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C o‐Constructing Colonial Dichotomies in Female Former Colonizers' Narratives of the B elgian C ongo
Author(s) -
Van De Mieroop Dorien,
Pagnaer Mathias
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of linguistic anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.463
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1548-1395
pISSN - 1055-1360
DOI - 10.1111/jola.12017
Subject(s) - colonialism , indigenous , gender studies , dichotomy , narrative , metis , ideology , sociology , civilization , negotiation , ethnology , history , anthropology , politics , art , literature , political science , social science , biology , ecology , philosophy , archaeology , epistemology , world wide web , computer science , law
Focusing on interviews with female former colonials in the B elgian C ongo, we analyze the ways in which the interviewees co‐construct and negotiate their identities in relation to master narratives of colonization in their interactions with the interviewer, who is also a former colonial. We focus mainly on stories of the household and family life, since the colonial household is typically a locus of encounters between the white female colonizers and black household staff. The findings demonstrate a polarization between blacks and whites that is in line with colonial ideological views in which indigenous people are infantilized, thus legitimizing colonization as an endeavor of civilization. These interview narratives thus seem frozen in time, even though they were told more than four decades after C ongolese independence. We propose that this frozen‐in‐time quality is partly attributable to features of the interactions, in which the interlocutors set up a local in‐group of white former colonizers; but it is also a reflection of contemporary B elgian society, in which a broad and critical debate concerning colonial history, one in which the voices of the former colonizers and the formerly colonized can both be heard, is largely absent.