6.16.2003
The most banal Sontagisms
[Posted 5:38 PM by Stefan Beck]
The world today, writes Susan Sontag in the TLS (link provided by Arts and Letters Daily), is �mired in the most banal nationalisms�”. To remedy this, Sontag proposes that everybody speak, yes, English.
“�there is one intractable feature of our lives which roots us in the old boundaries that advanced capitalism�and advanced imperial dominance (American-style) find so encumbering. That is the fact that we speak so many different languages. Hence, the necessity of an international language. And what more plausible candidate than English?”
She is confident that, upon her suggestion, India will stop quibbling about its “sixteen ’official languages’” and settle on English. But what was that bit of hers about the white race?
“It is the white race and it alone–its ideologies and inventions–which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads�” (Partisan Review, winter 1967, p. 57).
Inventions�like English? Or the world according to Susan Sontag?