seaver, actually, about a half hour after i posted the rant above i remembered that yesterday we were moving into a conversation here---but this stupid cold i still have (goddamnit) knocked me over and i forgot to follow up.
once i remembered that, it followed that i should have made some preliminary separations so as not to make it sound like i was simply blowing off your previous post and stating the same thing over again--but when i dragged myself back here to do it, things had changed and it was too late.
so first off, mea culpa for the vagueness of address.
on the other hand, since here:
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If you want to discuss the means, ideologies, etc. which would cause a nation to conquor/colonize/etc than that is a completely different argument.
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you say exactly what i was trying to get to, i dont feel so guilty--the way may have been clunky, but this is the reframing of the debate that i have been pushing toward over the last couple posts.
what if this is a better approach to the op project, one that makes the object addressed tangible and ongoing, one that avoids the problems of the Giant Mea Culpa....to stick with colonialism and neo-colonialism, ideological frames are the condition of possibility for both. they shape motive, they frame reality (both in terms of inclusion and exclusion of information, of variables), they delineate and provide justification for actions. it may well be that between, say, 1920 and now there has been considerable movement concerning the notion of colonialism and its explicit ideological underpinnings--but there is also an effect in using the category colonialism or "colonial period" to designate a discrete phase, one that is over, and another set of effects that follow from the usage of the term "globalization" as over against "neo-colonialism" (say) to describe something about the present capitalist arrangement--and among these effects is the possibility that globalization and neo-colonialism are not the same thing.
so the ideological frames which enabled colonialism maybe be understood as a cluster of propositions with certain features emphasized and certain features receding---that of "globalization" certainly shares a dense thicket of attributes, but not necessarily arranged in the same way. i would direct attention toward the continuities AND discontinuities between these clusters or formations.
and it sounds like you would in principle as well--even tho i suspect that our divergent politics would lead us in different directions once we agreed on the starting "object" of analysis (sorry about those last scare quotes--it's a tick generated by stuff i am working on elsewhere)....
the visiting of explicit accusations of guilt across generations seems to me kinda useless---not as bad as its opposite to my mind--but useless nonetheless in that it is all too easy to react as you are with nuance (and others without)--"but i didnt have anything to do with the belgian congo in the 1930s"...that might be true enough, but what follows from it is often so problematic that it's better to go after that entire way of thinking than try to pick apart what is interesting or not from the debris it leaves behind.
that's basically my position.
i suppose it'd make sense to push further into this rather than continue talking about it, but i think this is already long enough. we'll see what happens.