Why Are We 'Artists'? by Jessica Lack

Author:Jessica Lack
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241236338
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

The Third World Today

One of the most important features of colonialism was and is to violently suppress the indigenous culture of the colonized country and then impose its own cultural values on the colonial people. In many instances, colonialism imposed an actual ban on native cultural practices, taking away by force from the people their cultural artifacts. The loot was then transferred to the West. As a result, most of the Third World heritage is today either hidden away stored in the basement lockers of Western Museumsfn5 or insolently displayed in their glass cases as part of the evidence of the West’s pride and precious possessions. AFTER EXTERMINATING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AND THEN LOOTING THEIR BELONGINGS, THE WEST TODAY HAS THE AUDACITY TO CALL ITSELF THE PROTECTOR OF THE ARTISTIC AND CULTURAL HERITAGE OF THE WORLD.

At the same time, colonialism created and creates a native bourgeoisie by giving some of the native population Western colonial education, and by awarding them some socio-economic privileges and a share in political power. In turn, this native class, to quote Amilcar Cabral, ‘assimilates the colonizer’s mentality, considers itself culturally superior to its own people and ignores or looks down upon their cultural values.’fn6

With the coming to power of this native bourgeoisie, after ‘independence’, colonialism is only replaced by neo-colonialism; which in fact is a general phenomenon in the Third World today. One of the most important characteristics of neo-colonialism is the perpetuation of Western imperialist domination in the ‘decolonized’ countries through Western cultural penetration, against which the native bourgeoisie cannot and does not act as a shield. On the contrary, its own lifestyle facilitates further propagation of Western values, which openly relegate the indigenous cultural life. In effect, it virtually becomes an instrument through which Western culture is projected as civilized and progressive vis-à-vis the ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ native culture.

It is therefore no surprise that, immediately after the Second World War, Western imperialism under the leadership of its most powerful country, the US, unleashed an unprecedented cultural propaganda in the major cities of the Third World, particularly in Asia and Africa, through its control of mass media (films, TV, glossy publications, etc.). The whole purpose of this propaganda, which constantly assaulted people’s senses with alien images of the values of Western life, was to inflict their minds with the illusions of a better life (in the West) and to lure them into believing that they could also possess this life, if only they would abandon their own values; thereby making them develop a sense of their own inferiority. The aim of the cultural aggression, in fact, has always been to make the dominated people totally abandon their own values and accept the projected superiority of the imperialist culture, turning them into passive objects of Western domination, since, as Amilcar Cabral has pointed out, ‘with strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its own perpetuation’.fn7

At a time when people were trying to recover from their colonial past and were looking forward to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.