Post-colonial Literature

[kelby_lake]

How do people feel about the term? Do you believe it is a valid area of study, at least in English Literature? Is it patronising or liberating?

[PeterL]

It is an almost completely useless term, and that study is an excellent example of people finding something because they wnt it to be there. That said, I think that The Flashman Chronicles are collection of literature that should be looked at through the lens of post-colonialism. In fact, I will suggest that as an area of study and article for an English professor I know. He needs to get some serious academic publishing credits.

[dysfunctional-h]

I'm not much of an expert, but I don't think it's useless; it's without a doubt present in a number of works, like Things Fall Apart and Cry, the Beloved Country, just to name two. It's in a way a valid criticism of how disturbingly Euro-centric Western educations are, completely ignoring the importance of works outside the Western umbrella such as Tale of Genji or The Sign of Śakuntalā.

[Alexander III]

I'm not much of an expert, but I don't think it's useless; it's without a doubt present in a number of works, like Things Fall Apart and Cry, the Beloved Country, just to name two. It's in a way a valid criticism of how disturbingly Euro-centric Western educations are, completely ignoring the importance of works outside the Western umbrella such as Tale of Genji or The Sign of Śakuntalā.

My God! You are right, my european education is compleatly european. The bastards. Why can't we be more like the rest of the world, which focuses on teaching everything and has no bias whatsoever to it's own culture. Why should we study our own cultures more than others, tis preposterous.

[OrphanPip]

Well post-colonialism is a very wide field.

For one, you have the study of Western literary tradition being continued in non-Western cultures, and how this manifests itself in the works of those cultures. In this sense you get stuff like Indian and African literature in English.

Another kind of post-colonial studies would look at how diaspora slave culture has dealt with the issue of colonialism in their cultural production. How do you express yourself when the cultural terms and forms available to you are from other cultures? This would include some Caribbean literature, and some African literature.

Then you have the political use of the term, i.e. the thematic treatment of colonialism by post-colonial societies.

[JBI]

How do people feel about the term? Do you believe it is a valid area of study, at least in English Literature? Is it patronising or liberating?

Well, it seems kind of gimmicky. I think by now the only scholar who is actually advocating it is the worst of the lot, Spivak, who exemplifies all the flaws and crap that the bull**** half-discourse created.

As for general ideas, they did not need a movement, and it just brought more nonsense and incomprehensibility to an already stagnating department. The seminal texts became distorted, and it moved to post-colonialism being what was discussed in discourse, rather than works, or artists. In short, it became an onanist exercise in futility, that neither helped the authors it claimed to be exposing, nor helped readers or political situations.

Likewise, for us in area studies, it set things back maybe 20 years. It made it that instead of integrating specific studies into a wider discourse - Chinese literature as a form of world literature, Chinese painting as a form of world painting, etc., that things instead needed to be discussed as "how we are seeing things" rather than just seeing things. For anybody who is actually trained in any art related field, this is just an absolute headache, as anybody who learns anything knows the more literature you read, the more you become part of the discourse.

Eventually even the whitest of people will begin to read like a Chinese person, the more they read. The same is true with an art scholars, literary critics, etc. There is no need for a separate feel bad aspect. What the colonial annoyances did was make everything about us and them, and stress how there is an us and them to feel sorry about. That historically is no more accurate than saying France is England's other, or Germany always looked at Italy as a colonial space to occupy - nonsense in the artistic sense, as anybody can tell.


Thank god that movement is over. I once studied under a Spenser specialist who said the specialty became just discussing book 4 of the Faerie Queene, because that was the only part of the text Post-Colonializable. Everybody knows book 2 that plays with Ariosto is the best part of the whole text, with part 1 maybe a close second.

[Alexander III]

Well post-colonialism is a very wide field.

For one, you have the study of Western literary tradition being continued in non-Western cultures, and how this manifests itself in the works of those cultures. In this sense you get stuff like Indian and African literature in English.

Another kind of post-colonial studies would look at how diaspora slave culture has dealt with the issue of colonialism in their cultural production. How do you express yourself when the cultural terms and forms available to you are from other cultures? This would include some Caribbean literature, and some African literature.


That definition is highly problematic, otherwise Wilde, Joyce and all other irish writers are part of the umbrella of post-colonialist literature. Far more than any Chinua Achebe or any other ex-colonial writer.

