aalam-e-aftaab

When asked by an interviewer what he thought of Western civilisation, M. K. Gandhi is supposed to have replied: ‘I think it would be a good idea’.

my friend who’s obsessed with grammar and worships linguistic rules has bought a kitten with the name Max and said that although the name wasn’t to her liking it was the best one she could have chosen from the three already named cats...so I asked her why not change it and she turned to me with the most serious expression on her face and said: ‘I cannot CHANGE his name, it’s part of his personal identity!’ and I was like ‘how should I explain that naming things and beings is an arbitrary process and the symbol has no direct relation to the referent while only being an instrument of creating your personal emotional attachment to it and exercising power of possession over the designated...the cat does not care about anyone’s invasion of its personal integrity by word so you might as well rewrite the proprietorial label forced upon it earlier for your own pleasure’

As one very wise cat once said: ‘Cats don’t have names... you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names’. (Neil Gaiman, Coraline)

Moreover, cultures and peoples disenfranchised by the past few centuries of Western-dominated capitalist exploitation need to be able, or perhaps be made able, to take control of their own pasts, their own histories. Our own pasts are the ‘means of production’ of cultural identity. Just as the Eurocentrism and nation-statehood that goes hand-in-hand with capitalism has depended on misappropriating the economic capital of said disenfranchised peoples through colonialism to drive their own progress, so too have they appropriated those peoples’ pasts to rationalise the oppression. The underrepresentation of these non-Western peoples and cultures is another manifestation of class struggle and to move out of the yoke of cultural hegemony, it is is all the more important for everyone to see through the illusions, and, as you pointed out @darc-academiia, acknowledge and promote the existence of ‘academia, intelligence, music, art, architecture, and literature’ outside of European-origin communities. It is the ability to write our own histories, to tell our own stories, that gives us the power to progress away from insecurity, and away from divisiveness and towards unity.