RTV 4412 FAU Stuart Halls chapter The Spectacle of the Other Essay

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THE SPECTACLE OF
THE ‘OTHER’
Stuart Hall
Contents
1
INTRODUCTION
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1.1
Heroes or villains?
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1.2
Why does ‘difference’ matter?
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2
RACIALIZING THE ‘OTHER
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2.1
Commodity racism: empire and the domestic world
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2.2
Meanwhile, down on the plantation …
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2.3
Signifying racial ‘difference’
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STAGING RACIAL ‘DIFFERENCE’ ‘AND THE MELODY
LINGERED O N . . . ‘
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Heavenly bodies
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3
3.1
4
4.1
STEREOTYPING AS A SIGNIFYING PRACTICE
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Representation, difference and power
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4.2
Power and fantasy
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4.3
Fetishism and disavowal
264
CONTESTING A RACIALIZED REGIME OF
REPRESENTATION
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5.1
Reversing the stereotypes
270
5.2
Positive and negative images
272
5.3
Through the eye of representation
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CONCLUSION
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REFERENCES
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5
6
READINGS FOR CHAPTER FOUR
READING A:
Anne McClintock, ‘Soap and commodity spectacle’
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READING B:
Richard Dyer, ‘Africa’
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CHAPTER -1 THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER1
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READING C:
Sander Gilman, The deep structure of stereotypes’
READING D:
Kobena Mercer, ‘Reading racial fetishism’
I
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Introduction
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285
How do we represent people and places which are significantly different from
us? Why is ‘difference’ so compelling a theme, so contested an area of
representation? What is the secret fascination of ‘otherness’, and why is
popular representation so frequently drawn to it? What are the typical forms
and representational practices which are used to represent ‘difference’ in
popular culture today, and where did these popular figures and stereotypes
come from? These are some of the questions about representation which we
set out to address in this chapter. We will pay particular attention to those
representational practices which we call ‘stereotyping’. By the end we hope
you will understand better how what we call ‘the spectacle of the “Other”‘
works, and be able to apply the ideas discussed and the sorts of analysis
undertaken here to the mass of related materials in contemporary popular
culture — for example, advertising which uses black models, newspaper
reports about immigration, racial attacks or urban crime, and films and
magazines which deal with ‘race’ and ethnicity as significant themes.
The theme of ‘representing difference’ is picked up directly from the
previous chapter, where Henrietta Lidchi looked at how ‘other cultures’ are
given meaning by the discourses and practices of exhibition in ethnographic
museums of ‘the West’. Chapter 3 focused on the ‘poetics’ and the ‘polities’ of
exhibiting — both how other cultures are made to signify through the
discourses of exhibition (poetics) and how these practices are inscribed by
relations of power (politics) — especially those which prevail between the
people who are represented and the cultures and institutions doing the
representing. Many of the same concerns arise again in this chapter.
However, here, racial and ethnic difference is foregrounded. You should bear
in mind, however, that what is said about racial difference could equally be
applied in many instances to other dimensions of difference, such as gender,
sexuality, class and disability.
Our focus here is the variety of images which are on display in popular
culture and the mass media. Some are commercial advertising images and
magazine illustrations which use racial stereotypes, dating from the period of
slavery or from the popular imperialism of the late nineteenth century.
However, Chapter 4 brings the story up to the present. Indeed, it begins with
images from the competitive world of modern athletics. The question which
this comparison across time poses is: have the repertoires of representation
around ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ changed or do earlier traces remain intact
in contemporary society?
The chapter looks in depth at theories about the representational practice
known as ‘stereotyping’. However, the theoretical discussion is threaded
through the examples, rather than being introduced for its own sake. The
chapter ends by considering a number of different strategies designed to
intervene in the field of representation, to contest ‘negative’ images and
transform representational practices around ‘race’ in a more ‘positive’
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CHAPT LR 4
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direction. It poses the question of whether there can be an effective ‘politics
of representation’.
Once again, then, visual representation takes centre stage. The chapter
sustains the overall theme by continuing our exploration of representation as
a concept and a practice – the key first ‘moment’ in the cultural circuit. Our
aim is to deepen our understanding of what representation is and how it
works. Representation is a complex business and, especially when dealing
with ‘difference’, it engages feelings, attitudes and emotions and it mobilizes
fears and anxieties in the viewer, at deeper levels than we can explain in a
simple, common-sense way. This is why we need theories – to deepen our
analysis. The chapter, then, builds on what we have already learned about
representation as a signifying practice, and continues to develop critical
concepts to explain its operations.
I.I
Heroes or villains?
Look, first, at Figure 4.1. It is a picture of the men’s 100 metres final at the
1988 Olympics which appeared on the cover of the Olympics Special of the
Sunday Times colour magazine (9 October 1988). It shows the black Canadian
sprinter, Ben Johnson, winning in record time from Carl Lewis and Linford
Christie: five superb athletes in action, at the peak of their physical prowess.
All of them men and – perhaps, now, you will notice consciously for the first
time – all of them black!
How do you ‘read’ the picture — what is it saying? In Barthes’ terms, what
is its ‘myth’ – its underlying message?
One possible message relates to their racial identity. These athletes are all
from a racially-defined group — one often discriminated against precisely
on the grounds of their ‘race’ and colour, whom we are more accustomed
to see depicted in the news as the victims or ‘losers’ in terms of
achievement. Yet here they are, winning!
In terms of difference, then — a positive message: a triumphant moment, a
cause for celebration. Why, then, does the caption say, ‘Heroes and
villains’? Who do you think is the hero, who the villain?
Even if you don’t follow athletics, the answer isn’t difficult to discover.
Ostensibly about the Olympics, the photo is in fact a trailer for the magazine’s
lead story about the growing menace of drug-taking in international athletics
– what inside is called ‘The Chemical Olympics’. Ben Johnson, you may
recall, was found to have taken drugs to enhance his performance. He was
disqualified, the gold medal being awarded to Carl Lewis, and Johnson was
expelled from world athletics in disgrace. The story suggests that all athletes
– black or white – are potentially ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’. But in this image,
Ben Johnson personifies this split in a particular way. He is both ‘hero’ and
FIGURE 4.1 ‘Heroes and Villains’, cover of The Sunday Times Magazine, 9 October 1988.
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‘villain’. He encapsulates the extreme alternatives of heroism and villainy in
world athletics in one black body.
FIGURE 4.2 Linford Christie, holding a Union
Jack, having won the men’s 100 metres Olympic gold
medal, Barcelona 1992.
There are several points to make about the way the representation of ‘race’
and ‘otherness’ is working in this photo. First, if you think back to Chapters 1
and 3, you will remember the work of Barthes on the idea of ‘myth’. This
photo, too, functions at the level of ‘myth’. There is a literal, denotative level
of meaning — this is a picture of the 100 metres final and the figure in front is
Ben Johnson. Then there is the more connotative or thematic meaning — the
drug story. And within that, there is the sub-theme of ‘race’ and ‘difference’.
Already, this tells us something important about how ‘myth’ works. The
image is a very powerful one, as visual images often are. But its meaning is
highly ambiguous. It can carry more than one meaning. If you didn’t know
the context, you might be tempted to read this as a moment of unqualified
triumph. And you wouldn’t be ‘wrong1 since this, too, is a perfectly
acceptable meaning to take from the image. But, as the caption suggests, it is
not produced here as an image of ‘unqualified triumph’. So, the same photo
can carry several, quite different, sometimes diametrically opposite
meanings. It can be a picture of disgrace or of triumph, or both. Many
meanings, we might say, are potential within the photo. But there is no one,
true meaning. Meaning ‘floats’. It cannot be finally fixed. However,
attempting to ‘fix’ it is the work of a representational practice, which
intervenes in the many potential meanings of an image in an attempt to
privilege one.
So, rather than a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ meaning, what we need to ask is, ‘Which of
the many meanings in this image does the magazine mean to privilege?’
Which is the preferred meaning? Ben Johnson is the key element here
because he is both an amazing athlete, winner and record-breaker, and the
athlete who was publicly disgraced because of drug-taking. So, as it turns out,
the preferred meaning is both ‘heroism* and ‘villainy’. It wants to say
something paradoxical like, ‘In the moment of the hero’s triumph, there is
also villainy and moral defeat.’ In part, we know this is the preferred meaning
which the magazine wants the photo to convey because this is the meaning
which is singled out in the caption: HEROES AND VILLAINS. Roland
Barthes (1977) argues that, frequently, it is the caption which selects one out
of the many possible meanings from the image, and anchors it with words.
The ‘meaning’ of the photograph, then, does not lie exclusively in the image,
but in the conjunction of image and text. Two discourses – the discourse of
written language and the discourse of photography – are required to produce
and ‘fix’ the meaning (see Hall, 1972).
As we have suggested, this photo can also be ‘read’, connotatively, in terms of
what it has to ‘say’ about ‘race’. Here, the message could be – black people
shown being good at something, winning at last! But in the light of the
‘preferred meaning’, hasn’t the meaning with respect to ‘race’ and ‘otherness’
changed as well? Isn’t it more something like, ‘even when black people are
shown at the summit of their achievement, they often fail to carry it off? This
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having-it-both-ways is important because, as I
hope to show you, people who are in any way
significantly different from the majority —
‘them’ rather than ‘us’ – are frequently
exposed to this binary form of representation.
They seem to be represented through sharply
opposed, polarized, binary extremes – good/
bad, civilized/primitive, ugly/excessively
attractive, repelling-because-different/
compelling-because-strange-and-exotic. And
they are often required to be both things at the
same time] We will return to these split
figures or ‘tropes’ of representation in a
moment.
preferred
meaning
But first, let us look at another, similar news
photo, this time from another record-breaking
100 metres final. Linford Christie, subsequently captain of the British
Olympics squad, at the peak of his career, having just won the race of a
lifetime. The picture captures his elation, at the moment of his lap of honour.
He is holding the Union Jack. In the light of the earlier discussion, how do you
‘read’ this photograph (Figure 4.2)? What is it ‘saying’ about ‘race’ and cultural
identity?
Which of the following statements, in your view, comes closest to
expressing the ‘message’ of the image?
(a) This is the greatest moment of my life! A triumph for me, Linford
Christie.’
(b) This is a moment of triumph for me and a celebration for black
people everywhere!’
(c) This is a moment of triumph and celebration for the British Olympic
team and the British people!’
