I happen recently to have been reading the work of Arjuan Appadurai
(_Modernity at Large_, U Minnesota Press, 1996). He mentions in various
places his own and others' work on the ways in which colonial powers
projected European notions of racial and religious divisions onto societies
that had very different indigenous bases for classifying people (e.g. by
caste). He seems to suggest that while this led in part to some horrifying
results (e.g. the Hindu-Muslim confrontations), it some ways it did just
the reverse of 'divide-and-conquer': it actually led to emergent
nationalism, and a sense of greater unity across the former cultural
divisions. I wonder if anything of the sort could be claimed either for
Black solidarity in South Africa (vs. tribal and other loyalties), or for
whatever the parallel might be in Indonesia?
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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