WOG: Slurs, Civility, and Cultural Decolonization
Kushagr Awasthi
What is WOG? A question I wish you didn’t have to ask and I didn’t have to answer. The collective memory is fickle, and I find myself sorting through its trash. This thesis, WOG, is both a ThinkTank and a personal experiment: a reminder to both the Eastern and Western people that colonization happened—and continues to happen, today.
WOG is a slur for Indians. From its first appearance as a blackface character in “Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwog” (1895) to its entry in “Sea Slang: A Dictionary of the Old Timers’ Expressions and Epithets” (1920s), its avatar as the backronym “Wily Oriental Gentleman,” and its use by the Nixon administration to the “otherness” of India and its moral systems: this slur has been places.
In utilizing a forgotten slur: I accuse my compatriots of an erasure of history whilst simultaneously laying blame at the feet of my colonizer. “My Book of Woggish Quotes” showcases how I’m colonized even in the benign moments of the day-to-day; a series of provocative photo-illustration throws an unsavory history into stark relief; and “Woggish Children’s Books” explains post-colonial theory while appropriating “Dutch Doll’s” lettering to demonstrates how cultural colonization begins in childhood.
Through a method of such “retaliatory exploitation” where I appropriate colonial imagery: I have built a design system based on reframing, recontextualizing and shifting perspective. Through dissembling creative choices, satire, and hyperbole, I state: Let’s ReOrient (pun-intended). Let’s acknowledge the problem and move toward that true, elusive utopia.