Kim Todzi: "Walter Rodney on how the persp…" - Mastodon

Kim Todzi @kimtodzi@mastodon.social

Walter Rodney on how the perspective of the colonizers maintained in - even anticolonial - historiography. #WalterRodney #Colonialism #Histodons

What I then would suggest is that we need to understand
how certain generalizations, which have essentially a class
perspective in historiographical terms, have come to be taken
as common truths, as universal truths, even by West Indian
scholars. In the case of Guyana, at the end of the period of
slavery, there was a debate going on as to what would be the
future of the society. Now that debate, when one examines it
carefully, was really a debate about the future of the planta-
tions. The planters engaged in the debate with the British
government were assuming that the future of the plantations
and the future of the society merged, that there was no dis-
tinction. Plantation equals society; society equals plantation

And in a strange way many of us, including West Indians as I
said, who discussed the issue have also fallen into that trap,
and have equated the plantation as a social form, as an insti-
tution, with the totality of our society. Thus, in curious ways,
the perspective of the planters has been passed on in the
scholarship ever since then, even by persons who would cer-
tainly deny, almost violently deny, that they are taking a pro-
planter position. And yet, when one examines the output, there
is that tendency willy-nilly, usually unwittingly. Th

Feb 10, 2023, 12:46 PM··Web

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