Also all Italian and German literature post-napoleon should be considered post-colonial literature in light of the dramatic changes the empire produced in all their countries. Heck russian literature ought to be considered post-colonial literature considering that before the 1840's all of the russian nobility and bourgeoisie thought in french not russian, as that was their mother tongue.

The problem with the concept of post-colonial literature, is that it is based on a ridiculous concept. That being part of a conquered nation is something completely radical unique, when in truth it is the standard of history. To be conquered and to conquer was and is completely normal. Am I saying that ones country being invaded by anothers, has no impact upon their culture; ofcourse not. What I am saying is that it is completley normal and continous throughout history. Just look at europe, it is thanks to the continous conquering and re-conquering that ideas and cultures spread build upon another and change, adopting the best of the old and the best of the new. I dont see the need to emphasize this with the whole "guilt" aspect.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I once studied under a Spenser specialist who said the specialty became just discussing book 4 of the Faerie Queene, because that was the only part of the text Post-Colonializable. Everybody knows book 2 that plays with Ariosto is the best part of the whole text, with part 1 maybe a close second.

This is exactly the sort of thing I was getting at a few weeks ago when the ism becomes 'more important' than the work itself.

[kelby_lake]

It's in a way a valid criticism of how disturbingly Euro-centric Western educations are.

It's still Euro-centric: we colonised them! By applying the term so broadly, English Literature professors are basically just saying that we can appropriate the literature from the people we colonised! It's defining cultures through their colonial past. Yes, some literature from the ex-colonies may be about colonialism, but the term seems like it can be attached to anything.

[OrphanPip]

That definition is highly problematic, otherwise Wilde, Joyce and all other irish writers are part of the umbrella of post-colonialist literature. Far more than any Chinua Achebe or any other ex-colonial writer.

Also all Italian and German literature post-napoleon should be considered post-colonial literature in light of the dramatic changes the empire produced in all their countries. Heck russian literature ought to be considered post-colonial literature considering that before the 1840's all of the russian nobility and bourgeoisie thought in french not russian, as that was their mother tongue.

That doesn't really present a problem for post-colonial literature if it can be broadly applied as a critical approach to many different literatures. However, I'd argue whether those examples are comparable to colonialism. For one, the cultural changes are much more radical, not simply along lines of language but of religion, technology, racial understanding, and such.

Take a text like Things Fall Apart, it is incorporating a quote from Yeats in the title, it is full of Greek and Christian cultural allusions, but it is blended with Igbo culture and religion as well, you get a hybrid literature with much more distinct tensions than French fashions getting a little popular in Russia.



The problem with the concept of post-colonial literature, is that it is based on a ridiculous concept. That being part of a conquered nation is something completely radical unique, when in truth it is the standard of history. To be conquered and to conquer was and is completely normal. Am I saying that ones country being invaded by anothers, has no impact upon their culture; ofcourse not. What I am saying is that it is completley normal and continous throughout history. Just look at europe, it is thanks to the continous conquering and re-conquering that ideas and cultures spread build upon another and change, adopting the best of the old and the best of the new. I dont see the need to emphasize this with the whole "guilt" aspect.

No, I think you misunderstand what post-colonialism is about. It is not about condemning colonialism, it is about understanding how a culture responds to being colonized and then being post-colonized. It does not say anything about the situation being unique, the entire point of the movement is that it is not unique. The approaches of post-colonial studies can be applied in diverse historical (to Ireland in the case of the Faerie Queene), geographical (Asia, Africa, the Americas), and divergent histories (former slave cultures, African indigenous cultures, Native Americans, etc.).

Chinua Achebe makes a similar point, that colonialism brought some good and some bad. The point isn't to condemn colonialism, but to read the text with a particular attention to the way colonialism shapes perceptions and experiences.

Like any approach it can be applied lazily by bad critics, but that doesn't make it invalid.

[JBI]

Why read in such a way, why is it justified? Post-Colonial labelling automatically appropriates experience, and then cages it, in the sense that saying an English novel from Singapore is fundamentally the same as one from Nigeria, given that they are both Post-Colonial in makeup, is just plain stupid, and stresses the most meaningless features of the two places and experiences.

