“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, December 11, 2010

Spicy Nuggets of OOO

In answering a query from Ian Bogost I discovered yet more evidence of my latent OOO tendencies. This time it's from The Poetics of Spice (Cambridge UP, 2000):

The study of the literary and cultural representation of consumption and the commodity provides new ways of thinking about orientalism and colonialism, which are often construed through a psychoanalytic discourse of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’. This history of the subject can be expanded with histories of the object in colonial and orientalist texts.


The first draft was a bit ruder about postcolonial studies, which at the time was mired in identity politics. It's from a chapter on sugar.

Then it became popular to replace The Fascinating History of Mr. Charles Dickens with The Fascinating History of the Potato and I got out of food studies. Le plus ca change...

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