Sushma Joshi, Annapurna Express, September 6th, 2019 When I was an undergraduate at Brown University, I took a class on Colonial Latin America. An exceptionally brilliant professor, R. Douglas Cope, taught the class. Methodically through the semester, we read texts describing the arrival of the Spanish from Europe, and their gradual takeover of Latin and South America. We went through the conquistadores and the encomienda system. Post-colonial theory remains trendy in anthropology and English departments—the fields in which I have two masters degrees. I am not a subscriber to the theory that all structural problems of the present is the fault of the colonial systems of the past. The Indians (of India), for one, have blamed the British a lot for their social problems while under-examining their own roles in the poor state of affairs of their nation. At the same time, it is hard to deny that many of the social problems of our day and age does stem from European colonial
The civil wars of the twenty-first century: Sushma Joshi's slightly twisted perspective of the universe.