Wk 2 "Hall" Representation and Racial Stereotypes

Representation

The Division Within Subjectivity
  • The split within subjectivity can never be fully healed, according to some.
  • Some see this split as a primary source of neurosis in adults.
  • Psychic problems arise from:
    • Splitting between 'good' and 'bad' parts of the self.
    • Being pursued internally by 'bad' aspects taken into oneself.
    • Projecting 'bad' feelings onto others.
Frantz Fanon and Psychoanalytic Theory
  • Frantz Fanon used psychoanalytic theory to explain racism.
  • He argued that racial stereotyping and violence arise from the white 'Other' refusing to give recognition 'from the place of the other' to the black person.
Debates About 'Difference' and the 'Other'
  • These debates are introduced to analyze racial representation.
  • It is not necessary to choose one explanation over others; they are not mutually exclusive.
  • They refer to linguistic, social, cultural, and psychic levels of analysis.
  • Two key points:
    • 'Difference' and 'otherness' play an increasingly significant role across disciplines.
    • 'Difference' is ambivalent, both positive and negative.
Ambivalent Character of 'Difference'
  • Necessary for:
    • Production of meaning.
    • Formation of language and culture.
    • Social identities.
    • Subjective sense of self as a sexed subject.
  • Threatening, a site of:
    • Danger.
    • Negative feelings.
    • Splitting, hostility, aggression towards the 'Other'.
  • The ambivalent character of 'difference' and its divided legacy should always be borne in mind.

RACIALIZING THE ‘OTHER’

Repertoires of Representation
  • Examples of representational practices used to mark racial difference and signify the racialized 'Other' in western popular culture will be explored.
  • The formation of the archive and its typical figures and practices will be covered.
Major Moments of Encounter
  • Three major moments when the 'West' encountered black people, giving rise to popular representations based on racial difference:
    • Sixteenth-century contact between European traders and West African kingdoms (source of black slaves for three centuries).
    • European colonization of Africa and the 'scramble' for colonial territory during 'high Imperialism'.
    • Post-Second World War migrations from the 'Third World' into Europe and North America.
Shaping of Western Ideas
  • Western ideas about 'race' and images of racial difference were profoundly shaped by these encounters.

The Spectacle of the 'Other'

