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Week 7: Post-Colonialism, May 11, 2009
Homi Bhaba, “The Other Question: HKB Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial
Discourse” (Summary by Maria Quintana)
In this article, Bhaba constructs a theory of colonial discourse, which depends on
fixity in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity is a sign of cultural, historical,
and racial difference within this discourse; its major discursive strategy is the stereotype.
The stereotype functions through ambivalence, which gives it its power. However, the
function of ambivalence remains to be charted. Bhaba asks, how does ambivalence
function? How does one intervene? He argues that we should not focus on images as
positive or negative; we should look at processes of subjectification made possible
through stereotypical discourse, which is a project within colonialism. This is because
we can’t fight it with normalizing judgments; the only way to fight the stereotype is by
displacing it through positions of power and resistance.
Bhaba argues that in order to understand colonial power, it is crucial to construct
its regime of truth through representation. “The productive ambivalence of the object of
colonial discourse is that ‘otherness’ which is at once an object of desire and derision, an
articulation of difference contained within “the fantasy of origin and identity.” Thus,
what needs to be questioned, is the mode of representation of otherness. He argues that
we must pay attention to the sites that construct national difference in their deployment of
‘foreigness’ or ‘mixedness’ as corrupting. Stereotypes do not offer a secure point of
identification-they are always changing. However, there is no knowledge that is not
codified.
The minimum specification for colonial discourse is an apparatus that turns by
creating space for people through the production of knowledges in terms of which
surveillance is exercised and a complex form of pleasure/unpleasure is incited. The
objective? To construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of
racial origins, which produces the colonized as a fixed reality, which is at once an ‘other’
and yet entirely knowable. IN order to intervene, Said wrote Orientalism ; however, his
reluctance to engage with ambivalence produced a binarism within his argument that
allows for a congruent system of representations. Similarly, Said suggests that colonial
power and discourse is possessed entirely by the colonizer, which is an historical
simplification.
Bhaba then goes on to read the racial stereotype of colonial discourse in terms of
fetishism. The stereotype is the scene of fantasy—the desire for an originality, which is
threatened by the differences of race, color, and culture. The colonial subject is a misfit—
that threatens to split the soul and undifferentiated skin of the ego. Fanon despairs:
“wherever he goes, the negro remains a negro—his race becomes the ineradicable sign of
negative difference in colonial discourses. For the stereotype impedes the circulation and
articulation of the signifier of ‘race’ as anything other than its fixity as racism.”(p. 28)
Bhabha then takes up the problem of discrimination as the political effect of colonial
discourse and relates it to the question of race and skin. Here, Freud’s theory of the fetish
is interlaced throughout. Bhaba locates the construction of the signifier of skin/race in
those regimes of visibility and discursivity—fetishistic and imaginary, within which
stereotypes are located. As Fanon argues, whereas repression banishes its object into the
unconscious, discrimination must constantly invite its representations into consciousness,
reinforcing the crucial recognition of difference and thus authorizing discrimination.
Other Notes:
*The four-part strategy of the stereotype: a play between the metaphoric-narcissistic and
metonymic-aggressive. Recognizes the prefiguring of desire as a conflictual disturbing
force. In the identification of the imaginary there is always the alienating other or mirror
which returns its image to the subject.
*The exercise of the ‘official knowledge’ of colonialism—pseudo-scientific, typological,
legal-administrative, eugenicist—are implicated at the point of their production of
meaning and power with the fantasy that dramatizes the desire for a pure origin.
*The problem of origin as the problematic of racist, stereotypical knowledge is a complex
one. Stereotyping is not the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of
discriminatory practices; it is a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection,
metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, over-determination, guilt, and
aggressivity (p. 34).
* denying the colonized the capacities of self-government, independence, and western
modes of civility, lends authority to the official version and mission of colonial power.
Such a denial is the clearly voiced demand of colonial discourse as the legitimation of a
form of rule that is facilitated by racist fetish (p. 25).
*Colonialism is visible (from Fanon); it is a form of governmentality in which the
ideological space functions collaboratively with the political and economic. Such
visibility of the institutions and apparatuses of power is possible because the exercise of
colonial power makes their relationship obscure and produces them as fetishes.
*Governmentality=The seat of government is always elsewhere, alien and separate by the
distance upon which surveillance depends for its strategies of objectification,
normalization and discipline.-35
Questions
How does colonialist discourse work? Why does a colonial power need a colonialist
discourse?
What are the anti-colonialist’s objectives?
How do we go about politicizing the means of representation?
What does the term “post-colonial” signify?
Contemporary Post-Colonial Literature in English:
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/index.html
Post-Colonialism= it is fundamentally the product of over a century of “third world”
political activism that has been engaged in rethinking as well as contesting the ideologies
of western dominance.