Cultural Imperialism Bingo

Aliette de Bodard‘s been in touch to tell us of a new project: Cultural Imperialism Bingo.

Presenting the Cultural Imperialism Bingo Card

If you think colonialism is dead… think again. Globalisation has indeed made the world smaller–furthering the dominance of the West over the developing world, shrinking and devaluing local cultures, and uniformising everything to Western values and Western ways of life. This is a pernicious, omnipresent state of things that leads to the same unfounded things being said, over and over, to people from developing countries and/or on developing countries.

It’s time for this to stop. Time for the hoary, horrid misrepresentation clichés to be pointed out and examined; and for genuine, non-dismissive conversations to start.

Accordingly, here’s a handy bingo card for Western Cultural Imperialism–and we wish we could say we’ve made it all up, but unfortunately every single comment on this card was seen on the Internet.

Card designed by Aliette de Bodard, Joyce Chng, Kate Elliott, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, @requireshate, Charles Tan, @automathic and @mizHalle. Launch orchestrated with the help of Zen Cho and Ekaterina Sedia in addition to above authors (and an army of volunteer signal boosters whom we wish to thank very much!)

10 thoughts on “Cultural Imperialism Bingo

  1. Oh No! Someone said something I disagree with on the Internet! Something must be done! I must make a Bingo card!

    Pfft…

    This is silly. I refuse to be ashamed of Western culture. Maybe it’s so powerful for good reason?

    1. >Maybe it’s so powerful for good reason?
      @Heh: we have a bingo card square for this and its variants. See last line, second column. The main reason Western culture is so powerful is because it bulldozers everything in its path (just as Hollywood movie empires are quite busy buying up cinemas and pushing on foreign distributors to make sure that their movies are distributed everywhere in the world). “Better” has very little to do with it unless we’re talking “better at large-scale oppression”.

    2. Nobody’s telling you to be ‘ashamed of Western culture’, they’re just getting annoyed at it being forced on them.

  2. And how come “Heh” is not ashamed of Western culture but does not reveal its real name? COME ON!!

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