(d) This is a moment of triumph and celebration for black people and
the British Olympic team. It shows that you can be “Black” and
“British”!’
There is, of course, no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer to the question. The image
carries many meanings, all equally plausible. What is important is the fact that
this image both shows an event (denotation) and carries a ‘message’ or
meaning (connotation) — Barthes would call it a ‘meta-message’ or myth —
about ‘race’, colour and ‘otherness’. We can’t help reading images of this kind
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as ‘saying something’, not just about the people or the occasion, but about
their ‘otherness’, their ‘difference’. ‘Difference’ has been marked. How it is
then interpreted is a constant and recurring preoccupation in the
representation of people who are racially and ethnically different from the
majority population. Difference signifies. It ‘speaks’.
In a later interview, discussing his forthcoming retirement from international
sport, Christie commented on the question of his cultural identity – where he
feels he ‘belongs’ (The Sunday Independent, 11 November 1995). He has very
fond memories of Jamaica, he said, where he was born and lived until the age
of 7. But ‘I’ve lived here [in the UK] for 28 [years]. I can’t be anything other
than British’ (p. 18). Of course, it isn’t as simple as that. Christie is perfectly
well aware that most definitions of ‘Britishness’ assume that the person who
belongs is ‘white’. It is much harder for black people, wherever they were
born, to be accepted as ‘British’. In 1995, the cricket magazine, Wisden, had
to pay libel damages to black athletes for saying that they couldn’t be
expected to display the same loyalty and commitment to winning for England
because they are black. So Christie knows that every image is also being
‘read’ in terms of this broader question of cultural belongingness and
difference.
Indeed, he made his remarks in the context of the negative publicity to which
he has been exposed in some sections of the British tabloid press, a good deal
of which hinges on a vulgar, unstated but widely recognized ‘joke’ at his
expense: namely that the tight-fitting Lycra shorts which he wears are said to
reveal the size and shape of his genitals. This was the detail on which The
Sun focused on the morning after he won an Olympic gold medal. Christie
has been subject to continuous teasing in the tabloid press about the
prominence and size of his ‘lunchbox’ – a euphemism which some have
taken so literally that, he revealed, he has been approached by a firm wanting
to market its lunchboxes around his image! Linford Christie has observed
about these innuendoes: ‘I felt humiliated … My first instinct was that it was
racist. There we are, stereotyping a black man. I can take a good joke. But it
happened the day after I won the greatest accolade an athlete can win … I
don’t want to go through life being known for what I’ve got in my shorts. I’m a
serious person …” (p. 15).
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What, for example, did the French writer, Michael Cournot, whom Fanon
quotes, mean when he wrote that ‘Four Negroes with their penises
exposed would fill a cathedral’? (Fanon, 1986/1952, p. 169). What is the
relationship of these fantasies of sexuality to ‘race’ and ethnicity in the
representation of ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’?
We have now introduced another dimension into the representation of
‘difference’ – adding sexuality and gender to ‘race’, ethnicity and colour. Of
course, it is well established that sport is one of the few areas where black
people have had outstanding success. It seems natural that images of black
people drawn from sport should emphasize the body, which is the
instrument of athletic skill and achievement. It is difficult, however, to have
images of bodies in action, at the peak of their physical perfection, without
those images also, in some way, carrying ‘messages’ about gender and about
sexuality. Where black athletes are concerned, what are these messages
about?
ACTIVITY 4
Look, for example, at the picture from the Sunday Times 1988 Olympic
Special, of the black American sprinter, Florence Griffith-Joyner, who
won three gold medals at Seoul (Figure 4.3). Can you ‘read’ this photo
without getting some ‘messages’ about ‘race’, gender and sexuality — even
if what the meanings are remain ambiguous? Is there any doubt that the
photo is ‘signifying’ along all three dimensions? In representation, one
sort of difference seems to attract others – adding up to a ‘spectacle’ of
ACTIVITY 3
What is going on here? Is this just a joke in bad taste, or does it have a
deeper meaning? What do sexuality and gender have to do with images of
black men and women? Why did the black French writer from
Martinique, Frantz Fanon, say that white people seem to be obsessed
with the sexuality of black people?
It is the subject of a widespread fantasy, Fanon says, which fixates the
black man at the level of the genitals. ‘One is no longer aware of the
Negro, but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a
penis’ (Fanon, 1986/1952, p. 170).
FIGURE 4.3 Florence Griffith-Joyner.
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otherness. If you’re not convinced, you might think of this in the context
of the remark by ‘Flo-Jo’s’ husband, Al Joyner, quoted in the text next to
the photo: ‘Someone Says My Wife Looked Like A Man’. Or consider the
photo (which was reproduced on the following page of the article) of Al
Joyner’s sister, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who also won a gold medal and
broke world records at Seoul in the heptathlon, preparing to throw a
javelin, accompanied by text quoting another observation by Al Joyner:
‘Somebody Says My Sister Looked Like A Gorilla'(Figure 4.4).
FIGURE 4.4 Jackie Joyner-Kersee.
There is an additional point to be made about these photographs of black
athletes in the press. They gain in meaning when they are read in context,
against or in connection with one another. This is another way of saying that
images do not carry meaning or ‘signify’ on their own. They accumulate
meanings, or play off their meanings against one another, across a variety of
texts and media. Each image carries its own, specific meaning. But at the
broader level of how ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ is being represented in a
particular culture at any one moment, we can see similar representational
practices and figures being repeated, with variations, from one text or site of
representation to another. This accumulation of meanings across different
texts, where one image refers to another, or has its meaning altered by being
‘read’ in the context of other images, is called inter-textuality. We may
describe the whole repertoire of imagery and visual effects through which
‘difference’ is represented at any one historical moment as a regime of
representation; this is very similar to what, in Chapter 2, Peter Hamilton
referred to as a representational paradigm.
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An interesting example of inter-textuality, where the image depends for its
meaning on being ‘read’ in relation to a number of other, similar images, can
be found in Figure 4.5. This is Carl Lewis, one of the sprinters you saw in
Figure 4.1, taken from a Pirelli advertisement. At first glance, the image
summons up echoes of all the previous images we have been looking at —
superbly-honed athletic bodies, tensed in action, super-men and superwomen. But here the meaning is differently inflected. Pirelli is a tyre firm
with a reputation for producing calendars with pictures of beautiful women,
scantily clad, in provocative poses – the prototypical ‘pin-up’. In which of
these two contexts should we ‘read’ the Carl Lewis image? One clue lies in
the fact that, though Lewis is male, in the ad he is wearing elegant, highheeled red shoes!
FIGURE 4.5
Carl Lewis,
photographed for
a Pirelli
advertisement.
ACTIVITY 5
What is this image saying? What is its message? How does it ‘say’ it?
This image works by the marking of ‘difference’. The conventional
identification of Lewis with black male athletes and with a sort of ‘supermasculinity’ is disturbed and undercut by the invocation of his ‘femininity’ and what marks this is the signifier of the red shoes. The sexual and racial
‘message’ is rendered ambiguous. The super-male black athlete may not be all
he seems. The ambiguity is amplified when we compare this image with all
the other images – the stereotypes we are accustomed to see – of black
athletes in the press. Its meaning is inter-textual – i.e. it requires to be read
‘against the grain’.
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Does this photo reinforce or subvert the stereotype? Some people say it’s
just an advertiser’s joke. Some argue that Carl Lewis has allowed himself
to be exploited by a big corporate advertiser. Others argue that he
deliberately set out to challenge and contest the traditional image of
black masculinity. What do you think?
In the light of these examples, we can rephrase our original questions more
precisely. Why is ‘otherness’ so compelling an object of representation? What
does the marking of racial difference tell us about representation as a
practice? Through which representational practices are racial and ethnic
difference and ‘otherness’ signified? What are the ‘discursive formations’, the
repertoires or regimes of representation, on which the media are drawing
when they represent ‘difference’? Why is one dimension of difference – e.g.
‘race’ – crossed by other dimensions, such as sexuality, gender and class?
And how is the representation of ‘difference’ linked with questions of power?
1.2 Why does ‘difference’ matter?
Before we analyse any more examples, let us examine some of the underlying
issues posed by our first question. Why does ‘difference’ matter — how can we
explain this fascination with ‘otherness’? What theoretical arguments can we
draw on to help us unpack this question?
Questions of ‘difference’ have come to the fore in cultural studies in recent
decades and been addressed in different ways by different disciplines. In this
section, we briefly consider four such theoretical accounts. As we discuss
them, think back to the examples we have just analysed. In each, we start by
showing how important ‘difference’ is – by considering what is said to be its
positive aspect. But we follow this by some of the more negative aspects of
‘difference’. Putting these two together suggests why ‘difference’ is both
necessary and dangerous.
1 The first account comes from linguistics – from the sort of approach
associated with Saussure and the use of language as a model of how culture
works, which was discussed in Chapter 1. The main argument advanced here
is that ‘difference’ matters because it is essential to meaning; without it,
meaning could not exist. You may remember from Chapter 1 the example of
white/black. We know what black means, Saussure argued, not because there
is some essence of ‘blackness’ but because we can contrast it with its opposite
– white. Meaning, he argued, is relational. It is the ‘difference’between white
and black which signifies, which carries meaning. Carl Lewis in that photo
can represent ‘femininity’ or the ‘feminine’ side of masculinity because he
can mark his ‘difference’ from the traditional stereotypes of black
masculinity by using the red shoes as a signifies This principle holds for
broader concepts too. We know what it is to be ‘British’, not only because of
certain national characteristics, but also because we can mark its ‘difference’
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from its ‘others’ – ‘Britishness’ is not-French, not-American, not-German,
not-Pakistani, not-Jamaican and so on. This enables Linford Christie to
signify his ‘Britishness’ (by the flag) while contesting (by his black skin) that
‘Britishness’ must always mean ‘whiteness’. Again, ‘difference’ signifies. It
carries a message.
So meaning depends on the difference between opposites. However, when
we discussed this argument in Chapter 1, we recognized that, though binary
oppositions – white/black, day/night, masculine/feminine, British/alien have the great value of capturing the diversity of the world within their
either/or extremes, they are also a rather crude and reductionist way of
establishing meaning. For example, in so-called black-and-white
photography, there is actually no pure ‘black’ or ‘white’, only varying shades
of grey. ‘Black’ shades imperceptibly into ‘white’, just as men have both
‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sides to their nature; and Linford Christie
certainly wants to affirm the possibility of being both ‘black’ and ‘British’
though the normal definition of ‘Britishness’ assumes that it is white.
