Monday, July 23, 2007

Diaspora, Empire

Languagehat has a wonderful post on the Assyrians of Urmia here, drawing on an article by Arianne Ishaya on Nineveh.com.

I have a look at Nineveh.com and see this


and the site is immediately filed in the mental folder Barthes, thou shouldst be living at this hour -- a folder previously monopolised by materials from Read Hebrew America sent me courtesy of Haaretz


Since some readers may have missed out on Mythologies and may also have missed out on the Pompidou Barthes retrospective in 2003, I remind you that Barthes brought the guns of semiology to bear on

of which he said

.
.. je suis chez le coiffeur, on me tend un numéro de Paris-Match. Sur la couverture, un jeune nègre vêtu d'un uniforme français fait le salut militaire, les yeux levés, fixés sans doute sur un pli du drapeau tricolore. Cela, c'est le sens de l'image. Mais naïf ou pas, je vois bien ce qu'elle me signifie: que la France est un grand Empire, que tous ses fils, sans distinction de couleur, servent fidèlement sous son drapeau, et qu'il n'est de meilleure réponse aux détracteurs d'un colonialisme prétendu, que le zêle de ce noir à servir ses prétendus oppresseurs.
(I'm at the barber, they give me a copy of Paris-Match. On the cover, a young black wearing the French uniform makes a military salute, eyes raised, undoubtedly fixed on a fold of the three-coloured flag [whose red, white and blue are, of course the same three colours as those of the Stars and Stripes, though the Red White and Blue signifies, of course, something quite different from Le Tricolore. HD]. That's the [surface meaning] of the image. But naif or not, I see very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great empire, that all her sons, without distinction of colour, serve faithfully under her flag, and that there is no better reply to the critics of a supposed colonialism, than the zeal of this black to serve his supposed oppressors.)
(But I think Baudrillard and Mauss might offer the best way of understanding the book biz, my own little private problem)

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