Alternate Visions

Ooh, this is so good, and totally related to the Mudimbe piece: Vandana Singh, a science fiction author from India writes a great article on writing diversity. Here she talks about how internalizing an colonial, dominant power (and the knowledge framing therein) affected her ability to write:

“As I stood on that remote Himalayan hillside and watched a meeting of local villages — as I saw a woman speak with fist raised, and the audience of a couple of hundred men and women listen to her –  a fault line appeared in my understanding of the world.  Later I realized what it was: in the speech of that illiterate village woman, a doyenne of the Chipko movement, so far from the centers of power, education and modern civilization, I’d witnessed a homegrown, indigenous feminism that owed exactly nothing to, say, Betty Friedan.  Somehow over the years I’d absorbed without knowing it this colonial message –  that to recover from, and grow as successful as the occupying power, you had to turn to its ideas and its people and its history to make your own shining future, naturally in the image of that power.  The only alternative I knew of was a reactionary one – to label all or most aspects of that colonizing culture bad or evil, and to selectively pick aspects from one’s own tradition, inject them with a rigidifying solution, and label these as good.  Not a true alternative, then, but the same paradigm reversed, in which the colonizer’s worldview was still the standard, the unit of measure.”