I went through Kim’s Twitter and website.His style and approach reminds me of China Mieville.
I guess there’s always a niche for a Westerner to take on “Eastern topics.” I wonder if he would have gotten so much traction or controversy with his work if he was a plain old Sikh?
The Daily Telegraph would have probably not noticed him or been very careful in what it wrote. It is a bit perverse to see what is a hugely important in Indian history now being “milked”.
As an aside name me coloured Shakespearan academics (in Western institutions) or in Western history? It’s rare to see a coloured individuals teach Western history topics to white students; if Coloured are in humanities and academia, it will be in coloured topics. It’s a bit like casting white actors to play Middle Eastern and other ethnic roles.
I was ruminating the other day what was most interesting about that video of the little girl interrupting her dad on the BBC; is that the BBC had taken so much effort to find the one white American academic they could speak to in Korea about Korea.
Now it may seem I’m just having a usual gripe about Colonisers but it’s simply a reflection that the highest echelons of academa still remain steeped in white privilege.
I’ve seen this time and time again in Britain; as Britain begins to “brown”, the white spaces just grow and fossilise. There might be much gripe about diversity but Britain at the top looks and feels extremely different to urban Britain.
Minorities have a few choices at their disposal:
(1.) Struggle to the top but they will have to invisibly “whiten” as they do so. It is essentially adopting
(2.) Just focus on making money and being hyper-bourgeois; leave exciting Bohemian areas to white people.
(3.) Become angry and disaffected to be noticed but so much anger is corrosive to the soul. I get tired of every other tweet being “I cried with rage” about relatively abstract and trivial topics. I wish I could send every SJW to the third world for a 6 month to understand what “real problems are”.
(4.) Do what I do and create another base “back home.” I don’t have much privilege in the West but I sort have privilege in the East as a Westerner (yes it’s a perverse logic). Privilege is really important to get ahead in life and the absurd arguments of SJWs that they need to “atone” for their privilege is essentially that they are so far ahead that they need to give others a lift up.
