Singularity and students, cont.

Apparently students don't like the reductiveness of ethnic origin questionnaires. OK, but is it really a surprise that they don't reflect the complexity of human existence?

Oh no - Baudrillard's been mentioned - and not in a particularly informed sense. It's 'absurd to reduce people to one element'. I totally agree. I suspect you do too. What I don't understand is why it takes a professor to tell us this. In fact, I don't think it does. I know this. You know this. Only the BNP doesn't know this.

Now we're on to an attack on the postcolonialist take on Orientalism. Anti-imperialism is too simplistically binary.

Bingo! 9/11's been mentioned. In passing, because obviously that's all it deserves because it was very simple.

She says that cultural relativism leads students to feel that they know nothing if they're aware that they're from a privileged hegemonic society. I reject this - it means that they know something very profound - that most facts are culturally informed rather than universally true.

Now she's saying that the use of Western/non-Western is Eurocentric.
Well blow me down - Said said this magisterially in Orientalism (1978) - it informs everything media and literature lecturers say, I would think. We grew up with it, and its successors.