Thus, while we do not seem able to do without them, binary oppositions are
also open to the charge of being reductionist and over-simplified swallowing up all distinctions in their rather rigid two-part structure. What is
more, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued, there are very few
neutral binary oppositions. One pole of the binary, he argues, is usually the
dominant one, the one which includes the other within its field of
operations. There is always a relation of power between the poles of a binary
opposition (Derrida, 1974). We should really write, white/black, men/
women, masculine/feminine, upper class/lower class, British/alien to
capture this power dimension in discourse.
2 The second explanation also comes from theories of language, but from a
somewhat different school to that represented by Saussure. The argument
here is that we need ‘difference’ because we can only construct meaning
through a dialogue with the ‘Other’. The great Russian linguist and critic,
Mikhail Bakhtin, who fell foul of the Stalinist regime in the 1940s, studied
language, not (as the Saussureans did) as an objective system, but in terms of
how meaning is sustained in the dialogue between two or more speakers.
Meaning, Bakhtin argued, does not belong to any one speaker. It arises in the
give-and-take between different speakers. ‘The word in language is half
someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when … the speaker appropriates
the word, adapting it to his own semantic expressive intention. Prior to this
… the word does not exist in a neutral or impersonal language … rather it
exists in other people’s mouths, serving other people’s intentions: it is from
there that one must take the word and make it one’s own’ (Bakhtin, 1981
[1935], pp. 293-4). Bakhtin and his collaborator, Volosinov, believed that this
enabled us to enter into a struggle over meaning, breaking one set of
associations and giving words a new inflection. Meaning, Bakhtin argued, is
established through dialogue – it is fundamentally dialogic. Everything we
say and mean is modified by the interaction and interplay with another
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person. Meaning arises through the ‘difference’ between the participants in
any dialogue. The ‘Other’, in short, is essential to meaning.
This is the positive side of Bakhtin’s theory. The negative side is, of course,
that therefore meaning cannot be fixed and that one group can never be
completely in charge of meaning. What it means to be ‘British’ or ‘Russian’ or
‘Jamaican’ cannot be entirely controlled by the British, Russians or
Jamaicans, but is always up for grabs, always being negotiated, in the
dialogue between these national cultures and their ‘others’. Thus it has been
argued that you cannot know what it meant to be ‘British’ in the nineteenth
century until you know what the British thought of Jamaica, their prize
colony in the Caribbean, or Ireland, and more disconcertingly, what the
Jamaicans or the Irish thought of them … (C. Hall, 1994).
3 The third kind of explanation is anthropological, and you have already
met it in du Gay, Hall et al. (1997). The argument here is that culture
depends on giving things meaning by assigning them to different positions
within a classificatory system. The marking of ‘difference’ is thus the basis of
that symbolic order which we call culture. Mary Douglas, following the
classic work on symbolic systems by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim,
and the later studies of mythology by the French anthropologist, Claude LeViStrauss, argues that social groups impose meaning on their world by ordering
and organizing things into classificatory systems (Douglas, 1966). Binary
oppositions are crucial for all classification, because one must establish a
clear difference between things in order to classify them. Faced with different
kinds of food, Levi-Strauss argued (1979), one way of giving them meaning is
to start by dividing them into two groups – those which are eaten ‘raw’ and
those eaten ‘cooked’. Of course, you can also classify food into ‘vegetables’
and ‘fruit’; or into those which are eaten as ‘starters’ and those which are
eaten as ‘desserts’; or those which are served up at dinner and those which
are eaten at a sacred feast or the communion table. Here, again, ‘difference’ is
fundamental to cultural meaning.
However, it can also give rise to negative feelings and practices. Mary
Douglas argues that what really disturbs cultural order is when things turn up
in the wrong category; or when things fail to fit any category – such as a
substance like mercury, which is a metal but also a liquid, or a social group
like mixed-race mulattoes who are neither ‘white’ nor ‘black’ but float
ambiguously in some unstable, dangerous, hybrid zone of indeterminacy
in-between (Stallybrass and White, 1986). Stable cultures require things to
stay in their appointed place. Symbolic boundaries keep the categories
‘pure’, giving cultures their unique meaning and identity. What unsettles
culture is ‘matter out of place’ – the breaking of our unwritten rules and
codes. Dirt in the garden is fine, but dirt in one’s bedroom is ‘matter out of
place’ – a sign of pollution, of symbolic boundaries being transgressed, of
taboos broken. What we do with ‘matter out of place’ is to sweep it up, throw
it out, restore the place to order, bring back the normal state of affairs. The
retreat of many cultures towards ‘closure’ against foreigners, intruders,
aliens and ‘others’ is part of the same process of purification (Kristeva, 1982).
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According to this argument, then, symbolic boundaries are central to all
culture. Marking ‘difference’ leads us, symbolically, to close ranks, shore
up culture and to stigmatize and expel anything which is defined as impure,
abnormal. However, paradoxically, it also makes ‘difference’ powerful,
strangely attractive precisely because it is forbidden, taboo, threatening to
cultural order. Thus, ‘what is socially peripheral is often symbolically
centred’ (Babcock, 1978, p. 32).
4 The fourth kind of explanation is psychoanalytic and relates to the role of
‘difference’ in our psychic life. The argument here is that the ‘Other’is
fundamental to the constitution of the self, to us as subjects, and to sexual
identity. According to Freud, the consolidation of our definitions of ‘self and
of our sexual identities depends on the way we are formed as subjects,
especially in relation to that stage of early development which he called the
Oedipus complex (after the Oedipus story in Greek myth). A unified sense of
oneself as a subject and one’s sexual identity – Freud argued – are not fixed in
the very young child. However, according to Freud’s version of the Oedipus
myth, at a certain point the boy develops an unconscious erotic attraction to
the Mother, but finds the Father barring his way to ‘satisfaction’. However,
when he discovers that women do not have a penis, he assumes that his
Mother was punished by castration, and that he might be punished in the
same way if he persists with his unconscious desire. In fear, he switches his
identification to his old ‘rival’, the Father, thereby taking on the beginnings of
an identification with a masculine identity. The girl child identifies the
opposite way – with the Father. But she cannot ‘be’ him, since she lacks the
penis. She can only ‘win’ him by being willing, unconsciously, to bear a
man’s child – thereby taking up and identifying with the Mother’s role, and
‘becoming feminine’.
This model of how sexual ‘difference’begins to be assumed in very young
children has been strongly contested. Many people have questioned its
speculative character. On the other hand, it has been very influential, as well
as extensively amended by later analysts. The French psychoanalyst, Jacques
Lacan (1977), for example, went further than Freud, arguing that the child
has no sense of itself as a subject separate from its mother until it sees itself in
a mirror, or as if mirrored in the way it is looked at by the Mother. Through
identification, ‘it desires the object of her desire, thus focusing its libido on
itself (see Segal, 1997). It is this reflection from outside oneself, or what
Lacan calls the ‘look from the place of the other’, during ‘the mirror stage’,
which allows the child for the first time to recognize itself as a unified
subject, relate to the outside world, to the ‘Other’, develop language and take
on a sexual identity. (Lacan actually says, ‘mis-recognize itself, since he
believes the subject can never be fully unified.) Melanie Klein (1957), on the
other hand, argued that the young child copes with this problem of a lack of a
stable self by splitting its unconscious image of and identification with the
Mother into its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts, internalizing some aspects, and
projecting others on to the outside world. The common element in all these
different versions of Freud is the role which is given by these different
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REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES
theorists to the ‘Other’ in subjective development. Subjectivity can only arise
and a sense of ‘self be formed through the symbolic and unconscious
relations which the young child forges with a significant ‘Other’ which is
outside – i.e. different from – itself.
At first sight, these psychoanalytic accounts seem to be positive in their
implications for ‘difference’. Our subjectivities, they argue, depend on our
unconscious relations with significant others. However, there are also
negative implications. The psychoanalytic perspective assumes that there is
no such thing as a given, stable inner core to ‘the self or to identity.
Psychically, we are never fully unified as subjects. Our subjectivities are
formed through this troubled, never-completed, unconscious dialogue with this internalization of- the ‘Other’. It is formed in relation to something
which completes us but which – since it lies outside us – we in some way
always lack.
What’s more, they say, this troubling split or division within subjectivity can
never be fully healed. Some indeed see this as one of the main sources of
neurosis in adults. Others see psychic problems arising from the splitting
between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parts of the self- being pursued internally by
the ‘bad’ aspects one has taken into oneself, or alternatively, projecting on to
others the ‘bad’ feelings one cannot deal with. Frantz Fanon (referred to
earlier), who used psychoanalytic theory in his explanation of racism, argued
(1986/1952) that much racial stereotyping and violence arose from the refusal
of the white ‘Other’ to give recognition ‘from the place of the other’, to the
black person (see Bhabha, 1986b; Hall, 1996).
These debates about ‘difference’ and the ‘Other’ have been introduced
because the chapter draws selectively on all of them in the course of
analysing racial representation. It is not necessary at this stage for you to
prefer one explanation of ‘difference’ over others, or to choose between them.
They are not mutually exclusive since they refer to very different levels of
analysis – the linguistic, the social, the cultural and the psychic levels
respectively. However, there are two general points to note at this stage. First,
from many different directions, and within many different disciplines, this
question of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ has come to play an increasingly
significant role. Secondly, ‘difference’ is ambivalent. It can be both positive
and negative. It is both necessary for the production of meaning, the
formation of language and culture, for social identities and a subjective sense
of the self as a sexed subject — and at the same time, it is threatening, a site of
danger, of negative feelings, of splitting, hostility and aggression towards the
‘Other’. In what follows, you should always bear in mind this ambivalent
character of ‘difference’, its divided legacy.
CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE OF THE OTHER’
239
2 Racializingu> the ‘Other’
Holding these theoretical ‘tools’ of analysis in reserve for a moment, let us
now explore further some examples of the repertoires of representation and
representational practices which have been used to mark racial difference
and signify the racialized ‘Other’ in western popular culture. How was this
archive formed and what were its typical figures and practices?