Now, if there could be a proven quality and experience worth discussing amongst the group, then there would be some justification, but there isn't. Canada is not South Africa, no more than Korea is Afghanistan. The term can be applied almost everywhere, and has been, to the point where it is just sounding like nonsense, which it is.

Orientalism as a book was an interesting book. Homi Bhabha had some cute points (once you get through the Lacanian bullsh[i]t), but neither of them are actually trying to keep the discourse together.

We can look at certain features, such as nation, identity, and marginalization, but we do not need an umbrella term, or a specific lens - one shouldn't be looking into a text with any sort of lens primarily, that in itself is a form of marginalization.

It's like saying all works that come from places with a colonial past are fundamentally working the same way. How is that any different than assuming all Jews are cheap?

[OrphanPip]

It's like saying all works that come from places with a colonial past are fundamentally working the same way. How is that any different than assuming all Jews are cheap?

I'm not sure it is saying they work fundamentally the same. It is perhaps saying that the way any two cultures interact creates common dynamics that can inform a general methodology that holds the approach together. Having a general theory for a certain artificially generated group of texts doesn't mean ignoring the differences within that group.

I take your point that the same subjects can be addressed without recourse to any specific lens, and that post-colonial studies tend to dominate critical discourses about certain texts to the exclusion of other worthwhile readings. However, I don't think there's really a fundamental problem to an approach that attempts to focus readings on a certain kind of experience.

[kelby_lake]

I can understand that post-colonialism provides a dynamic- how does a colony appropriated by a coloniser begin to shape an identity for itself?- but one could argue that the conflict of identity would have been present in some of the colonial literature. Attributing that conflict solely to post-colonialism is a bit like the attitudes to feminism- "You people have had quite a bad time of it from us dead white men so now we will study your recovery".

[JBI]

I can understand that post-colonialism provides a dynamic- how does a colony appropriated by a coloniser begin to shape an identity for itself?- but one could argue that the conflict of identity would have been present in some of the colonial literature. Attributing that conflict solely to post-colonialism is a bit like the attitudes to feminism- "You people have had quite a bad time of it from us dead white men so now we will study your recovery".

It's just a bad idea to assume 1) there is a similar process across colonies, and 2) that this is informative of the art, and by extension, is worth discussing. It just ends up causing people to only read texts that fit their theoretical lenses, rather than seeing the complexity and the subjectivity of individual situations.

[dysfunctional-h]

It's still Euro-centric: we colonised them! By applying the term so broadly, English Literature professors are basically just saying that we can appropriate the literature from the people we colonised! It's defining cultures through their colonial past. Yes, some literature from the ex-colonies may be about colonialism, but the term seems like it can be attached to anything.
I frankly had no idea what post-colonialism is before reading Achebe. XD I'll gladly excise myself from the conversation because I AM BY NO MEANS AN ACADEMIC, SO I HAD NO IDEA HOW IT AFFECTED ACADEMIC POLITICS ETC. SO SUE ME.

trolololol

I actually think it is more learning to appreciate what affect being colonized had on their culture. What was missing from Europeans "colonizing" each other was the level of extreme racism and bitterness with which they colonized Africa and America (except obviously in the 20th century's world wars, Ireland, etc). The British didn't divide people into impoverished ghettos based upon race in 16th century France. To ignore that element is to ignore quite a bit.

Not gonna deny it, I'm a derp. But I still think there's much to be said about the effects of colonization on a society. It's in no way Euro-centric to try to understand that... and we could still use more teaching of The Tale of Genji etc in our schools. It's in no way "appropriating" credit for the work. they're still Japanese, African, etc works, not English works. ;P

[JBI]

I frankly had no idea what post-colonialism is before reading Achebe. XD I'll gladly excise myself from the conversation because I AM BY NO MEANS AN ACADEMIC, SO I HAD NO IDEA HOW IT AFFECTED ACADEMIC POLITICS ETC. SO SUE ME.

trolololol

I actually think it is more learning to appreciate what affect being colonized had on their culture. What was missing from Europeans "colonizing" each other was the level of extreme racism and bitterness with which they colonized Africa and America (except obviously in the 20th century's world wars, Ireland, etc). The British didn't divide people into impoverished ghettos based upon race in 16th century France. To ignore that element is to ignore quite a bit.

