Though
Camus himself was not a racist or a believer in European supremacy, the namelessness of the Arab
characters is reflective of just such an attitude that was prevalent among white people in the
colonial world.
European writers of that period who were progressives were
open in pointing out the reflexively racist tendencies among their compatriots. For instance,
George Orwell, in his essay "Marrakech," wrote that non-white people, to the European
eye, tend to blend into the landscape and to appear undifferentiated from iteven to people such
as himself who presumably were unprejudiced. In the novel The Jewel in the Crown,
Paul Scott describes a situation in which a man of Indian descent brought up in
England, after he has returned to India, is not recognized by his closest English friend when he
sees him on the street in a group of Indian men. The implication is that non-Europeans lose
their specific identity and simply become part of the masses of "natives" and of the
physical...
No comments:
Post a Comment