We tend to have a visceral response to someone we think is dirty. But Stephanie Newell argues that judging other people as dirty is more in our minds than it is about medical reality. Through examples ranging from the travel diaries of colonial British traders in West Africa to the surprising ways Nigerian popular culture makes comedy out of disease, Stephanie shows how judging people to be dirty always involves a failure to understand them – but sometimes can also spark empathy.
Tag: colonial
It might seem obvious that it’s good to read in ways that are literary, critical and modern. But Michael Allan argues that viewing certain ways of reading as literary, critical and modern also involves constructing a stereotype of a bad reader who is unliterary, uncritical and backwards. In colonial Egypt, British authorities relied on stereotypes of Islamic reading practices to treat local people as merely memorising and repeating what they read. As a result, local people were considered incapable of thinking critically and of holding valid political opinions.