 鈥� which look benign at first glace 鈥� with a postcolonial lens. For eg. the house in Mansfield Park is funded by slave labour from a Jamaican sugar plantation; which makes it not only a story about English life, but one that carries the weight of Caribbean history with it. His point being that the history of England cannot be thought of in separation from Caribbean history; the experience of imperialism being "the experience of interdependent histories". (Note: This is a much more common in today's institutions than it used to be in the late 1980s when these interviews were recorded.)
鈥� The unfortunate derailing of nationalism in postcolonial nations that mutated to imitate that of the colonizer's. Said quotes Frantz Fanon's comment about how the the idea of Algerian emancipation turned false when the Algerians replaced the French police officers with Algerian police officers. Many nations were decolonised on paper, but continue to be colonised as far as the institutions operating within them are concerned, thus denying any notion of emancipation to the people.
鈥� The representation of Arabs in American movies; to frame them both as incompetent savages that attack in hordes and can always be defeated by the American on a one against ten basis, but simultaneously the biggest existential threat to American "freedom", whatever that means. Many of these films are bankrolled by the American military and naturally function to justify American interventionism in the Middle East. This sort of thing continues to the present day, so whoever pointed out that Hollywood is just the propaganda arm of the American government made an astute observation.
鈥� There's a lot of history covered about the hows and whys of the rise of more radical forms of Islam in the Middle East. In most cases, it seems that the rise of moderate, liberal parties are thrown into destabilizing conditions due to foreign interventions, which leave a power vacuum that the radicals capture. They are then kept in power by the intervening powers with funding as long as the door to resource extraction is kept open for the corporations that fly in. The rise and fall of Saddam Hussein, anyone?