Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

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Under the new reality, one no longer needed to go through the long and often arduous process of becoming, to use Voegelin’s term, a “person-in-the-foreign-culture” in order to spout off in public as an expert about its core realities. No, now all one needed to do was to read a bunch of articles and books written in English by area studies “theorists” and “strategic thinkers” who, themselves often had a very tenuous, and in a surprisingly large number of cases, non-existent (outside of guided and interpreted visits) dialogue with the language and culture of their alleged “area of expertise.” That the new discourses about the other had the additional problem of being predicated, more often than not, on an underlying belief in the essentially normative and universal nature of US cultural, political and economic behaviors made things even worse.

But on second thought, maybe this was, and is, precisely the aim.

In her work on colonial literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Mary Louise Pratt points to the high incidence of “promontory views” within the literary accounts of British travelers to Africa. By this she means descriptions of the foreign territories made from “on high,” that is, from a vantage point that both encourages a sense of mastery over the land and avoids any hint of engagement or messy entanglement with its complexities, or those of the “native” people who have dwelt upon it for centuries. She suggests, moreover, that the frequency of these scenes of commanding detachment was no accident. Rather, that they were an integral element of the effort on the part of the British ruling class to prepare the ordinary citizenry for their role as invaders and predators of far-off places.