Oriental(ized) Portuguese-Anglophone litteratura, culture, and colonial stereotypes (original) (raw)
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Racism, one of the dominant features of the world, is often treated as a permanent phenomenon in human relations. Entwined with the belief that racial antipathy and ethnocentrism are primordial is the assumption that racism is a natural, characteristically European legacy. This perspective ignores the mass of evidence that demonstrates that racism has a definite origin in a particular historical period, linked to very specific circumstances and conditions. Discovering the origins of racism may not account for its persistence. Understanding its origins casts an essential light not only on the functioning of racism but on the nature of governance.
A theory of the origins of non-racist thinking
A very peculiar thin happened. The way to overcome what by then appeared to be overzealous proclamation of European superiority was not for Europeans to concede their weaknesses, but it was for them to presuppose instead that actually others were equally ‘superior’ to them. Europeans began a determined process of reading their ‘superior’ way of life into almost everyone else’s culture. That is, they began to refuse point blank, as a matter of principle, that other people, non-Europeans, could be anything but (effectively) European / Protestant in their aptitudes and capabilities. Such were the historical origins of that contemporary ongoing, in the face if necessary of all evidence, determination to assume that everyone the world over should, can, and does behave like a good western Protestant, which is the foundation for countering racist discrimination. In effect, for the West that now wants to see Christianity as just one of a list of religious options, i.e. that wants to prove to all that any religions can produce the same ‘good’ as can Christianity, evidence in favour of any racism is an unwanted indirect proclamation that Jesus is Lord.
Classical Review, 2011
In 2005 B. Isaac published a widely-reviewed study of racism in antiquity. The fi rst two chapters of the present volume are devoted to answering his critics and to recapitulating his basic argument. Despite his trenchant tone, Isaac's conclusion is curiously anodyne: 'I tend to say that it is not very signifi cant whether we speak of proto-racism or racism in the classical world, as long as we recognize the phenomenon for what it is: a pattern of recurring efforts to ascribe to groups of human beings common characteristics on seemingly logical grounds and presumed scientifi c grounds from the late fi fth century BC to late antiquity' (p. 56). There are two substantive claims lurking here. The fi rst is that racist thought is not demonstrable before the late fi fth century, and that the European version of it, more systematic and deadly than any other, is a direct outgrowth of its classical antecedents. This fi rst claim involves, as I argued in a review of the earlier volume, a misreading of both Aeschylus and Herodotus, while the second is bolstered by an assertion that is truly mind-boggling: 'It is generally accepted that Greek civilization was the fi rst to raise abstract, systematic thought to a level that we now recognize as approaching our own' (p. 9, with a footnote referencing Frankfort, 1946). Isaac's shadow looms over the ensuing chapters. H.A. Shapiro's contribution, 'The Invention of Persia in Classical Athens', for example, endorses Isaac's fi ndings and asserts that the Persians of Classical Athenian art are 'invented' and that 'there is nothing in fi fth-century Greek attitudes towards Persia that can be termed even "proto-racism"' (p. 58). Accordingly, in a supreme instance of missing the forest for the trees, Shapiro classifi es the infamous Eurymedon oinochoe as a member of a group of vases that 'poke gentle fun at the humiliated Persian empire in ways that anticipate the comic stereotyping of Aristophanes' (p. 66). Yet Shapiro's analysis of this example of 'sympotic humour', for all its erudition, misses a crude simplicity that is full-blown racism. The message of the vase, depicting a naked Greek holding his erect penis as he advances towards a terrifi ed Persian conveniently bent over is, as a recent blogger put it succinctly, 'We can bugger the Persians because they are softies and begging for it'. 1 D. Goldenberg's essay, 'Racism, Color Symbolism, and Color Prejudice', addresses the special position in western thought of blackness. The essay refl ects a semiotic approach in which black is treated as a signifi er, whose signifi cance varies in different contexts, according to cultural associations with death, sin and so forth. Goldenberg argues convincingly that racism against Blacks was qualitatively different from other types of racism and suggests that this difference may account for a persistence of colour-based racism unlike other forms of racism. As he neatly notes, 'Stereotype disappears with familiarity but skin colour does not' (p. 106). D. Kimber Buell explores the potential racism of early Christian universalism. This she sees as Christianity's mixed legacy: on the one hand anyone can become fully human by converting to Christianity; on the other, anyone who chooses not to be saved deserves whatever she gets. This dilemma Buell labels as 'compulsory
In the heroic age of the "Discovery of Man and the World", to use Jacob Burckhardt's capitalized slogan, Europeans were almost incessantly debating the question of attitudes towards hitherto unfamiliar peoples encountered in other continents. The chapters in the last section of this volume presented some of the reactions and consequences of facing, conquering or enslaving the inhabitants of Asia, Africa and America. These encounters were such huge dramas, involving so many millions of human beings and producing such large amounts of records, that they could not but absorb the full attention of scholars searching for the foundations of modern categorizations and classifications of human "races". In addition, transformations and upheavals in Europe itself were causing the reformulation of attitudes and policies towards those ethnic or religious minorities that had resided in Europe for many centuries.
The Racial Stereotype, Colonial Discourse, Fetishism, and Racism
The Psychoanalytic Review, 2005
This paper draws on the work of Homi Bhabha to mount an explanation for a facet of (post)colonial racism, the 'paradox of otherness' as exemplified in the racial stereotype. The paradox in question operates at the levels of discourse and identification alike. As a mode of discourse the stereotype functions to exaggerate difference of the other, whilst nevertheless attempting to produce them as a stable, fully knowable object. As mode of identification, the stereotype operates a series of mutually exclusive categories differentiating self and other which unintentionally nevertheless relies upon a grid of samenesses. These two paradoxes follow a similar movement: an oscillation, at the level of discourse, between attempts to generate and contain anxiety, a wavering, at the level of identification, between radical difference and prospective likeness. Bhabha provides a structural and functional analogue with which to account for this double movement of otherness: Freud's model of fetishism. This is an analogue that both enables us to foreground the operations of displacement and condensation in racist stereotyping, and to draw a series of conclusions about the effective functioning of discursive and affective economies of racism.