#colonial language

[thoughtlessarse]

Dutch stats office to stop using terms 'Western' and 'non-Western'

The official statistics bureau for the Netherlands will stop using the terms 'Western' and 'non-Western’ in their research in a plan which could take several years to implement, according to newspaper NRC. This decision was made in line with pending advice from the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), because using the distinction to define people with a non-Dutch cultural background lacks scientific purpose and evokes 'negative associations'.

The newspaper said the topic was given extra scrutiny when Utrecht University said they would participate in the Cultural Diversity Barometer workplace research from the CBS. In mapping diversity within the university, it would have to categorize employees as being either Dutch, people from a Western foreign background, or people from a non-Western foreign background. The latter is defined by the CBS as  people from “Turkey or countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, with the exception of Former Dutch East Indies/Indonesia and Japan.”

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So that’s “allochtoon” (from another soil) and the Western/non-Western dichotomy both dropped. “Allochtoon” was dropped in 2016 due to the negative connotations thereof.

[apveng]

The Troubling Rhetoric of Space Exploration

Opinion | Colonialist language is often invoked to justify missions to the cosmos. That’s only adding to problems here on Earth.

[brassmanticore]

British colonial sources describe Muharram as a “festival” and talk about it being “celebrated” (the British Library still does it), and it strikes me as a weird thing to say.  The tone is so off.

[brassmanticore]

At times this Manicheism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man's reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary. The European rarely hits on a picturesque style; but the native, who knows what is in the mind of the settler, guesses at once what he is thinking of. Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life—all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. General de Gaulle speaks of "the yellow multitudes" and Francois Mauriac of the black, brown, and yellow masses which soon will be unleashed. The native knows all this, and laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other's words. For he knows that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory.

Frantz Fanon, 'The Wretched of the Earth,' pg. 43 (trans. Constance Farrington. Grove Press, 1963). You see a (sometimes modernised, not always) form of that language a lot in English-language media (I don't read any other European languages well so I can't talk about them, but I'm sure it's going on there too. Fanon was talking about French colonialism in Algeria, but Britain had the same attitudes and said the same things about the people they colonialised). Its notable in the white fear of being overrun by "swarms" or "masses" of black and brown refugees or migrants from formerly colonised or occupied countries that's everywhere lately. It's very racialised language, and the assumption that these migrants are violent or "uncivilised" is voiced explicitly. People use other colonialist key words Fanon talks about in other passages too, like the threat to Western "values," and think they're totally not being racist. It's not subtle at all.

[othernotebooksareavailable]

Polite petition to call it 'Literatures in English'

rather than to elide Scottish Welsh, Northern Irish Literatures under the banner 'English Literature'. English is not a synonym for British. English Literature is literature from England.

*Lies down on the floor. Stays face down down on the floor.*