OK, but so what? Bangladesh is not the ne plus ultra of formerly colonialized places. People in other places have developed different ideas from those you adhere to, rooted in their own experiences of colonization, prior views, and outlooks on international affairs. I get it, you prefer the culture you were most recently colonized by to your perception of what existed prior to that, and that's a position I can relate to even if I don't fully share it.
But you're in no position to make that judgement for all other people, and dismissal of their sincerely held and closely argued points of view as 'bananas' is trite and beneath your level of education and accomplishment. And while you may not have met any Bangledeshis who have explored such views, a simple search for 'decolonization Bangladesh' turned up several thought-provoking reads, such as https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/haque.... (on conceptions of beauty in art) and https://www.e-ir.info/2019/08/16/decolonising-queer-banglade... (on conceptions of propriety in sexual relations). Perhaps you would find it illuminating to assign yourself the exercise of writing a brief on the topic for an imaginary client whose views differed from your own.
> People in other places have developed different ideas from those you adhere to, rooted in their own experiences of colonization, prior views, and outlooks on international affairs.
Who are these people? Western academic journals and media amplify views that align with those of western academics, so it’s hard to gauge what ordinary people in other countries believe.
In my experience, apart from Britain and the US (alignment with the Anglo world), Bangladeshis look to ideas from the Middle East (alignment with the Muslim world) and socialism (alignment with the Soviet bloc). All of these are imported too. They were embraced not out of a desire to eliminate British influence, but out of the notion that those ideologies were the future. It’s like microkernels-socialism was seen as a scientific government of the future at the time. Today, the country is quite capitalist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alyssaayres/2014/10/28/banglade...
About two decades ago I read an article from a Middlebury professor advocating Bangladesh to ignore the World Bank embrace what today would be described as economic decolonization. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/05/alternative-pro.... (“But there is another way of looking at things, a Gorasin way, one developed closer to home, less despairing and less grandiose at the same time.”).
Luckily these ideas found no purchase, and Bangladesh’s economy grew by a factor of five since that article was published.
> I get it, you prefer the culture you were most recently colonized by to your perception of what existed prior to that, and that's a position I can relate to even if I don't fully share it.
I prefer air conditioning and the rule of law and economic growth. Western culture, I find less relatable over time. Pets, I’ve always found odd. Pop culture attitudes towards marriage and babies and old age, young people talking back to their elders, etc. I find all that curiouser and curiouser as I get older.
> But you're in no position to make that judgement for all other people, and dismissal of their sincerely held and closely argued points of view as 'bananas' is trite and beneath your level of education and accomplishment.
Fair.
> And while you may not have met any Bangledeshis who have explored such views, a simple search for 'decolonization Bangladesh' turned up several thought-provoking reads, such as https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/haque.... (on conceptions of beauty in art)
This is the article I linked, and it’s a (judicious and even handed) critique of decolonization ideas. It opens with a Tagore quote:
> Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet-philosopher of Bengal once said, “To taste the beauty of a Greek sculpture or an Italian Renaissance painting, one needs not to be a Greek or an Italian. A painting is actually a painting, not Indian, Ajantan, nothing.”
This article is extremely disingenuous. While British law may be the statutory basis for prosecuting homosexual behavior, that’s not the reason prosecutions are suddenly happening now. (“On Thursday, 18 May 2017, Bangladesh saw the arrests of men on the alleged basis of their homosexuality for the first time in its history.”). The law has been on the books since 1860. The British are long gone. What changed? Islam—another colonial import. Bangladesh has increasingly aligned itself with the broader Islamic world. When we left in 1989, headscarves were nowhere to be seen. Today they are quite common. The best thing that could happen for LGBT people in Bangladesh is westernization. It’s our western constitution, with due process rights and equality of all under the law, that offer the best hope of protection.
Those expressing a point of view you took issue with, whose point of view seems just as valid to me as yours.
This is the article I linked, and it’s a (judicious and even handed) critique of decolonization ideas. It opens with a Tagore quote:
Yes, but it goes on to explore other perspectives, and how art that Tagore appreciated alongside others has, in some contexts, been presented as objectively superior.
You can go on complaining about articles being disingenuous and so on (although I think you're choosing to miss the point it's making), but you started out by claiming that nobody in Bangladesh has any truck with such ideas and I'm pointing out that they are in fact being debated there as in other places, even though you may not approve or agree with many of the people articulating them.
But you're in no position to make that judgement for all other people, and dismissal of their sincerely held and closely argued points of view as 'bananas' is trite and beneath your level of education and accomplishment. And while you may not have met any Bangledeshis who have explored such views, a simple search for 'decolonization Bangladesh' turned up several thought-provoking reads, such as https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/haque.... (on conceptions of beauty in art) and https://www.e-ir.info/2019/08/16/decolonising-queer-banglade... (on conceptions of propriety in sexual relations). Perhaps you would find it illuminating to assign yourself the exercise of writing a brief on the topic for an imaginary client whose views differed from your own.