There are three major moments when the ‘West’ encountered black people,
giving rise to an avalanche of popular representations based on the marking
of racial difference. The first began with the sixteenth-century contact
between European traders and the West African kingdoms, which provided a
source of black slaves for three centuries. Its effects were to be found in
slavery and in the post-slave societies of the New World (discussed in
section 2.2). The second was the European colonization of Africa and the
‘scramble’ between the European powers for the control of colonial territory,
markets and raw materials in the period of ‘high Imperialism’ (see below,
section 2.1). The third was the post-World War II migrations from the Third
World’ into Europe and North America (examples from this period are
discussed in section 2.3). Western ideas about ‘race’ and images of racial
difference were profoundly shaped by those three fateful encounters.
2.1 Commodity racism: empire and the domestic
world
We start with how images of racial difference drawn from the imperial
encounter flooded British popular culture at the end of the nineteenth
century, in the middle ages, the European image of Africa was ambiguous – a
mysterious place, but often viewed positively: after all, the Coptic Church
was one of the oldest ‘overseas’ Christian communities; black saints appeared
in medieval Christian iconography; and Ethiopia’s legendary Trester John’,
was reputed to be one of Christianity’s most loyal supporters. Gradually,
however, this image changed. Africans were declared to be the descendants
of Ham, cursed in The Bible to be in perpetuity ‘a servant of servants unto his
brethren’. Identified with Nature, they symbolized ‘the primitive’ in contrast
with ‘the civilized world’. The Enlightenment, which ranked societies along
an evolutionary scale from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’, thought Africa ‘the
parent of everything that is monstrous in Nature’ (Edward Long, 1774, quoted
in McClintock, 1995, p. 22). Curvier dubbed the Negro race a ‘monkey tribe’.
The philosopher Hegel declared that Africa was ‘no historical part of the
world … it has no movement or development to exhibit’. By the nineteenth
century, when the European exploration and colonization of the African
interior began in earnest, Africa was regarded as ‘marooned and historically
abandoned … a fetish land, inhabited by cannibals, dervishes and witch
doctors . . . ” (McClintock, 1995, p. 41).
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CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER’
REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES
The exploration and colonization of Africa produced an explosion of popular
representations (Mackenzie, 1986). Our example here is the spread of
imperial images and themes in Britain through commodity advertising in the
closing decades of the nineteenth century.
The progress of the great white explorer-adventurers and the encounters with
the black African exotic was charted, recorded and depicted in maps and
drawings, etchings and (especially) the new photography, in newspaper
illustrations and accounts, diaries, travel writing, learned treatises, official
reports and ‘boy’s-own’ adventure novels. Advertising was one means by
which the imperial project was given visual form in a popular medium,
forging the link between Empire and the domestic imagination. Anne
McClintock argues that, through the racializing of advertisements
(commodity racism), ‘the Victorian middle-class home became a space for the
display of imperial spectacle and the reinvention of race, while the colonies in particular Africa – became a theatre for exhibiting the Victorian cult of
domesticity and the reinvention of gender’ (1995, p. 34).
THE
FIGURE 4.6
Bovril
advertisement
claiming to depict
Lord Roberts’
historical march
from Kimberley
to Bloemfontein
during the South
African (Boer)
War, 1900.
OF
THE YEAR,
How Lord Roberts wrote BOVRIL.
HUNTLEY & PALMERS
Advertising for the objects, gadgets, gee-gaws and bric-a-brac with which the
Victorian middle classes filled their homes provided an ‘imaginary way of
relating to the real world’ of commodity production, and after 1890, with the
rise of the popular press, from the Illustrated London News to the
Harmsworth Daily Mail, the imagery of mass commodity production entered
the world of the working classes via the spectacle of advertising (Richards,
1990). Richards calls it a ‘spectacle’ because advertising translated things
into a fantasy visual display of signs and symbols. The production of
commodities became linked to Empire – the search for markets and raw
materials abroad supplanting other motives for imperial expansion.
This two-way traffic forged connections between imperialism and the
domestic sphere, public and private. Commodities (and images of English
domestic life) flowed outwards to the colonies; raw materials (and images of
‘the civilizing mission’ in progress) were brought into the home. Henry
Stanley, the imperial adventurer, who famously traced Livingstone (‘Dr
Livingstone, I presume?’) in Central Africa in 1871, and was a founder of the
infamous Congo Free State, tried to annex Uganda and open up the interior
for the East Africa Company. He believed that the spread of commodities
would make ‘civilization’ in Africa inevitable and named his native bearers
after the branded goods they carried – Bryant and May, Remington and so on.
His exploits became associated with Pears’ Soap, Bovril and various brands of
tea. The gallery of imperial heroes and their masculine exploits in ‘Darkest
Africa’ were immortalized on matchboxes, needle cases, toothpaste pots,
pencil boxes, cigarette packets, board games, paperweights, sheet music.
‘Images of colonial conquest were stamped on soap boxes … biscuit tins,
whisky bottles, tea tins and chocolate bars … No pre-existing form of
organized racism had ever before been able to reach so large and so
differentiated a mass of the populace’ (McClintock, 1995, p. 209) (Figures 4.6,
4.7 and 4.8).
EVENT
241
FIGURE 4.7
Huntley and
Palmer’s biscuit
advertisement.
Soap symbolized this ‘racializing’ of the domestic world and ‘domestication’
of the colonial world. In its capacity to cleanse and purify, soap acquired, in
the fantasy world of imperial advertising, the quality of a fetish-object. It
apparently had the power to wash black skin white as well as being capable
of washing off the soot, grime and dirt of the industrial slums and their
inhabitants – the unwashed poor – at home, while at the same time keeping
the imperial body clean and pure in the racially polluted contact zones ‘out
there’ in the Empire. In the process, however, the domestic labour of women
was often silently erased.
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CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER’
243
Heavily emphasized was the historical case against the black man based
on his supposed failure to develop a civilized way of life in Africa. As
portrayed in pro-slavery writing, Africa was and always had been the
scene of unmitigated savagery, cannibalism, devil worship, and
licentiousness. Also advanced was an early form of biological argument,
based on real or imagined physiological and anatomical differences —
especially in cranial characteristics and facial angles — which allegedly
explained mental and physical inferiority. Finally there was the appeal to
deep-seated white fears of widespread miscegenation [sexual relations
and interbreeding between the races], as pro-slavery theorists sought to
deepen white anxieties by claiming that the abolition of slavery would
lead to inter-marriage and the degeneracy of the race. Although all these
arguments had appeared earlier in fugitive or embryonic form, there is
something startling about the rapidity with which they were brought
together and organized in a rigid polemical pattern, once the defenders of
slavery found themselves in a propaganda war with the abolitionists.
(Frederickson, 1987, p. 49)
The White Man’s Burden
Pears’ Soap
FIGURE 4.8 Nineteenth-century advertisements for Pears’ soap.
Look, now, at the two advertisements for Pears’ Soap (Figure 4.8). Before
reading further, write down briefly what you think these ads are ‘saying’.
READING A
Now read Anne McClintock’s analysis of Pears’ advertising campaigns, in
Reading A: ‘Soap and commodity spectacle’ at the end of this chapter.
2.2 Meanwhile, down on the plantation …
Our second example is from the period of plantation slavery and its
aftermath. It has been argued that, in the USA, a fully fledged racializcd
ideology did not appear amongst the slave-holding classes (and their
supporters in Europe) until slavery was seriously challenged by the
Abolitionists in the nineteenth century. Frederickson (1987) sums up the
complex and sometimes contradictory set of beliefs about racial difference
which took hold in this period:
Binary oppositions
This racialized discourse is structured by a set of binary oppositions. There is
the powerful opposition between ‘civilization’ (white) and ‘savagery’ (black).
There is the opposition between the biological or bodily characteristics of the
‘black’ and ‘white’ ‘races’, polarized into their extreme opposites – each the
signifiers of an absolute difference between human ‘types’ or species. There
are the rich distinctions which cluster around the supposed link, on the one
hand, between the white ‘races’ and intellectual development — refinement,
learning and knowledge, a belief in reason, the presence of developed
institutions, formal government and law, and a ‘civilized restraint’ in their
emotional, sexual and civil life, all of which are associated with ‘Culture’;
and on the other hand, the link between the black ‘races’ and whatever is
instinctual — the open expression of emotion and feeling rather than intellect,
a lack of ‘civilized refinement’ in sexual and social life, a reliance on custom
and ritual, and the lack of developed civil institutions, all of which are linked
to ‘Nature’. Finally there is the polarized opposition between racial ‘purity’
on the one hand, and the ‘pollution’ which comes from intermarriage, racial
hybridity and interbreeding.
The Negro, it was argued, found happiness only when under the tutelage of a
white master. His/her essential characteristics were fixed forever- ‘eternally’
– in Nature. Evidence from slave insurrections and the slave revolt in Haiti
(1791) had persuaded whites of the instability of the Negro character. A
degree of civilization, they thought, had rubbed off on the ‘domesticated’
slave, but underneath slaves remained by nature savage brutes; and long
buried passions, once loosed, would result in ‘the wild frenzy of revenge, and
the savage lust for blood’ (Frederickson, 1987, p. 54). This view was justified
with reference to so-called scientific and ethnological ‘evidence’, the basis of
a new kind of ‘scientific racism’. Contrary to Biblical evidence, it was
asserted, blacks/whites had been created at different times – according to the
theory of’polygenesis’ (many creations).
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REPRFSENTATION: CULTURAL RFPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES
Racial theory applied the Culture/Nature distinction differently to the two
racialized groups. Among whites, ‘Culture’ was opposed to ‘Nature’.
Amongst blacks, it was assumed, ‘Culture’ coincided with ‘Nature’. Whereas
whites developed ‘Culture’ to subdue and overcome ‘Nature’, for blacks,
‘Culture’ and ‘Nature’ were interchangeable. David Green discussed this
view in relation to anthropology and ethnology, the disciplines which (see
Chapter 3) provided much of the ‘scientific evidence’ for it.
Though not immune to the ‘white man’s burden’ [approach], anthropology
was drawn through the course of the nineteenth century, even more
towards causal connections between race and culture. As the position and
status of the ‘inferior’ races became increasingly to be regarded as fixed, so
socio-cultural differences came to be regarded as dependent upon
hereditary characteristics. Since these were inaccessible to direct
observation they had to be inferred from physical and behavioural traits
which, in turn, they were intended to explain. Socio-cultural differences
among human populations became subsumed within the identity of the
individual human body. In the attempt to trace the line of determination
between the biological and the social, the body became the totemic object,
and its very visibility the evident articulation of nature and culture.
