On Postcolonial Scholars in the Peanut Gallery and Realistic Empire Building

Google alerts are an interesting thing. You get to read all kinds of things being written about you on the internet, and are never sure whether the authors are passively-aggressively intending you to find out or not.

And so it was this weekend, when somebody wrote a blog post decrying Yoon-Suin for *checks notes* being 'problematic and annoying' while also 'bland' and 'unimaginative'. This appears to stem from (as you may have guessed) something something postcolonial something something orientalist something something cultural appropriation something something. Apparently, I should be 'less defensive' and more 'inviting of discussion', which I think means that I ought to pay more attention to the views of dilettantes sorry, 'postcolonial scholars' on the internet.

This last point is where the mask slips, of course: what these people (I've encountered a number of them down the years) typically really want is to arrogate for themselves the freestanding and perpetual authority to declare what other people should or should not like, and to set themselves up in a position (preferably a nice university-level, highly paid sinecure, but failing that, a blog) from which to hand down their wisdom to the hoi polloi. You can easily tell this is the case, because 'postcolonial scholars' of this ilk never want to do the intellectual heavy lifting to reason through a coherent theory of what is, or is not, appropriate when it comes to the subject of cultural appropriation. Instead, what they want to do is to issue wishywashy announcements on a case-by-case basis - this is good, but that is bad - and thus, in the manner of a third-rate medieval hedgewitch, maintain themselves in perpetuity as a kind of arbiter of morality for the peasantry. 

If only the rest of us would listen to them, which I strongly recommend you don't.

This is, however, a good opportunity to share some thoughts on Realistic Empire Building for Your D&D Setting, because empire is a concept about which everybody has a vague idea but which people rarely think about in any philosophical way.

An exception to this was Alexandre Kojeve, who reminds us that the fundamental quality of an empire is that it lacks a physical a priori in contradistinction to any other form of polity. A city-state is bounded by the city itself and its citizens; a nation state is bounded by geography and/or ethnicity; but an empire is unbounded - its a priori are conceptual. Ostensibly any location, and any ethnic group, and indeed any individual, can be made its subject; what matters to an empire (to paraphrase) is that it is imbued with an Idea. This could be religious (see: the Umayyads or the Russian Tsars); it could be political (see: Napoleon or Athens); it could be economic (see: Japan's 'co-prosperity sphere'); it could be racial (see: Nazi Germany); it is very often a mixture of some or all of these imperatives (see: Rome, France, Portugal). The point is that an empire is generally a manifestation of a philosophical concept of History in which there is an arc bending towards a final end. Kojeve directs our attention to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, who imagined an empire uniting all of the peoples under his rule in common worship of the sun-god Aten, but that basic pattern also informed the 'civilising mission' of the European empires and, in a sense, the conquest of the American West.  This is the path down which empire-building generally travels - it is not about conquest or plunder for its own sake, but the realisation of some overarching vision.

What this means is that empires are very often the product of discourses which themselves construct a vision of the empire itself as good and necessary and the subjects of empire as deficient and in need of its intervention. Hence, the Spanish Empire imagined itself to be doing God's work, rescuing the peoples of the New World from their pagan debauchery and cruelty, and the corollary of that was that it was also necessary to imagine those peoples as sunk in 'savagery' and barbarism. This is basically what Edward Said was hitting upon with his influential concept of orientalism: it is just a worked example of the wider phenomenon, wherein the British and French imagined themselves to be imposing civilisation, virtue and order onto the chaotic, irrational, lazy and over-emotional 'Near East'. Even the hideous Nazi empire can be understood in this way, as a vision wherein the supreme race cleansed Europe of the 'unclean' on behalf of its weaker cousins.

What Said also noticed was that it is often through art and literature that these discourses find expression. It is not reason that motivates human beings to leave their families; cross oceans; risk death from war, disease or famine, but emotion, and the language of emotion is the arts. This is why 'orientalism' was an artistic and literary genre, and it is also why Akhenaten spent so much of his wealth on the creation of bas-reliefs and statues depicting his subject peoples kneeling before Aten. It is also why, in The Bridge on the Drina, Andric focuses on the symbolism of architecture in the empire-building efforts of the Ottomans. Human beings do not understand the world through perceiving it directly, in other words; they understand it through metaphor, and through symbols. And power governs through this language.

What is the lesson here, though, for DMs who want to think a bit more deeply about the RPG settings they are creating? Clearly, it means that it is important to get away from the idea that empires are simply big versions of other types of polity that happen to spend their time expanding through force. There is more to it than that, and once one begins to think of empires as being based on conceptual rather than physical a priori, a very different vista opens up. What kind of ideas would animate an empire of orcs, an empire of elves, an empire of dwarves, an empire of dragons - or, for that matter, an empire of humans subjecting non-human peoples? What purposes would they imagine, and what destination would they consider the arc of History to be bending towards? Moreover, how would they give effect to all of this through their art, music, architecture and so on? Considering these questions leads to much richer depictions of fantasy worlds, and the people who inhabit them.