Life's Pleasures Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

The sentence lands like a tossed-off travel fact, and that casualness is the point. “Certain regions” and “the country” keep everything conveniently vague, while “the indigenous people” collapses dozens of distinct communities into a single, museum-label category. The most loaded word is “dogs”: not because eating dog meat is unheard of globally, but because in a U.S.-shaped moral imagination it functions as instant shorthand for “barbaric,” a cue that bypasses history and goes straight to disgust. The line doesn’t just report difference; it manufactures hierarchy.

As a playwright, Hagedorn knows how power lives in how people speak when they think they’re being neutral. The syntax mimics the tone of an educated outsider doing ethnography at a cocktail party, smuggling prejudice into the language of information. It’s a miniature of colonial narration: the center gets to name, generalize, and define the periphery as spectacle. The “indigenous” are framed not by land rights, dispossession, or political agency, but by a practice designed to make them feel unassimilable.

Contextually, Hagedorn’s work often circles diaspora and the way empires export not just armies but stories about who counts as civilized. This line reads less like an endorsement than a ventriloquism of the imperial gaze, exposing how quickly “culture” becomes a weapon. The intent is to make the audience hear the prejudice in the supposedly plainspoken fact, and to notice how easily language turns people into a moral anecdote.