(Green, 1984, pp. 31-2)
Green’s argument explains why the racialized body and its meanings came to
have such resonance in popular representations of difference and ‘otherness’.
It also highlights the connection between visual discourse and the
production of (racialized) knowledge. The body itself and its differences were
visible for all to see, and thus provided ‘the incontrovertible evidence’ for a
naturalization of racial difference. The representation of ‘difference’ through
the body became the discursive site through which much of this ‘racialized
knowledge’ was produced and circulated.
Popular representations of racial ‘difference’ during slavery tended to cluster
around two main themes. First was the subordinate status and ‘innate
laziness’ of blacks – ‘naturally’ born to, and fitted only for, servitude but, at
the same time, stubbornly unwilling to labour in ways appropriate to their
nature and profitable for their masters. Second was their innate ‘primitivism’,
simplicity and lack of culture, which made them genetically incapable of
‘civilized’ refinements. Whites took inordinate amusement from the slaves’
efforts to imitate the manners and customs of so-called ‘civilized’ white folks.
(In fact, slaves often deliberately parodied their masters’ behaviour by their
exaggerated imitations, laughing at white folks behind their backs and
‘sending them up’. The practice – called signifying-is now recognized as a
well-established part of the black vernacular literary tradition. See, for
example, Figure 4.9, reprinted in Gates, 1988).
CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER’
245
Typical of this racialized regime of representation was the practice of reducing
the cultures of black people to Nature, or naturalizing ‘difference’. The logic
behind naturalization is simple. If the differences between black and white
people are ‘cultural’, then they are open to modification and change. But if
they are ‘natural’ – as the slave-holders believed – then they are beyond
history, permanent and fixed. ‘Naturalization’ is therefore a representational
strategy designed to fix ‘difference’, and thus secure it forever. It is an attempt
to halt the inevitable ‘slide’ of meaning, to secure discursive or ideological
‘closure’.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries popular representations of daily
life under slavery, ownership and servitude are shown as so ‘natural’ that
they require no comment. It was part of the natural order of things that white
men should sit and slaves should stand; that white women rode and slave
men ran after them shading them from the Louisiana sun with an umbrella;
that white overseers should inspect slave women like prize animals, or
punish runaway slaves with casual forms of torture (like branding them or
urinating in their mouths), and that fugitives should kneel to receive their
punishment (see Figures 4.10, 4.11, 4.12). These images are a form of
ritualized degradation. On the other hand, some representations are idealized
and sentimentalized rather than degraded, while remaining stereotypical.
These are the ‘noble savages’ to the ‘debased servants’ of the previous type.
For example, the endless representations of the ‘good’ Christian black slave,
like Uncle Tom, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pro-abolitionist novel, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, or the ever-faithful and devoted domestic slave, Mammy. A
third group occupy an ambiguous middle-ground — tolerated though not
admired. These include the ‘happy natives’ – black entertainers, minstrels
and banjo-players who seemed not to have a brain in their head but sang,
danced and cracked jokes all day long, to entertain white folks; or the
‘tricksters’ who were admired for their crafty ways of avoiding hard work,
and their tall tales, like Uncle Remus.
For blacks, ‘primitivism’ (Culture) and ‘blackness’ (Nature) became
interchangeable. This was their ‘true nature’ and they could not escape it. As
has so often happened in the representation of women, their biology was their
‘destiny’. Not only were blacks represented in terms of their essential
characteristics. They were reduced to their essence. Laziness, simple fidelity,
mindless ‘cooning’, trickery, childishness belonged to blacks as a race, as a
species. There was nothing else to the kneeling slave but his servitude;
nothing to Uncle Tom except his Christian forbearing; nothing to Mammy but
her fidelity to the white household – and what Fanon called her ‘sho’ nuff
good cooking’.
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CHAPTER 4
THE SPECTACLE OF THE’OTHER’
FIGURE 4.10 Slavery: a scene from a planter’s life in the West Indies.
FIGURE 4. II Slavery: a slave auction in the West Indies, c. 1830.
FIGURE 4.9
‘A Black Lecture on Phrenology’.
247
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CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE Oh THE ‘OTI HER1
249
In short, these are stereotypes. We will return, in section 4, to examine this
concept of stereotyping more fully. But for the moment, we note that
‘stereotyped’ means ‘reduced to a few essentials, fixed in Nature by a few,
simplified characteristics’. Stereotyping of blacks in popular representation
was so common that cartoonists, illustrators and caricaturists could summon
up a whole gallery of ‘black types’ with a few, simple, essentialized strokes of
the pen. Black people were reduced to the signifiers of their physical
difference — thick lips, fuzzy hair, broad face and nose, and so on. For
example, that figure of fun who, as doll and marmalade emblem, has amused
little children down the ages: the Golliwog (Figure 4.13). This is only one of
the many popular figures which reduces black people to a few simplified,
reductive and essentialized features. Every adorable little ‘piccaninny’ was
immortalized for years by his grinning innocence on the covers of the Little
Black Sambo books. Black waiters served a thousand cocktails on stage, screen
and in magazine ads. Black Mammy’s chubby countenance smiled away, a
century after the abolition of slavery, on every packet of Aunt Jemima’s
Pancakes.
FIGURE 4.12
Slavery: drawing
of a Creole lady
and black slave in
the West Indies.
FIGURE 4.13
A girl and her
golliwog: an
illustration by
Lawson Wood,
1927.
3 Staging
melody
lingered
racial ‘difference’:
on…’
‘and the
The traces of these racial stereotypes – what we may call a ‘racialized regime
of representation* – have persisted into the late twentieth century (Hall, 1981).
Of course, they have always been contested. In the early decades of the
nineteenth century, the anti-slavery movement (which led to the abolition of
British slavery in 1834) did put into early circulation an alternative imagery of
black-white relations and this was taken up by the American abolitionists in
the US in the period leading up to the Civil War. In opposition to the
stereotypical representations of racialized difference, abolitionists adopted a
different slogan about the black slave – ‘Are you not a man and brother? Are
you not a woman and a sister?’ – emphasizing, not difference, but a common
humanity. The anniversary coins minted by the anti-slavery societies
represented this shift, though not without the marking of’difference’. Black
people are still seen as childish, simple and dependent, though capable of,
and on their way to (after a paternalist apprenticeship), something more like
equality with whites. They were represented as either supplicants for freedom
or full of gratitude for being freed – and consequently still shown kneeling to
their white benefactors (Figure 4.14).
This image reminds us that the ‘Uncle Tom’ of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel
was not only written to appeal to anti-slavery opinion but in the conviction
that, ‘with their gentleness, their lowly docility of heart – their childlike
simplicity of affection and facility of forgiveness’.blacks were, if anything,
wore fitted than their white counterparts to ‘the highest form of the peculiarly
Christian life’ (Stowe, quoted in Frederickson, 1987, p. 111). This sentiment
counters one set of stereotypes (their savagery) by substituting another (their
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REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES
FIGURE 4.14 Two images of slaves
kneeling: (top) from the sheet music of
a French song, and (bottom) the female
version of the well-known emblem of
the English Abolition Society.
P. C H E R E T .
eternal goodness). The extreme racialization of
the imagery has been modified; but a
sentimentalized version of the stereotyping
remained active in the discourse of anti-slavery.
After the Civil War, some of the grosser forms
of social and economic exploitation,
physical and mental degradation associated
with plantation slavery were replaced by a
different system of racial segregation legalized in the South, more informally
maintained in the North. Did the old,
stereotypical ‘regime of representation’, which
had helped to construct the image of black people
in the white imaginary, gradually disappear?
CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER’
251
That would seem too optimistic. A good test case is the American cinema, the
popular art form of the first half of the twentieth century, where one would
expect to find a very different representational repertoire. However, in critical
studies like Leab’s From Sambo to Superspade (1976), Cripps’ Black Film as
Genre (1978), Patricia Morton’s Disfigured Images (1991), and Donald Bogle’s
Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies and Bucks: an interpretative history of
blacks in American films (1973), the astonishing persistence of the basic racial
‘grammar of representation’ is documented — of course, with many variations
and modifications allowing for differences in time, medium and context.
Bogle’s study identifies the five main stereotypes which, he argues, made the
cross-over: Toms — t h e Good Negroes, always ‘chased, harassed, hounded,
flogged, enslaved and insulted, they keep the faith, ne’er turn against their
white massas, and remain hearty, submissive, stoic, generous, selfless and
oh-so-kind’ (p. 6). Coons- the eye-popping piccanninnies, the slapstick
entertainers, the spinners of tall tales, the ‘no-account “niggers”, those
unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman creatures, good for nothing more than
eating watermelons, stealing chickens, shooting crap, or butchering the
English language’ (pp. 7-8). The Tragic Mulatto – the mixed-race woman,
cruelly caught between ‘a divided racial inheritance’ (p. 9), beautiful,
sexually attractive and often exotic, the prototype of the smouldering, sexy
heroine, whose partly white blood makes her ‘acceptable’, even attractive, to
white men, but whose indelible ‘stain’ of black blood condemns her to a
tragic conclusion. Mammies – the prototypical house-servants, usually big,
fat, bossy and cantankerous, with their good-for-nothing husbands sleeping it
off at home, their utter devotion to the white household and their
unquestioned subservience in their workplaces (p. 9). Finally, the Bad Bucks
– physically big, strong, no-good, violent, renegades, ‘on a rampage and full
of black rage’, ‘over-sexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for
white flesh’ (p. 10). There are many traces of this in contemporary images of
black youth – for example, the ‘mugger’, the ‘drug-baron’, the ‘yardie’, the
gansta-rap singer, the ‘niggas with attitude’ bands and more generally black
urban youth ‘on the rampage’.
The film which introduced these black ‘types’ to the cinema was one of the
most extraordinary and influential movies of all times, D.W. Griffiths’ The
Birth of a Nation (1915), based on a popular novel, The Clansman, which had
already put some of these racialized images into circulation. Griffiths, a
‘founding father’ of the cinema introduced many technical and cinematic
innovations and virtually single-handedly constructed the ‘grammar’ of
silent feature-film-making. Up to then,
American movies had been two- or three-reel affairs, shots running no
longer than ten or fifteen minutes, crudely and casually filmed. But Birth
of a Nation was rehearsed for six weeks, filmed in nine, later edited in
three months, and finally released as a hundred-thousand dollar
spectacle, twelve reels in length and over three hours in running time. It
altered the entire course and concept of American movie-making,
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CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER’
developing the close-up, cross-cutting, rapid-fire editing, the iris, the
split-screen shot and realistic and impressionistic lighting. Creating
sequences and images yet to be seen, the film’s magnitude and epic
grandeur swept audiences off their feet.