Not gonna deny it, I'm a derp. But I still think there's much to be said about the effects of colonization on a society. It's in no way Euro-centric to try to understand that... and we could still use more teaching of The Tale of Genji etc in our schools. It's in no way "appropriating" credit for the work. they're still Japanese, African, etc works, not English works. ;P

Japan is hardly post-colonial, unless one wants to call it a colonial power itself - in the sense that its influence on Korea, Taiwan, and various parts of China and South East Asia was colonial. How is the post-World-War-2 Japanese experience (the only possible post-colonial experience in their history since the 2nd Mongol Invasion) even remotely like the experience of Egyptians under Napoleon or even the slave trade and control of the British West Indies.

In the same way, the Dutch settling of New York was not the same as the French fur trade in what is now Canada - even the history of that period itself is not so static and continuous. Lets compare that now to Cortez conquering Mexico, and things feel even more ridiculous.

Add to that the Dutch East-Indies - such a different situation, history, relationship, development, etc.



If we want to talk world literature, it's one thing to make such ridiculous comparisons for no appropriate reason, and it is another to seek out to spread our knowledge wider. If the criteria is only that a place underwent a particular mistreatment for its texts to be revealed to the rest of the world, then quite simply those who read for appreciation are automatically dismissed. The answer to Euro-centric knowledge is to learn to appreciate others, not to learn how to see how you subjected them, how their texts show how badly you bruised them, etc.

What I want to see is people reading the Tale of Genji because The Tale of Genji is a great book, is interesting, poetic, beautiful, etc. If they read it because somehow the experience of Japan under the U.S.'s influence was not so amazing (lets not mention Korea or China), then quite simply they are not reading it for the right reason.

The only criteria for literature, in terms of how we study it, should be something that is beautiful. Otherwise, it should not be read as literature. That is a disgusting use of the discourse. It should be read rather as news, or as politics, not as something to be studied and enjoyed for the sake of itself.

As soon as art becomes political, then everything about the study of it naturally becomes marginalized. One must then decide things based on what is most "politically useful" and reduce their work to the position of propaganda. With your work being credited for politics, naturally one needs to choose which political opinions to hold.

For instance, do we understand the world then in terms of body counts? Do we search for the most important bloody events, or the biggest crimes we committed? Or do we look for the most politically volatile situations to decide our position on through books?

All these positions are absolute crap, as is the literature that these movements produce. The negativity never generates into beautiful art, unless it is transformed. We do not read to feel terrible, unless we want to be active - but even then, it is incredibly pessimistic to suggest we should look for only negative artwork. A pretty ugly world view, I must say. We should all, according to this, still live as if we are shellshocked all the time, so as to make our act of reading somewhat significant.

What a load, art is for arts sake always, in the sense that people go to art rather to find something optimistic that will liven them. That is why tragedy is not supposed to end as the tragedy occurs, but rather after the tragedy is healed, and transformed into something that brings something good to the world.

[osho]

In fact we have now from the people on the peripheries volumes of literature, and we have Salmon Rushdie one in the lead from India and V. S. Naipaul too smells of colonialist thoughts in his narratives since he too had grown up in a colonial island. In fact there are few narratives that mirror the kind of lives people in colonies had to live, the kind of brutality, segmentation, bias and the like prevailed in colonies. India was colonized and there was apartheid, racism, hegemonic governments, all kinds of discrimination against the aborigines they have colonized. Only a very little amount of colonialist literature come into light amongst the English speaking world. They are rich in their narratives, themes and the like yet today only the few that come from the western hemisphere grabs attention no matter what beautiful literary pieces come from colonial countries.

[JBI]

In fact we have now from the people on the peripheries volumes of literature, and we have Salmon Rushdie one in the lead from India and V. S. Naipaul too smells of colonialist thoughts in his narratives since he too had grown up in a colonial island. In fact there are few narratives that mirror the kind of lives people in colonies had to live, the kind of brutality, segmentation, bias and the like prevailed in colonies. India was colonized and there was apartheid, racism, hegemonic governments, all kinds of discrimination against the aborigines they have colonized. Only a very little amount of colonialist literature come into light amongst the English speaking world. They are rich in their narratives, themes and the like yet today only the few that come from the western hemisphere grabs attention no matter what beautiful literary pieces come from colonial countries.

