How the Enlightenment Led to Colonialism
Dave Monroe
against.the.dave at gmail.com
Sun Mar 1 04:45:57 CST 2015
Kentridge also sketched a brief history of a Herero insurrection in
what had been German Southwest Africa—“the first German genocide of
the twentieth century,” he noted. Skulls of the Herero were shipped to
Berlin, where they were skinned, boiled, and catalogued for
taxonomical purposes—an attempt to construct a latter-day Great Chain
of Being.
[...]
“Every act of enlightenment—all ambitions to save souls, all the basic
impulses—is so dogged by the weight of what follows it, the shadows,
the violence that has accompanied the Enlightenment. The colonial
project in its own description of bringing light to darkness is a
gruesome working out of Plato’s cave.”
http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/04/how-the-enlightenment-led-to-colonialism
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