Us, the Other and the In Between.

In retrospect, I think i actually enjoyed perusing the readings more than I'd thought I would. They made me reflect on the "new imperialism" that began in the 1880s and that stamped its legacy on the Third World.
What I found of especial interest in Levine's "Ruling an Empire" is the anxiety over the perceived possible corruption of the Britons by the native, 'lesser' cultures which would inevitably undermine British rule. "Pocahontas" jumped into my mind at that point and refused to budge. In my study of history in secondary school and junior college I guess I'd conveniently glossed over the fact that assimilation at the height of Britain's imperial power was very much a "one-way street". It is easy to get blindsided by the colonized people's struggles. After all, jingoism was the rallying cry of the day, one that united nationalism, anti-Semitism and imperialism. I for one have always found myself focusing on the harsh sentiment voiced by Jews of the time; the harshest thing one man can tell another is that your "blood, your soul, your sensibility has no place in our community, you are and will remain different, ignoble, alien." There is variance, but there are also parallels in the colonists' cases and that fascinates me; they couldn't and didn't remain inviolate and to expect them to remain perfectly aloft was ludicrous and doomed from the onset. They had to strive for it though, because they had effectively garlanded themselves and stepped on to the pedestals of their own volition; to temper their personas would mean undermining their power and authority over the less civilized. Even Picasso was irritated by the influences the Negroes had on him even as he loved the "magical influence" of the primitive and tribal. After all, there can be a certain kind of nobility in savagery, as Levine touches on in the case of the Amerindians, or rather, I would venture to say, romanticism. Therefore, I would think that one of the concerns of this module is the margins of identity as well as the modes of identification. Because decolonization was a process rather than a simple appearance, these identification imperatives are vastly dynamic and more, even a type of recolonization.
Levine also piqued my interest further with mention of Bronte's St John Rivers, who is a favorite character of mine. She mentions the trend among converts in "adapting Christianity to a variety of colonial customs and traditions, an un-expected and, to the missionaries, mostly unwelcome outgrowth of their efforts." This confluence of identities has shaped the world as we know it today and even in contemporaneous social times, the distinction between race and religion is ambiguous. For example, there are cultural aspects of being Malay that aren't exactly endorsed by Islam and history is not so much a palimpset as a continually shifting entity.
I really like what Yuen Mei highlighted in her post. Orientalism is, for the most part, still superficial or at least, vaguely specular. And I do agree that the intimacy of savagery and the artistic sensibility is crucial in the aesthetic of modernism, as evinced by our current furious blogging. The fallout, and its multiplicities, are for us to ponder on.

Nur Khairunnisa Ismail