(Bogle, 1987, p. 10)
More astonishingly, it not only marked the ‘birth of the cinema’, but it told
the story of ‘the birth of the American nation’ — identifying the nation’s
salvation with the ‘birth of the Ku Klux Klan’, that secret band of white
brothers with their white hoods and burning crosses, ‘defenders of white
womanhood, white honour and white glory’, shown in the film putting the
blacks to rout in a magnificent charge, who ‘restore(d) to the South
everything it has lost including its white supremacy” (p. 12), and who were
subsequently responsible for defending white racism in the South by
torching black homes, beating up black people and lynching black men.
There have been many twists and turns in the ways in which the black
experience was represented in mainstream American cinema. But the
repertoire of stereotypical figures drawn from ‘slavery days’ has never
entirely disappeared – a fact you can appreciate even if you are not familiar
with many of the examples quoted. For a time, film-makers like Oscar
Mischeaux produced a ‘segregated’ cinema — black films exclusively for black
audiences (see Gaines, 1993). In the 1930s black actors principally appeared
in mainstream films in the subordinate roles of jesters, simpletons, faithful
retainers and servants. Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson faithfully butlered and
danced for the child star, Shirley Temple; Louise Beavers steadfastly and
cheerfully cooked in a hundred white family-kitchens; while Hattie
McDaniel (fat) and Butterfly McQueen (thin) ‘mammied’ to Scarlet O’Hara’s
every trick and infidelity in Gone With The Wind – a film all about ‘race’
which failed to mention it (Wallace, 1993). Stepin Fetchit (step in and fetch
it) was made to roll his eyes, spread his dim-witted grin, shuffle his
enormous feet and stammer his confused way through twenty-six films — the
archetypal ‘coon’; and when he retired, many followed in his footsteps. The
1940s was the era of the black musicals – Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather,
Porgy and Bess, Carmen Jones – and black entertainers like Cab Galloway,
Fats Waller, Ethel Waters, Pearl Bailey, including two famous, type-cast
‘mulatto femmes fatales’, Lena Home and Dorothy Dandridge. They didn’t
make me into a maid but they didn’t make me anything else either. I became a
butterfly pinned to a column singing away in Movieland’, was Lena Home’s
definitive judgement (quoted in Wallace, 1993, p. 265).
Not until the 1950s did films begin cautiously to broach the subject of ‘race’
as problem (Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, Pinky, to mention a few
titles) – though largely from a white liberal perspective. A key figure in these
films was Sidney Poitier – an extremely talented black actor, whose roles cast
him as a ‘hero for an integrationist age’. Bogle argues that Poitier, the first
black actor to be allowed ‘star billing’ in mainstream Hollywood films, ‘fitted’
FIGURE 4.15 Still from Charlie McCarthy, Detective.
**»-:
253
because he was cast so rigorously ‘against the
grain’. He was made to play on screen
everything that the stereotyped black figure
was nor: ‘educated and intelligent, he spoke
proper English, dressed conservatively, and
had the best of table manners. For the mass
white audience, Sidney Poitier was a black
man who met their standards. His characters
were tame; never did they act impulsively;
nor were they threats to the system. They
were amenable and pliant. And finally they
were non-funky, almost sexless and sterile. In
short they were the perfect dream for white
liberals anxious to have a coloured man in for
lunch or dinner’ (Bogle, 1973, pp. 175-6).
Accordingly, in 1967, he actually starred in a
film entitled Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.
Despite outstanding film performances (The
Defiant Ones, To Sir With Love, In the Heat of
the Night), There was nothing there’, as one
critic kindly put it, ‘to feed the old but potent
fear of the over-endowed Negro’ (Cripps,
1978, p. 223).
FIGURE 4.16 Ann Sheridan and Hattie McDaniel in
George Washington Slept Here, 1942.
FIGURE 4.17 Dorothy Dandridge, the 1950s
definitive tragic mulatto, in Island in the Sun, 1957.
FIGURE 4.18 Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, in
The Defiant Ones, 1958.
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CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER’
3.1 Heavenly bodies
Did nobody transcend this regime of racialized representation in the American
cinema in its heyday up to the 1960s? If anyone could have, that person was
Paul Robeson, who was a major black star and performer in the arts between
1924 and 1945, achieving enormous popularity with audiences on both sides
of the Atlantic. Richard Dyer, in his full-length study of Robeson in Heavenly
Bodies (1986), observes that, ‘His image insisted on his blackness— musically,
in his primary association with Negro folk music, especially spirituals; in the
theatre and films, in the recurrence of Africa as a motif; and in general in the
way his image is so bound up with the notions of racial character, the nature of
black folks, the Negro essence, and so on. Yet he was a star equally popular
with black and white audiences.’ Dyer asks, ‘How did the period permit black
stardom? What were the qualities this black person could be taken to embody,
that could catch on in a society where there had never been a black star of this
magnitude?’ (pp. 67, 69). One answer is that in his performances on stage,
theatre and screen, Robeson was ‘read’ differently by black and white
audiences. ‘Black and white discourses on blackness seem to be valuing the
same things – spontaneity, emotion, naturalness – yet giving them a different
implication’ (ibid., p. 79).
Robeson’s is a complex case, shot through with ambivalences. Dyer identifies
a number of themes through which Robeson came to embody ‘the epitome of
what black people are like’ (ibid., p. 71). His musical talent, sonorous voice,
his intellect, physical presence and stature, coupled with his simplicity,
sincerity, charm and authority allowed him to portray the ‘male heroes of
black culture’ in plays like Toussaint L’Ouverture and films like The Emperor
Jones -but also ‘the stereotypes of the white imagination’ in Show Boat,
Shuffle Along, Voodoo and Sanders of the River (ibid., p. 73) (Figure 4.19).
Robeson himself said that ‘The white man has made a fetish of intellect and
worships the God of thought; the Negro feels rather than thinks, experiences
emotions directly rather than interprets them by roundabout and devious
abstractions, and apprehends the outside
world by means of intuitive perceptions …”
(quoted in Dyer, 1986, p. 76). This sentiment,
embodied in several of his films, gave his
performances a vibrant emotional intensity.
But it also played directly into the black/
white, emotion/intellect, nature/culture
binary oppositions of racial stereotyping.
Something of the same ambivalence can be
detected in relation to other themes, Dyer
argues, like the representation of blackness
FIGURE 4.19 Paul Robeson in Sanders of the
River, 1935.
FIGURE 4.20
Paul Robeson
with Wallace
Ford and Henry
Wilcoxon, at the
Giza pyramids in
Egypt, during the
filming of Jericho,
1937.
255
as ‘folk’ and what he calls ‘atavism’ (for a
definition, see below). The emotional
intensity and ‘authenticity’ of black
performers was supposed to give them a
genuine feel for the ‘folk’ traditions of black
people – ‘folk’, here, signifying spontaneity
and naturalness as opposed to the
‘artificiality’ of high art. Robeson’s singing
epitomized this quality, capturing what was
thought to be the essence of the Negro
spirituals in, for example, the universally
popular and acclaimed song, Old Man River.
He sang it in a deep, sonorous voice which, to
blacks, expressed their long travail and their
hope of freedom, but also, to whites, what they had always heard in spirituals
and Robeson’s voice – ‘sorrowing, melancholy, suffering’ (Dyer, 1986, p. 87).
Robeson gradually altered the words of this song to make it more political – ‘to
bring out and extend its reference to oppression and to alter its meaning from
resignation to struggle’ (ibid., p. 105). The line which, in the stage
performance of Show Boat, went ‘Ah’m tired of livin’ an’ scared of dyin” was
altered in the film to the much more assertive ‘I must keep fightin’ until I’m
dyin” (ibid., p. 107). On the other hand, Robeson sang black folk songs and
spirituals in a ‘pure’ voice and ‘educated’ diction, without any of jazz’s use of
syncopation or delay in phrasing, without any of the ‘dirty’ notes of black
blues, gospel and soul music or the nasal delivery characteristic of ‘folk’ or the
call-and-response structure of African and slave chants.
By ‘atavism’, Dyer means a return to or ‘recovery of qualities that have been
carried in the blood from generation to generation … It suggests raw, violent,
chaotic and “primitive” emotions’ and in the Robeson context, it was closely
associated with Africa and the ‘return’ to ‘what black people were supposed to
be like deep down’ and ‘a guarantee of the authentic wildness within of the
people who had come from there’ (ibid., p. 89). Robeson’s ‘African’ plays and
films (Sanders of the River, Song of Freedom, King Solomon’s Mines, Jericho)
were full of ‘authentic’ African touches, and he researched a great deal into
the background of African culture. ‘In practice, however,’ Dyer observes,
‘these are genuine notes inserted into works produced decidedly within
American and British discourses on Africa’ (ibid., p. 90).
Look, now, at the photograph of Robeson in a version of African dress
(Figure 4.19), taken on the set of Sanders of the River (1935). Now, look at
the second photograph (Figure 4.20) – Robeson with Wallace Ford and
Henry Wilcoxon at the Giza pyramids. What strikes you about these
photographs? Write down briefly anything which strikes you about the
‘meaning’ of these images.
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CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER’
REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES
of the Dust) or John Singleton (Boys ‘n’ the Hood) – to put their own
interpretations on the way blacks figure within ‘the American experience’.
This has broadened the regime of racial representation – the result of a historic
‘struggle around the image’ – a politics of representation – whose strategies we
need to examine more carefully.
READING 8
Now read Richard Dyer’s brief analysis of
the second of these images (Reading B at
the end of this chapter).
Undoubtedly, part of Robeson’s immense
impact lay in his commanding physical
presence. ‘His sheer size is emphasized time
and again, as is the strength presumed to go
with it’ (Dyer, p. 134). One can perhaps judge
the relevance of this to his representation of
blackness from the nude study of Robeson
taken by the photographer, Nicholas Muray,
which, in Dyer’s terms, combines Beauty and
Strength with Passivity and Pathos.
