Conversation

I think about this Edward Said quote a lot. In teaching, I pair it with Kipling's The White Man's Burden. They're essential for showing how Americans, especially policy & media elites, view (and viewed) their relationship to the majority world of black & brown people.
The quote reads, in part: Much of the rhetoric of the 'New World Order' promulgated by the American government since the end of the Cold War -- with its redolent self-congratulation, its unconcealed triumphalism, its grave proclamations of responsibility -- might have been scripted by Conrad's Holroyd: we are number one, we are bound to lead, we stand for freedom and order, and so on.
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This 1900 Puck magazine cartoon, celebrating our conquest of the Philippines, is a grimly appropriate visual companion to the words of Said & Kipling.
Illustration shows Uncle Sam standing at center, gesturing to the left toward American soldiers boarding ships to return to America after defeating the Spanish in the Philippines, and gesturing to the right toward a group of matronly women, one labeled "Daughters of the Revolution", who have just arrived to educate the peoples of the Philippines.
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