2. Zitate
2.1. Sklaverei
Exklusionen
"New Englanders, like other English people, were prepared by their ethnocentric attitudes to regard Africans as 'strangers'
(or 'outsiders') who could justifiably be enslaved." [Soderlund 399]
Trägheit
"The failure to abolish slavery in the late eighteenth century left succeeding generations stymied, imprisoned by the
Constitution's apparent protection of slavery, yet conscious of the implicit attack on it in the Declaration of Independence.
The post-Revolutionary sons, it could be said, harbored the sins of the past until the accumulated pressure - of territorial acquisition,
of political dissension, of guilt - became too great." [Sundquist 5]
Einheit der Union
"Our 'fear of dissolving the Union' is the strongest reason for 'our supineness of the subject of slavery' "
[Lydia Maria Child. An Appeal in Favor of the Americans Called Africans. New York: Arno Press, 1968 [reprint of . 1836 ed.],
p. 212; as quoted in Sundquist 20]
Dekonstruktion
"After the legal act of the Emancipation Proclamation, after the military victory of the Union and the cultural work of Uncle Tom's
Cabin, blacks were no longer 'things', and therefore property, but persons." [Fisher 4]
Freiheit
"It was, of course, Rousseau who described all men within society as prisoners when at the beginning of The Social Contract he wrote,
'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' Wordsworth described the relation of adulthood to the full humanity of childhood as
a growing up in which 'shades of the prison house begin to fall.' " [Fisher 94]
2.2. Begrifflichkeiten
Demographische Klassifikation
"Fewer and fewer Americans believe in the biological reality of races, but they are remarkably willing to live with an officially
sanctioned system of demographic classification that replicates precisely the crude, colloquial categories, black, yellow, white, red
and brown" [Hollinger 8]
Diskriminierung
"Being classified as Euro-American, white, or Caucasian has rarely been a basis for being denied adequate employment, housing,
education, or protection from violence. " [Hollinger 22]
ethnische Klassifizierung
"Today's device for classification is not even a guide to lines along which genealogical interaction and merging are taking place;
rather, it is a framework for politics and culture in the United States. It is an implicit prescription for the principles on which
Americans should maintain communities; it is a statement that certain affiliations matter more than others." [Hollinger 24]
Bezeichnungen
"Die Struktur gestattet dem Sichtbaren, indem sie es begrenzt und filtriert, sich in Sprache zu transkribieren. [..]
Aber die so erhaltenen Beschreibung ist nichts weiter als eine Art Eigenname. Sie läßt jedem Wesen seine strenge Individualität
und formuliert weder die Übersicht, zu der es gehört, noch die Nachbarschaft, die es umgibt, noch den Platz, den es einnimmt.
Sie ist schlicht und einfach Bezeichnung." [Foucault 177/180]
Arbitrarität des Systems
"Das System ist arbiträr in seiner ganzen Abfolge, wenn aber einmal das System der Variablen (das Merkmal) am Anfang definiert worden ist,
ist es nicht mehr möglich, es zu modifizieren, auch nur ein Element hinzuzufügen oder fortzulassen. Die Methode wird von außen aufgezwungen,
und zwar durch globale Ähnlichkeiten, die die Dinge miteinander verwandt machen. Sie transkribiert die Perzeption sofort in Diskurs." [Foucault 186]
Dekonstruktion
"This is how deconstruction works: by showing that what was prior and privileged in the old hierarchy (for instance, metaphor and speech)
can just as easily seem secondary, the deconstructor causes the formerly privileged term to exchange properties with the formerly
devalued one. Causes become effects and (d)evolutions become origins, but the result is neither the destruction of the old order or
hierarchy nor the construction of a new one. It is, rather, deconstruction. " [Murphin 186]
Relativität
"It is only from our knowledge of the subsequent history of Western Europe that we can presume to rank events in terms of their
world-historical significance, and even then that significance is less world historical than simply Western European, representing a
tendency of modern historians to rank events in the record hierarchically from within a perspective that is culture-specific, not
universal at all." [White 9f]
|