Hey, sorry if not completely related, but this reminded me of a book I'm reading that mentions how language itself is part of colonization. (something we need to understand if we're doing decolonization)
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In the book, the author talks about, for instance, how western society tends to associate vision with truth, with the translator mentioning how most western languages use "I see" as "I understand" and "clear" as "easy to understand", which reinforces the notion that what is visible is what matters.
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view
Which is incredibly relevant for how both racism and the patriarchy works.
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view
The book itself centers around discussing women in african societies (more specifically, yoruba society), and also does a really interesting deconstruction of sex/gender the way we understand it in western society.
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view
(I'm still at the start, which is mostly criticism of western understandings of sex/gender. I read theory somewhat slowly)
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view
It points out that western society has built social norms on top of biological and anatomical characteristics; "Biological determinism provides the basic logic for the social world's organization" "The presence or not of certain organs determines one's social position"
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view
Anyway, for whoever chances upon this and is interested, the author is Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and the book is: "The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses."
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view
Another peculiar addition, if I might, is that I read the portuguese version of the book and that one has a whole two pages from the translator warning about how regular translation issues are extra important in a book that problematizes language itself and what he did to try to dimish that.
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view
Such as which parts to translate or not translate and trying to avoid using masculine as neutral, since portuguese is a language that genders *everything* (a nation is a woman, but a country is a man, btw) and masculine is neutral (if there's 100 women and 1 man in a crowd, it's "them (male)"
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view
Anyway, it was interesting because it added an extra layer to the whole thing and gave me some insight as to the translator's political position regarding the book (a good one, it seems).
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view
Also, the whole language as colonization thing is even worse in portuguese, since "clear" as "easy to understand", for instance, becomes "claro" which also means "light", so on top of the "vision as truth" aspect, there's a more direct correlation to "white as true".
aug 26, 2025, 9:44 am • 1 0 • view