File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1999/postcolonial.9904, message 127


Date: Tue, 13 Apr 1999 11:45:19 -0700
From: "Marlene R. Atleo" <maratleo-AT-island.net>
Subject: Whiteness, Rightness, En-lighten-ness 


The fluidity of "rationality" about "race" and "nationality" is certainly
something I have been trying to illustrate with my prattle....
>If the intervention in Kosovo came about because Kosovo->Albanians were
white, does that mean the Bosnians were not? 
So what was the flashpoint in this...it seems some trigger started this
much like the "triggers" that spurs those with attention deficit syndromes
into action...I think it behooves us to look at what underlies these
triggers..."race" is the stinking red herring that keeps being drawn across
our path to throw us off the scent....I for one want to resist this "fake
to the left"

I have to agree with Joe F.  I don't really see anything very "leftist" in
this discussion...I suspect we need the "vertical axis" of history to
understand our position on the on the horizontal axis of ideology as we
seek to understand the field in which our discussion  takes place..
 
>What happens when arguments advanced by the left are >appropriated by the
right? Should we disavow them, agree with >them (on this particular issue)
or see what ideological purpose such >appropriations serve? 

But I think that this is a critical point....because of course I favor the
latter...as ideologies "seem" to merge, just as in cross cultural
functioning it becomes critical to be able to meta the process and attempt
to understand its complexity rather than to try to parsimoniously simplify
it in a reductionist approach....

>Finally, is Kosovo really that historically significant to the Serbs? ...
>What's the difference, in short, between the reactiviation of national
>mythology to serve present needs and agendas and a "true" >national
historical feeling? Might it not be that Kosovo has become >so important to
the Serbs not because of a history that extends to >the Battle of Kosovo in
the 14(?) century but because Kosovo was >where the war in Jugoslavia began
in 1989 and if the Serbs loose >this area as well all the hardships they've
endured in the last decade >will have been for naught. 
I think such speculation is important....there are hardly going to be any
answers here but speculation, hypotheses and suppositions....as we wrestle
with what postcolonial though is about from our various perspectives...

which is why I believe we "seem" to have gotten off track...
but there are many perspectives represented here and I appreciate the
engagements from the various....




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