"Chinese or African or African-American or Native American aesthetics are much more accessible to my students than the works of ?their own? tradition (whatever that means; my students have multiple origins, and the ?western tradition? is a fiction anyway)."
Auto-oppression reaches new heights. Or depths. Crypto-imperialism, rehabilitating cultural difference as cultural difference. How people can keep a straight face whilst comparing the "fiction" of Western Culture to the romanticised projections of "Other" (sic.) Cultures I'll never know. But whilst enjoying the frisson of superior moral inferiority, do bear in mind that other canons may just be based on exclusion, or even be fictions themselves, and that fiction is not exactly a marginal element of human culture.
http://www.aesthetics-online.org/ideas/sartwell.html
Auto-oppression reaches new heights. Or depths. Crypto-imperialism, rehabilitating cultural difference as cultural difference. How people can keep a straight face whilst comparing the "fiction" of Western Culture to the romanticised projections of "Other" (sic.) Cultures I'll never know. But whilst enjoying the frisson of superior moral inferiority, do bear in mind that other canons may just be based on exclusion, or even be fictions themselves, and that fiction is not exactly a marginal element of human culture.
http://www.aesthetics-online.org/ideas/sartwell.html
