Transatlantic Differences
... No, I'm not talking political differences here. I'm talking political culture. Bill ("the spouse") and I are coming up to 20 years of a transatlantic marriage. It took us a few years to figure out that when we talked about the role of "race" in society, we were talking about different things. (Americans construe "race" largely in terms of skin color-- a legacy of the role of slavery, I guess. But in Britain, it's construed much more along the lines of "national group" or whatever-- the concept for which US citizens now use the term "ethnicity".)
Actually, once we figured that out, it became easier to see the "Zionism is racism" resolution at the UN came to spark such hot controversy. Basically, people east and west of the Atlantic were talking about different things...
So here's another interesting difference. On the whole bottom half of page A11 of today's New York Times is an ad placed by a group of communities in the Outer Banks region of North Carolina. That region, which is heavily dependent on tourism, got very badly hit by the recent hurricane here, so the communities were advertising to urge tourists and investors to come back as soon as possible. "While the storm shifted our dunes and reshaped our coastline, she hasn't changed the resiliency of the people of the Outer Banks," etc., etc.
And then, the ad copy gets to waxing rapturous about why it's important "to preserve this coastal destination for our children's children" and talk about the "rich cultural and historical heritage for which we've become known." The prime example they give of the latter? "After all, colonial settlers chose our islands to start a brave new life on the cusp of a new worold."
Excuse me? We extol "colonial settlers" and their historical role?
For Europeans, the whole role of "colonial settlers" in their nation's histories is an intense embarrassment-- terrifically nineteenth century.
But not here, it seems.
Oh, and did I mention what had drawn me to p. A11 in the first place? Most of the top of the page is given over to a really depressing news acount of the Israeli government's plan to build 600 new homes in three (highly illegal) settlements in the West Bank.
Colonial settlerism in action!
OK, a long comment from someone who just stumbled across your very enlightening weblog. And who is probably going too deeply into a minor point...
While I'd agree with you that there is something winceworthy in the emphasis on the colonial history of the islands in that advertisement, it's my take that this is a pretty mild expression of the celebratory attitude taken -- particularly in that part of the U.S. -- toward the colonial period. That sentence is nothing, for example, compared to the multimillion dollar tourist business done by Colonial Williamsburg in the nearby Tidewater region of Virginia.
Of course from the perspective of all the bloodshed committed in the European settling of the North American continent it seems perhaps uncool to speak of the settling of that coastline without embarrassment or regret.
But it probably isn't going to happen, and the reasons for that are not simply knee-jerk reactionary politics or some such. The people there don't associate colonialism with the East India Company or Heart of Darkness (to speak of "the colonial period" on the East Coast, after all, usually means the 17th Century, anyway).
Europeans, after all, by and large are not viewing the embarassing 19th century colonialism through the lens of "this is how my family came to live in the place that it does." But in North Carolina, your family likely does live there because of one of the waves of settlement that began in that early colonial period (even if they came much later). It's hard for me to imagine the people there (as a community) choosing to feel neutral or negative about their "origins" there. For better or for worse, it is their myth.
This doesn't mean that such a mythology isn't still rendered, um, problematic (to say the least) by the facts of what happened in the encounter between European settlers and native communities. Slaughter and conquest (to say nothing of slavery) aren't pretty things to include in one's national myths, but I believe that Americans of European descent should try to regard our history in its totality -- which includes a lot of nastiness and horror.
But that's pretty ambitious, I think. My point is that colonial history is, in many US communities, not merely a politico-economic practice that used to be more than defensible (Kipling's exhortation to take up "the white man's burden," etc.) and now can be seen as a ruthless wholesale power-grab by a few cultures. Instead, it's family history, family origins even, sometimes the terminus of what one knows about where one came from. So I wonder if it will ever be the case that, say, Outer Banks residents would phrase their attitude toward the settlers in a way that matches the expectations you mention.
That took longer to say than I thought it would...if I am sounding like I'm defending "pride" in colonialism, I'm not -- but I suppose I am surprised at your surprise.
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