4 Stereotyping as a signifying practice
Before we pursue this argument, however, we need to reflect further on how
this racialized regime of representation actually works. Essentially, this
involves examining more deeply the set of representational practices known
stereotyping as stereotyping. So far, we have considered the essentializing, reductionist
and naturalizing effects of stereotyping. Stereotyping reduces people to a few,
simple, essential characteristics, which are represented as fixed by Nature.
Here, we examine four further aspects: (a) the construction of ‘otherness’ and
exclusion; (b) stereotyping and power; (c) the role of fantasy; and (d)
fetishism.
ACTIVITY 9
What do you think?
Even so outstanding a performer as Paul Robeson, then, could inflect, but
could not entirely escape, the representational regime of racial difference
which had passed into the mainstream cinema from an earlier era. A more
independent representation of black people and black culture in the cinema
would have to await the enormous shifts which accompanied the upheavals of
the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and the ending of legal segregation in
the South, as well as the huge migration of blacks into the cities and urban
centres of the North, which profoundly challenged the ‘relations of
representation’ between racially defined groups in American society.
A second, more ambiguous, ‘revolution’ followed in the 1980s and 1990s,
with the collapse of the ‘integrationist’ dream of the Civil Rights movement,
the expansion of the black ghettos, the growth of the black ‘underclass’, with
its endemic poverty, ill-health and criminalization, and the slide of some
black communities into a culture of guns, drugs and intra-black violence.
This has, however, been accompanied by the growth of an affirmative selfconfidence in, and an insistence on ‘respect’ for, black cultural identity, as
well as a growing ‘black separatism’ – which features nowhere so visibly as in
the massive impact of black music (including ‘black rap’) on popular music
and the visual presence of the music-affiliated ‘street-style’ scene. These
developments have transformed the practices of racial representation, in part
because the question of representation itself has become a critical arena of
contestation and struggle. Black actors agitated for and got a wider variety of
roles in film and television. ‘Race’ came to be acknowledged as one of the
most significant themes of American life and times. In the 1980s and 1990s,
blacks themselves entered the American cinema mainstream as independent
film-makers, able – like Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), Julie Dash (Daughters
257
FIGURE 4.21
Paul Robeson, by
Nicholas Muray.
Stereotyping as a signifying practice is central to the representation of racial
difference. But what is a stereotype? How does it actually work? In his essay
on ‘Stereotyping’, Richard Dyer (1977) makes an important distinction
between typing and stereotyping. He argues that, without the use of types, it
would be difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the world. We
understand the world by referring individual objects, people or events in our
heads to the general classificatory schemes into which — according to our
culture — they fit. Thus we ‘decode’ a flat object on legs on which we place
things as a ‘table’. We may never have seen that kind of ‘table’ before, but we
have a general concept or category of ‘table’ in our heads, into which we ‘fit’
the particular objects we perceive or encounter. In other words, we
understand ‘the particular’ in terms of its ‘type’. We deploy what Alfred
Schutz called typifications. In this sense, ‘typing’ is essential to the
production of meaning (an argument we made earlier in Chapter 1).
Richard Dyer argues that we are always ‘making sense’ of things in terms of
some wider categories. Thus, for example, we come to ‘know’ something
about a person by thinking of the roles which he or she performs: is he/she a
parent, a child, a worker, a lover, boss, or an old age pensioner? We assign
him/her to the membership of different groups, according to class, gender,
age group, nationality, ‘race’, linguistic group, sexual preference and so on.
We order him/her in terms of personality type – is he/she a happy, serious,
depressed, scatter-brained, over-active kind of person? Our picture of who
the person ‘is’ is built up out of the information we accumulate from
positioning him/her within these different orders of typification. In broad
terms, then, ‘a type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and
widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded and
change or “development” is kept to a minimum’ (Dyer, 1977, p. 28).
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REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES
What, then, is the difference between a type and a stereotype”? Stereotypes get
hold of the few ‘simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely
recognized’ characteristics about a person, reduce everything about the person
to those traits, exaggerate and simplify them, and fix them without change or
development to eternity. This is the process we described earlier. So the first
point is – stereotyping reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes
‘difference’.
Secondly, stereotyping deploys a strategy of ‘splitting’. It divides the normal
and the acceptable from the abnormal and the unacceptable. It then excludes
or expels everything which does not fit, which is different. Dyer argues that ‘a
system of social- and stereo-types refers to what is, as it were, within and
beyond the pale of normalcy [i.e. behaviour which is accepted as ‘normal’ in
any culture]. Types are instances which indicate those who live by the rules
of society (social types) and those who the rules are designed to exclude
(stereotypes). For this reason, stereotypes are also more rigid than social
types. … [Boundaries … must be clearly delineated and so stereotypes, one
of the mechanisms of boundary maintenance, are characteristically fixed,
clear-cut, unalterable’ (ibid., p. 29). So, another feature of stereotyping is its
practice of ‘closure’ and exclusion. It symbolically fixes boundaries, and
excludes everything which does not belong.
Stereotyping, in other words, is part of the maintenance of social and
symbolic order. It sets up a symbolic frontier between the ‘normal’ and the
‘deviant’, the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’, the ‘acceptable’ and the
‘unacceptable’, what ‘belongs’ and what does not or is ‘Other’, between
‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, Us and Them. It facilitates the ‘binding’ or bonding
together of all of Us who are ‘normal’ into one ‘imagined community’; and it
sends into symbolic exile all of Them – ‘the Others’ – who are in some way
different – ‘beyond the pale’. Mary Douglas (1966), for example, argued that
whatever is ‘out of place’ is considered as polluted, dangerous, taboo.
Negative feelings cluster around it. It must be symbolically excluded if the
‘purity’ of the culture is to be restored. The feminist theorist, Julia Kristeva,
calls such expelled or excluded groups, ‘abjected’ (from the Latin meaning,
literally, ‘thrown out’) (Kristeva, 1982).
The third point is that stereotyping tends to occur where there are gross
inequalities of power. Power is usually directed against the subordinate or
excluded group. One aspect of this power, according to Dyer, is
ethnocentrism — ‘the application of the norms of one’s own culture to that of
others’ (Brown, 1965, p. 183). Again, remember Derrida’s argument that,
between binary oppositions like Us/Them, ‘we are not dealing with …
peaceful coexistence … but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two
terms governs … the other or has the upper hand” (1972, p. 41).
CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE Of THE ‘OTHbR1
259
In short, stereotyping is what Foucault called a ‘power/knowledge’ sort of
game. It classifies people according to a norm and constructs the excluded as
‘other’. Interestingly, it is also what Gramsci would have called an aspect of
the struggle for hegemony. As Dyer observes, The establishment of normalcy
(i.e. what is accepted as ‘normal’) through social- and stereo-types is one
aspect of the habit of ruling groups … to attempt to fashion the whole of
society according to their own world view, value system, sensibility and
ideology. So right is this world view for the ruling groups that they make it
appear (as it does appear to them) as ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ – and for
everyone – and, in so far as they succeed, they establish their hegemony’
(Dyer, 1977, p. 30). Hegemony is a form of power based on leadership by a
group in many fields of activity at once, so that its ascendancy commands
widespread consent and appears natural and inevitable.
4.1 Representation, difference and power
Within stereotyping, then, we have established a connection between
representation, difference and power. However, we need to probe the nature
of this power more fully. We often think of power in terms of direct physical
coercion or constraint. However, we have also spoken, for example, of power
in representation; power to mark, assign and classify; of symbolic power; of
ritualized expulsion. Power, it seems, has to be understood here, not only in
terms of economic exploitation and physical coercion, but also in broader
cultural or symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or
something in a certain way – within a certain ‘regime of representation’. It
includes the exercise of symbolic power through representational practices.
Stereotyping is a key element in this exercise of symbolic violence.
In his study of how Europe constructed a stereotypical image of’the Orient’,
Edward Said (1978) argues that, far from simply reflecting what the countries
of the Near East were actually like, ‘Orientalism’ was the discourse ‘by which
European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient
politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and
imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’. Within the framework
of western hegemony over the Orient, he says, there emerged a new object of
knowledge – ‘a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display
in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical
illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial and historical
theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and
sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personalities,
national or religious character’ (pp. 7-8). This form of power is closely
connected with knowledge, or with the practices of what Foucault called
‘power/knowledge’.
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THE SPEC I’ACL.E OF THE ‘OTHER1
261
of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism its durability and
its strength … Orientalism is never far from … the idea of Europe, a
collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’
non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component
in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic
both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior
one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures.
There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient,
themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness,
usually overriding the possibility that a more independent thinker …
may have had different views on the matter.
(Said, 1978, p. 7)
FIGURE 4.22
Edwin Long, The Babylonion Marriage Market, 1882.
ACTIVITY 10
For an example of Orientalism in visual representation, look at the
reproduction of a very popular painting, The Babylonian Marriage
Market by Edwin Long (Figure 4.22). Not only does the image produce a
certain way of knowing the Orient – as ‘the mysterious, exotic and
eroticized Orient’; but also, the women who are being ‘sold’ into marriage
are arranged, right to left, in ascending order of ‘whiteness’. The final
figure approximates most closely to the western ideal, the norm; her clear
complexion accentuated by the light reflected on her face from a mirror.
Said’s discussion of Orientalism closely parallels Foucault’s power/
knowledge argument: a discourse produces, through different practices of
representation (scholarship, exhibition, literature, painting, etc.), a form of
racialized knowledge of the Other (Orientalism) deeply implicated in the
operations of power (imperialism).
Interestingly, however, Said goes on to define ‘power’ in ways which
emphasize the similarities between Foucault and Gramsci’s idea of hegemony.
In any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms predominate
over others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has
identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding
of cultural life in the industrial West. It is hegemony, or rather the result
You should also recall here our earlier discussion in Chapter 1, about
introducing power into questions of representation. Power, we recognized
there, always operates in conditions of unequal relations. Gramsci, of course,
would have stressed ‘between classes’, whereas Foucault always refused to
identify any specific subject or subject-group as the source of power, which,
he said, operates at a local, tactical level. These are important differences
between these two theorists of power.
However, there are also some important similarities. For Gramsci, as for
Foucault, power also involves knowledge, representation, ideas, cultural
leadership and authority, as well as economic constraint and physical
coercion. Both would have agreed that power cannot be captured by thinking
exclusively in terms of force or coercion: power also seduces, solicits,
induces, wins consent. It cannot be thought of in terms of one group having a
monopoly of power, simply radiating power downwards on a subordinate
group by an exercise of simple domination from above. It includes the
dominant and the dominated within its circuits. As Homi Bhabha has
remarked, apropos Said, ‘it is difficult to conceive … subjectification as a
placing within Orientalist or colonial discourse for the dominated subject
without the dominant being strategically placed within it too’ (Bhabha,
1986a, p. 158). Power not only constrains and prevents: it is also productive.