Well, Indian texts have been widely read in Europe for two centuries now. It is not fair to suggest that India has been silenced.

Sanskrit literature, for instance, has infiltrated every layer of our society. Yoga and "Indian" culture are marketed and accepted, with chic value added for the "likeness" to the traditional idea of Indian.

We likewise have always loved Chinese arts - especially porcelain and furniture - and have always esteemed them. Japanese paintings are the second most internationally appealing product of art that moves around the world. The first being impressionist paintings. Korean television drama is international. Czech beer is consumed all over the world.


What really is happening, rather, is that all these colonial subjects have been re-appropriated by creators of a new product, post-colonialism. Tourism behaves similarly.

For instance, you go on a trip to a Chinese Hmoung village. The people there are paid, and legally forced to remain as a cultural attraction for you to gock at. The place is a "living" culture, where nothing changes, and you get to eat and enjoy your stay for the few minutes to few days you spend there.

You go to Paris now, and you have much of the same experience, only the myths it is upholding are different. The wine is superb, the food, to die for, the art "Romantic" the music, excellent, etc. and you enjoy the product you have purchased of "Paris" - the experience.

This is not a Western or Eastern thing, it is simply how culture works in a spectator world. When you actually spend time somewhere, however, the undersides of the place begin to appear, and the world changes rapidly into something more complex and layered than your textbook imagines.

Post-Colonialism, and the victim narrative only remove the degree of complexity to the insulted/wounded/destroyed people. It makes a nice feel-good gloss over issues and complexity, in favor of having a coherent narrative.

Lets all just face it, the world is far different than this idea of post-colonialism. It is so impossible to break a space down into colonizer/colonized when you have rich people from everywhere, and poor people from everywhere. There is no single place that doesn't have its local millionaires. If you want to make a marxist argument then, you would just say all places have felt the brunt of class violence. The dying chimney sweeps of London were just as abused as the whipped slaves of Mississippi. Why the need to stress colonizer and colonized then, and post-colonial and mainstream?

[kelby_lake]

The British didn't divide people into impoverished ghettos based upon race in 16th century France. To ignore that element is to ignore quite a bit.

Not gonna deny it, I'm a derp. But I still think there's much to be said about the effects of colonization on a society. It's in no way Euro-centric to try to understand that... and we could still use more teaching of The Tale of Genji etc in our schools. It's in no way "appropriating" credit for the work. they're still Japanese, African, etc works, not English works. ;P

Pretty much all the post-colonial literature I've done has been about British colonisers. If you did a module on it in English Literature, you'd get the impression that we were the sole colonisers!

I don't dispute the merit of teaching the effects of colonisation but I don't think the place for it is in literature classes. It's taking the focus away from the literature itself and encouraging essays that focus on whether colonialism is bad or not rather than its depiction in literature. Literature students, though we would hope them to have a knowledge of history and social issues, are not historians or sociologists.

The literature may still be theirs not ours but we insist on arguing that our mark is there, and that we helped shape their literature. It's our colonial instinct :P

[kelby_lake]

Post-Colonialism, and the victim narrative only remove the degree of complexity to the insulted/wounded/destroyed people. It makes a nice feel-good gloss over issues and complexity, in favor of having a coherent narrative.


It's a case of trying to keep English Studies afloat by academics trying to style themselves as historians and sociologists. Studying post-colonialism has nothing to do with them wishing to bring the literature of minorities to light- it's simply a trend. If we can include selected Iranian Literature (I have no idea whether it is even representative of the tradition of Iranian Literature) onto an English Literature course, why can't we study some European stuff? England is in Europe after all.

[osho]

Well, Indian texts have been widely read in Europe for two centuries now. It is not fair to suggest that India has been silenced.

Sanskrit literature, for instance, has infiltrated every layer of our society. Yoga and "Indian" culture are marketed and accepted, with chic value added for the "likeness" to the traditional idea of Indian.

We likewise have always loved Chinese arts - especially porcelain and furniture - and have always esteemed them. Japanese paintings are the second most internationally appealing product of art that moves around the world. The first being impressionist paintings. Korean television drama is international. Czech beer is consumed all over the world.


What really is happening, rather, is that all these colonial subjects have been re-appropriated by creators of a new product, post-colonialism. Tourism behaves similarly.

