References:
Little time is spent not so much in 'learning about other cultures' the phrase has an inane vagueness to it but in studying the map of interactions [...]p 23
Rushdie vs. Naipaul: responsibility of the fate of the Third World in its own pre-colonial history.
Western democracy had taken a beating, and even if the physical damage had been done abroad, there was a sense, as Jimmy Carter once rather oddly put it, of 'mutual destruction'.p 24
There seemed little skepticism that a monolythic 'West' in fact existed.p 29
In both Lyotard and Foucault we find the same trope employed to explain the disappointment in the politics of liberation: narrative, which posits an enabling beginning point and a vindicating goal, is no longer adequate for plotting the human trajectory in society.p 49
[T]he study of 'comparative literature' originated in the period of high European imperalism and is irrecusably linked to it.
After Lukacs and Proust, we have been so accustomed to thinking of the novel's plot and structure as constituted mainly by temporality that we have overlooked the function of space, geography, and location.p 107
Before the Anglo-French competition the major distinguishing characteristic of Western empires (Roman, Spanish, and Portuguese) was that the earlier empires were bent on a loot, as Conrad puts it, on the transport of treasure from the colonies to Europe, with very little attention to development, organization, system within the colonies themselves; Britain and, to a lesser degree, France both wanted to make their empires long-term, profitable, ongoing concerns [...]
[What] Kipling has Kim go through is a ceremony of reappropriation, Britain (through a loyal Irish subject) taking hold once again of India.p 181
Kim is a major contribution to this Orientalized India of the imagination, as it is also to what historians have come to call 'the invention of tradition'.
'The Nation' is for Tagore a tight and unforgiving receptacle of power for producing conformity, whether British, Chinese, Indian or Japanese. India's answer, he said, must be to provide not a competing nationalism but a creative solution to the divisiveness produced by racial consciousness.p 311
The Palestinian intifada, one of the great anti-colonial uprisings of our times, continues the struggle over historical Palestine, one of the principal themes of The Arab Awakening [Antonius].p 319-320
To [Nehru] the peasants and the urban poor are ruled by passions, not reason; they can be mobilized by poets like Tagore and charismatic presences like Gandhi, but after independence this large number of people ought to be absorbed into the state, to be made functional in its development. Yet Chatterjee makes the interesting point that by transforming nationalism into a new regional or state ideology, post-colonial countries subjected themselves to a global process of rationalization based on external norms, a process governed in the post-war years of modernization and development by the logic of a world system whose type is global capitalism, commanded at the top by the handful of leading industrial countries.
p 358
It is curious and profoundly symptomatic of the Gulf conflict that one word that was tediously pronounced and repronounced and yet left unanalysed was 'linkage', an ugly solecism that seems to have been invented as a symbol of the unexamined American right to ignore or include whole geographical sections of the globe in its considerations. During the Gulf crisis, 'linkage' meant not that there was, but that there was no connection between things that in fact belonged together by common association, sense, geography, history.
p 362
I do not know a single Arab who would demur that the state's monopoly on coercion has almost completely eliminated democracy in the Arab world, introduced immense hostility between rulers and ruled, placed much too high value on conformity, opportunism, flattery, and getting along rather than on risking new ideas, criticism, or dissent.