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i think i am posting this to distance myself from the previous 2 posts.
i am not sure where this facile meme "white guilt" comes from or what exactly it is to accomplish--beyond of course enabling a meme-worthy separation of the present from the past. in the last two posts, what it does comes at such a high price in terms of reductive thinking that it is hard to imagine the point of indulging it at all.
it is as if colonial-style domination only took place during the colonial period...once "we" were done with that (when did that happen exactly?) "we" were done with everything about it, including all the modes of thinking and acting that made the colonial project seem rational. i dont know how you'd go about showing that this is the case: personally, i dont think it is. on the problem of the reverse of arguments shaped by this "white guilt" meme, see below.
or as if in the states, once the civil war was over, so was racism.
but but but...what about reconstruction?...
no no, we took care of that one in the 1960s--and now you can see that we have a holiday....
but the reverse is obviously not true--we are not simply operating in a colonial context, we are not still operating within an economy that enslaves that many people explicitly....
it is in the setting up of useless, false binaries that this "white guilt" meme demonstrates its emptiness. i dont think the term allows you to even start thinking about anything--all it does is to provide a one-dimensional distancing device that wards off the problem of inherited guilt (original sin)...it doesnt address anything--it just says "i dont like this inherited guilt idea"...
and i dont find the analogies that seaver tries to make convincing at all--the fact is that christian colonialism is so much more pervasive and was so much more self-righteously violent that it is unlike other forms of invasion/domination. to think otherwise is the same as arguing that there is no difference between a tiny stuffed toy elephant and an elephant. the elephant is simply more itself because it is better at being an elephant than the tiny stuffed toy elephant is.
my problem with the project comes mostly from not understanding still what exactly it is.
within that, there are certain moves that i think are excluded up front--the giant mea culpa being one of them--the production of objects meant to represent something of the eradication of Others seems to me another (because it could unwittingly repeat the problem it is set up to criticise)--but both are based on limited information and probably are meaningless with reference to the actual project.
at least i hope that's the case.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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