For instance, you go on a trip to a Chinese Hmoung village. The people there are paid, and legally forced to remain as a cultural attraction for you to gock at. The place is a "living" culture, where nothing changes, and you get to eat and enjoy your stay for the few minutes to few days you spend there.

You go to Paris now, and you have much of the same experience, only the myths it is upholding are different. The wine is superb, the food, to die for, the art "Romantic" the music, excellent, etc. and you enjoy the product you have purchased of "Paris" - the experience.

This is not a Western or Eastern thing, it is simply how culture works in a spectator world. When you actually spend time somewhere, however, the undersides of the place begin to appear, and the world changes rapidly into something more complex and layered than your textbook imagines.

Post-Colonialism, and the victim narrative only remove the degree of complexity to the insulted/wounded/destroyed people. It makes a nice feel-good gloss over issues and complexity, in favor of having a coherent narrative.

Lets all just face it, the world is far different than this idea of post-colonialism. It is so impossible to break a space down into colonizer/colonized when you have rich people from everywhere, and poor people from everywhere. There is no single place that doesn't have its local millionaires. If you want to make a marxist argument then, you would just say all places have felt the brunt of class violence. The dying chimney sweeps of London were just as abused as the whipped slaves of Mississippi. Why the need to stress colonizer and colonized then, and post-colonial and mainstream?
The social fabrics are subtler than you understand. The nuance of it cannot be comprehended if you look at it from the lens of someone. You will have to go there, study disinterestedly. America is a great colonizer today though there is no territorial colonization. Commercial colonization is understated, nuanced and you cannot easily comprehend the insides of a certain social order. What you look at a particular social system is through someone's eyes only. Even your mindsets have been moderated, molded by certain schools of thought. Today' civilization is American and since it has superpower the rest of the world has to be submissive to it. You can see its foreign policies, its troops in different countries and the like. I do not want to analyze comparative politics here since it is a literary forum and I have to abide by the rules set here. But colonialism is still powerful, but a variant of it and you cannot easily observe it since it is layered

[dysfunctional-h]

Japan is hardly post-colonial, unless one wants to call it a colonial power itself - in the sense that its influence on Korea, Taiwan, and various parts of China and South East Asia was colonial. How is the post-World-War-2 Japanese experience (the only possible post-colonial experience in their history since the 2nd Mongol Invasion) even remotely like the experience of Egyptians under Napoleon or even the slave trade and control of the British West Indies.

I wasn't saying it was, I was using Tale of Genji as an example of how even the World lit canon taught in schools is annoyingly Franko/Anglo-Saxon-centric. Of course, you as a academic understand post colonialism better than I as a layperson do, but I think you've misinterpreted my use of that example. -___-ll and the US pretty much took it over after WWII triggering an identity crisis that is reflected much in later 20th Century japanese lit. Not that that was what I was talking about in the first place...

[JBI]

Well, Chinese readers are sino-centric, Japanese readers are Japenese-centric, etc.

If anything the textbooks I grew up with were multicultural - anything from the Ballad of Mulan to cuttings from Japanese classical poetry. Canadian literature was the neglected tradition, of all of them, whereas our textbooks spanned much of the globe, and we were encouraged to read internationally.

The sad truth is that this is not the situation elsewhere. Yet the top scholars of Chinese philosophy are French or Belgian, of contemporary Chinese literature, Dutch, of Sanskrit texts, probably German. The world isn't so euro-centric, only certain bodies of it, and certain academics.

English speakers in general are like that, but the post-colonial authors discussed in post-colonial literature are writing in English, Spanish or French anyway for the most part. You do not get Genji out of this any more than you get Cervantes or Proust. There is nothing multicultural about Post-colonialism, and it does not add to the reader's spectrum of knowledge.

[LeNoirFaineant]

You guys and gals might enjoy to read this:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhitey

[kelby_lake]

You guys and gals might enjoy to read this:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MightyWhitey

I love TV Tropes :D

[ennison]

Well after a while people who are "liberated" have to start blaming themselves for their problems. So at what point does the national literature reach that? India's seems to have long ago. But then it is and was a huge and diverse country. It might take longer for smaller countries created out of colonial fragments to reach that kind of maturity. Quite a lot of "liberated" countries seem to have become good examples of the common idea that people prefer to run themselves badly than be in vassalage to foreigners who run them well.