Images of Asians, Indigenous people, Arabs, and black people dominating, exploiting, and enslaving white Europeans abound throughout the history of colonialism. This is so even at the height of the “classical” European colonial venture when colonialists were, relatively speaking, most secure about their entitlements and their transnational supremacy.
As Stephen Arata, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, has pointed out, such narratives of “colonial reversal” where the “civilized” world is on the point of being overrun by “primitive” forces, and where the colonisers become colonised and the exploiters become exploited, were frequent in late-Victorian popular fiction in Britain. Arata argues that these discourses of reversal intensified when the empire was in crisis. [...]
Indeed, novels moved by an imaginary wherein the plant and animal world “reclaim” the human domain of the built environment abound. And in much the same way as with the colonial fantasies of reversal, humans have ended up imagining worlds where we are ruled by the very animals we have dominated. Planet of the Apes is the most obvious example of this imaginary circulating in popular culture. In his novel 2007 the Australian naturalist Robyn Williams (2001) also takes us into a world where a more generalised process of reversal is under way: whales sink Japanese whaling vessels, pelicans occupy Heathrow airpot, cows invade Tullamarine airport in Melbourne, Amazonian pythons attacking developers’ bulldozers, etc.
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