It produces new discourses, new kinds of knowledge (i.e. Orientalism), new
objects of knowledge (the Orient), it shapes new practices (colonization) and
institutions (colonial government). It operates at a micro-level — Foucault’s
‘micro-physics of power’ – as well as in terms of wider strategies. And, for
both theorists, power is to be found everywhere. As Foucault insists, power
circulates.
The circularity of power is especially important in the context of
representation. The argument is that everyone — the powerful and the
powerless – is caught up, though not on equal terms, in power’s circulation.
No one – neither its apparent victims nor its agents – can stand wholly
outside its field of operation (think, here, of the Paul Robeson example).
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REPRESENTATION; CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES
4.2 Power and fantasy
A good example of this ‘circularity’ of power relates to how black masculinity
is represented within a racialized regime of representation. Kobena Mercer
and Isaac Julien (1994) argue that the representation of black masculinity ‘has
been forged in and through the histories of slavery, colonialism and
imperialism’.
As sociologists like Robert Staples (1982) have argued, a central strand of
the ‘racial’ power exercised by the white male slave master was the
denial of certain masculine attributes to black male slaves, such as
authority, familial responsibility and the ownership of property. Through
such collective, historical experiences black men have adopted certain
patriarchal values such as physical strength, sexual prowess and being in
control as a means of survival against the repressive and violent system
of subordination to which they have been subjected.
The incorporation of a code of ‘macho’ behaviour is thus intelligible as a
means of recuperating some degree of power over the condition of
powerlessness and dependency in relation to the white master subject. …
The prevailing stereotype (in contemporary Britain) projects an image of
black male youth as ‘mugger’ or ‘rioter’ … But this regime of
representation is reproduced and maintained in hegemony because black
men have had to resort to ‘toughness’ as a defensive response to the prior
aggression and violence that characterizes the way black communities
are policed … This cycle between reality and representation makes the
ideological fictions of racism empirically ‘true’ — or rather, there is a
struggle over the definition, understanding and construction of meanings
around black masculinity within the dominant regime of truth.
(Mercer and Julien, 1994, pp. 137-8)
During slavery, the white slave master often exercised his authority over the
black male slave, by depriving him of all the attributes of responsibility,
paternal and familial authority, treating him as a child. This ‘infantilization’
of difference is a common representational strategy for both men and women.
(Women athletes are still widely referred to as ‘girls’. And it is only recently
that many Southern US whites have ceased referring to grown black men as
‘Boy!’, while the practice still lingers in South Africa.) Infantilization can
also be understood as a way of symbolically ‘castrating’ the black man (i.e.
depriving him of his ‘masculinity’); and, as we have seen, whites often
fantasized about the excessive sexual appetites and prowess of black men —
as they did about the lascivious, over-sexed character of black women —
which they both feared and secretly envied. Alleged rape was the principal
‘justification’ advanced for the lynching of black men in the Southern states
until the Civil Rights Movement (Jordan, 1968). As Mercer observes, The
primal fantasy of the big black penis projects the fear of a threat not only to
white womanhood, but to civilization itself, as the anxiety of miscegenation,
eugenic pollution and racial degeneration is acted out through white male
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THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER’
263
rituals of racial aggression – the historical lynching of black men in the
United States routinely involved the literal castration of the Other’s “strange
fruit”‘ (1994a, p. 185).
The outcomes were often violent. Yet the example also brings out the
circularity of power and the ambivalence — the double-sided nature — of
representation and stereotyping. For, as Staples, Mercer and Julien remind
us, black men sometimes responded to this infantilization by adopting a sort
of caricature-in-reverse of the hyper-masculinity and super-sexuality with
which they had been stereotyped. Treated as ‘childish’, some blacks in
reaction adopted a ‘macho’, aggressive—masculine style. But this only served
to confirm the fantasy amongst whites of their ungovernable and excessive
sexual nature (see Wallace, 1979). Thus, ‘victims’ can be trapped by the
stereotype, unconsciously confirming it by the very terms in which they try
to oppose and resist it.
This may seem paradoxical. But it does have its own ‘logic’. This logic
depends on representation working at two different levels at the same time: a
conscious and overt level, and an unconscious or suppressed level. The
former often serves as a displaced ‘cover’ for the latter. The conscious
attitude amongst whites – that ‘Blacks are not proper men, they are just
simple children’ — may be a ‘cover’, or a cover-up, for a deeper, more
troubling fantasy – that ‘Blacks are really super-men, better endowed than
whites, and sexually insatiable’. It would be improper and ‘racist’ to express
the latter sentiment openly; but the fantasy is present, and secretly
subscribed to by many, all the same. Thus when blacks act ‘macho’, they
seem to challenge the stereotype (that they are only children) — but in the
process, they confirm the fantasy which lies behind or is the ‘deep structure’
of the stereotype (that they are aggressive, over-sexed and over-endowed).
The problem is that blacks are trapped by the binary structure of the
stereotype, which is split between two extreme opposites – and are obliged to
shuttle endlessly between them, sometimes being represented as both of them
at the same time. Thus blacks are both ‘childlike’ and ‘oversexed’, just as
black youth are ‘Sambo simpletons’ and/or ‘wily, dangerous savages’; and
older men both ‘barbarians’ and/or ‘noble savages’ — Uncle Toms.
The important point is that stereotypes refer as much to what is imagined in
fantasy as to what is perceived as ‘real’. And, what is visually produced, by
the practices of representation, is only half the story. The other half – the
deeper meaning – lies in what is not being said, but is being fantasized, what
is implied but cannot be shown.
So far, we have been arguing that ‘stereotyping’ has its own poetics — its own
ways of working – and its politics – the ways in which it is invested with
power. We have also argued that this is a particular type of power — a
hegemonic and discursive form of power, which operates as much through
culture, the production of knowledge, imagery and representation, as through
other means. Moreover, it is circular, it implicates the ‘subjects’ of power as
well as those who are ‘subjected to it’. But the introduction of the sexual
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REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICES
CHAPTER 4 THE SPECTACLE OF THE ‘OTHER’
spoke Dutch and learned some English, and, during a court case in Chancery,
taken out to protect her from exploitation, declared herself ‘under no restraint’
and ‘happy to be in England’. She then reappeared in Paris where she had an
amazing public impact, until her fatal illness from smallpox in 1815.
dimension takes us to another aspect of ‘stereotyping’: namely, its basis in
fantasy and projection – and its effects of splitting and ambivalence.
In ‘Orientalism’, Said remarked that the ‘general idea about who or what was
an “Oriental”‘ emerged according to ‘a detailed logic governed’ – he insisted ‘not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions,
investments and projections’ (1978, p. 8). But where does this battery of
‘desires, repressions, investments and projections’ come from? What role does
fantasy play in the practices and strategies of racialized representation? If the
fantasies which lie behind racialized representations cannot be shown or
allowed to ‘speak’, how do they find expression? How are they ‘represented’?
This points us in the direction of the representational practice known as
fetishism.
4.3 Fetishism and disavowaI
Let us explore these questions of fantasy and fetishism, summing up the
argument about representation and stereotyping, through a concrete example.
READING C
Read first the short edited extract on The
deep structure of stereotypes’ from
Difference and Pathologyby Sander
Oilman (1985), Reading C at the end of this
chapter.
Make sure you understand why, according
to Gilman, stereotyping always involves
what he calls (a) the splitting of the ‘good’
and ‘bad’ object; and (b) the projection of
anxiety on to the Other.
In a later essay, Gilman refers to the ‘case’ of
the African woman, Saartje (or Sarah)
Baartman, known as ‘The Hottentot Venus’,
who was brought to England in 1819 by a Boer
farmer from the Cape region of South Africa
and a doctor on an African ship, and regularly
exhibited over five years in London and Paris
(Figure 4.23). In her early ‘performances’, she
was produced on a raised stage like a wild
beast, came and went from her cage when
ordered, ‘more like a bear in a chain than a
human being’ (quoted from The Times, 26
November 1810, in Lindfors, unpublished
paper). She created a considerable public stir.
She was subsequently baptized in Manchester,
married an African and had two children,
265
Venus’ – Saartje
Baartman.
Both in London and Paris, she became famous in two quite different circles:
amongst the general public as a popular ‘spectacle’, commemorated in
ballads, cartoons, illustrations, in melodramas and newspaper reports; and
amongst the naturalists and ethnologists, who measured, observed, drew,
wrote learned treatises about, modelled, made waxen moulds and plaster
casts, and scrutinized every detail, of her anatomy, dead and alive (Figure
4.24). What attracted both audiences to her was not only her size (she was a
diminutive four feet six inches tall) but her steatopygia – her protruding
buttocks, a feature of Hottentot anatomy – and what was described as her
‘Hottentot apron’, an enlargement of the labia ’caused by the manipulation of
the genitalia and considered beautiful by the Hottentots and Bushmen’
(Gilman, 1985, p. 85). As someone crudely remarked, ‘she could be said to
carry her fortune behind her, for London may never before have seen such a
“heavy-arsed heathen'” (quoted in Lindfors, ibid., p. 2).
I want to pick out several points from The
Hottentot Venus’ example in relation to
questions of stereotyping, fantasy and
fetishism.
First, note the preoccupation – one could say
the obsession – with marking ‘difference’.
Saartje Baartman became the embodiment of
‘difference’. What’s more, her difference was
‘pathologized’: represented as a pathological
form of ‘otherness’. Symbolically, she did not
fit the ethnocentric norm which was applied
to European women and, falling outside a
western classificatory system of what
‘women’ are like, she had to be constructed
as ‘Other’.
Next, observe her reduction to Nature, the
signifier of which was her body. Her body
was ‘read’, like a text, for the living evidence
– the proof, the Truth – which it provided of
her absolute ‘otherness’ and therefore of an
irreversible difference between the ‘races’.
FIGURE 4.24 … ‘every detail of her anatomy’:
Sexual anomalies in women, from Cesare
Lombroso and Guillaume Ferraro, La donna
deliquente: la prostrtuta e la donna normals
(Turin, L Roux, 1893).
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REPRESENT…