Anita Desai Quotes

In Scotland, we're a colony in more ways than one. So when directors come up to work, there's a very particular way they want Scotland to look like and to behave like.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

I think Hollywood makes the mistake of mixing all these identities and cultures, mostly from the Middle East.

The downside to defining everything Chinese as different than American is that all things Chinese then become exotic.

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.

I wanted to write a story about colonization and about Hawaii. I went to college right at the height of identity politics, and that's how I always read 'The Tempest,' for example.

To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul.

There are still some terrible cliches in the presentation of Indian fiction. The lotus flower. The hennaed hands. In mainland Europe, people still slap these images on my books and I go bananas.

When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.

I haven't gotten labeled as a Hispanic actor.

Undeniably the American art form, too. And yet more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example. And sometimes trash it completely.

America is so accustomed to some depiction of native people that is entirely racist, and there's a perception that that is okay.

I think that I altered history in 'Elizabeth,' and I interpreted history far more than Danny Boyle or Richard Attenborough did to 'Slumdog Millionaire' or 'Gandhi.' They took Indian novels or Indian characters and very much stayed within the Indian diaspora.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.

'Doctor Who' is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain's role in the world as its empire unravelled.

It's interesting: I think, as a Latino actor, the biggest challenge is being called 'Latino' because immediately, the world has a perception of what that means.

'Captain America' I love, and that would be great, but c'mon, a Frenchman doing 'Captain America?' They would burn my passport.

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of things American - but when American people do British stuff, it's so universally dreadful.

We’re [Native Americans] portrayed as either the noble savage or the ignoble savage. In most people’s minds, we only exist in the 19th century.

While [European] national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism…in order to match, balance and thus authenticate ‘Western Civilization’.

As an Egyptian, I was glad to see the film 'Black Panther' embrace my country with its inclusion of the Ancient Egyptian goddess Bast as the deity of Wakandans. But considering the anti-black racism against the Nubian indigenous community and visitors in my country, I knew Egypt would not return the love.

I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous.