Hilary Beckles Quotes

It would be wrong to see the re-making of Asia, much less India, as a revolt against the West. Asia has indeed been re-built on the ruins of colonialism, but not on the ruins of all that the West has come to represent.

My head is in India, yet my body remains in Britain. I straddle the world like a colossus. Like a 5ft. 7in. colossus.

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

My work has been much more Caribbean and eclectic. I am interested in people, and where they come from happens to have fallen within an area of Africa.

America has always imported history.

Did Algeria colonize France, or vice versa? Did Egypt colonize England, or vice versa? We [Arabs] are the victims...

People tend to migrate from the third world to the metropolises of the very countries that once dominated them. Algerians to Paris; Puerto Ricans to New York; Pakistanis to London.

Using food as a way of understanding empire is highly effective. Food knows no barriers of race, gender or even time.

If, as is certainly the case, capitalism cannot do without nationality, that is precisely why accelerating and intensifying the deterritorializing, de-ethnicizing and anti-national impulses within (but inhibited by) capitalism constitutes an anti-capitalist strategy.

I don't have doctrinaire views about how we should relate to Asia. But novelists reflect the world they live in, and that world propels you, to some extent. I'm a creature of the British Empire, and of the period of transition from the Empire.

Everyone is so estranged; no one is rooted. That's what I like to write about more than anything else. Everything being so mixed up. Racially mixed up, people moving from place to place, everything shifting.

One's teachers all belonged to that generation who were imperialists, and the whole narrative throughout my adolescence was of countries leaving the empire. I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us.

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

Take a random selection of photographs of America in 2012 and 2002 and 1992 and, except for the skinny jeans and the porkpie hats, you'll be hard-pressed to tell the years in which the pictures were taken.

When people say this isn't the America they grew up in, they're right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

We talk about globalization today as if it's some great big new thing, that we've all just discovered. But there's really nothing new about it.

Increasingly national boundaries are unable to contain ideas, money or even people.

We are not now a country of Africa but a country of Europe.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

Nations and races change with the change of periods and the passage of time.

Asia is the continent of origination; Europe the continent of differentiation; and America the continent of reunions.

Migration is development.

Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will.

I have to confess I do have a slight preference. I do think, naturally, that people from India and Australia are in some ways more likely to speak English, understand common law, and have a connection with this country than some people that come perhaps from countries that haven't fully recovered from being behind the Iron Curtain.