Commodity Racism: Empire and the Domestic World
  • Images of racial difference from the imperial encounter flooded British popular culture in the late nineteenth century.
  • In the Middle Ages, the European image of Africa was ambiguous but often positive.
  • Africans were later declared descendants of Ham, cursed in the Bible.
  • Identified with Nature, symbolizing 'the primitive' in contrast to 'the civilized'.
  • The Enlightenment ranked societies, viewing Africa as the parent of monstrosities in Nature.
  • Africa was regarded as historically abandoned, inhabited by cannibals and witch doctors.
Popular Representations
  • Exploration and colonization of Africa produced an explosion of popular representations.
  • Imperial images and themes spread in Britain through commodity advertising.
  • The imperial project was given visual form in a popular medium, linking Empire and the domestic imagination.
Racializing Advertisements
  • Victorian middle-class homes displayed imperial spectacle.
  • Colonies, particularly Africa, became a theatre for exhibiting Victorian domesticity and gender reinvention.
  • Advertising provided an 'imaginary way of relating to the real world' of commodity production.
  • Mass commodity production imagery entered the working classes via advertising.
  • Commodities became linked to Empire, with the search for markets and raw materials abroad.
Connections Forged
  • Two-way traffic forged connections between imperialism and the domestic sphere, public and private.
  • Commodities and English domestic life images flowed to the colonies.
  • Raw materials and images of 'the civilizing mission' came into the home.
Henry Stanley's Exploits
  • Henry Stanley, the imperial adventurer, traced Livingstone in Central Africa in 1871.
  • He founded the Congo Free State and tried to annex Uganda.
  • He believed commodities would make 'civilization' in Africa inevitable.
  • He named his native bearers after branded goods (Bryant and May, Remington, etc.).
The Role of Advertising
  • Imperial heroes' exploits were immortalized on various items.
  • Colonial conquest images were stamped on everyday objects.
  • Advertising reached a large and differentiated mass of the populace.
Symbolism of Soap
  • Soap symbolized the 'racializing' of the domestic world and 'domestication' of the colonial world.
  • It acquired the quality of a fetish object, capable of washing black skin white.
  • It cleaned industrial slums and kept the imperial body clean in racially polluted zones.
  • The domestic labor of women was often silently erased.
Pears' Soap Advertisements
  • Pears' Soap advertisements promoted the virtues of cleanliness as the first step toward lightening 'The White Man's Burden'.
  • It was seen as a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth.
Plantation Slavery and its Aftermath
  • In the USA, a fully-fledged racialized ideology appeared when slavery was challenged by Abolitionists.
  • Beliefs about racial difference included:
    • Historical case against the black man based on failure to develop a civilized life in Africa.
    • Africa portrayed as a scene of savagery, cannibalism, devil worship.
    • Biological arguments based on physiological differences explaining inferiority.
    • Fears of miscegenation leading to the degeneracy of the race.
Racialized Discourse
  • Structured by binary oppositions:
    • 'Civilization' (white) vs. 'savagery' (black).
    • Biological characteristics of 'black' and 'white' races signified absolute difference.
Distinctions
  • White 'races' linked to intellectual development, reason, developed institutions, and 'civilized restraint'.
  • Black 'races' linked to instinct, emotion, lack of 'civilized refinement', custom, and lack of civil institutions.
  • Polarized opposition between racial ‘purity' and 'pollution' from intermarriage.
Views on the Negro
  • The Negro was believed to find happiness only under a white master.
  • Essential characteristics were fixed in Nature.
  • Slave revolts highlighted the instability of the Negro character.
  • Slaves remained savage brutes by nature, with buried passions.
  • This view was justified with scientific racism and the theory of 'polygenesis'.
Culture/Nature Distinction
  • Among whites, 'Culture' was opposed to ‘Nature'.
  • Among blacks, 'Culture' coincided with 'Nature'.
  • Whites developed 'Culture' to subdue ‘Nature', while for blacks, they were interchangeable.
Anthropology and Ethnology
  • These disciplines provided scientific evidence for the view that race and culture were connected.
  • Socio-cultural differences were regarded as dependent on hereditary characteristics.
  • The racialized body became a totemic object, with visibility articulating nature and culture.
Racialized Body
  • The racialized body and its meanings had resonance in popular representations of difference.
  • Visual discourse and the production of racialized knowledge were connected.
  • The body provided 'incontrovertible evidence' for naturalizing racial difference.
  • Representation of 'difference' through the body became the site for producing and circulating racialized knowledge.
Signifying Racial 'Difference'
  • Popular representations during slavery clustered around two themes:
    • Subordinate status and ‘innate laziness’ of blacks.
    • ‘Primitivism’, simplicity, and lack of culture making them genetically incapable of 'civilized' refinements.
Imitation and Parody
  • Whites were amused by slaves imitating white customs.
  • Slaves parodied their masters' behavior, laughing at white folks behind their backs (signifying).
  • Signifying is now recognized as part of the black vernacular literary tradition.
Naturalization of Difference
  • Black cultures were reduced to Nature, naturalizing 'difference'.
  • If differences are 'cultural', they can change; if 'natural', they're permanent.
  • 'Naturalization' is a strategy to fix 'difference' and halt the 'slide' of meaning.
Representations of Daily Life Under Slavery
  • Shown as natural and requiring no comment.
  • Images included whites sitting, slaves standing; white women riding, slaves shading them; overseers inspecting slave women; punishment of runaway slaves.
  • These images are a form of ritualized degradation.
Stereotypical Sentimentalized Representations
  • Included 'noble savages' and 'debased servants'.
  • Examples: 'good' Christian black slave (Uncle Tom) and devoted domestic slave (Mammy).
Ambiguous Middle-Ground
  • 'Happy natives' - black entertainers, minstrels, banjo-players.
  • 'Tricksters' - admired for avoiding hard work and tall tales (Uncle Remus).
Interchangeability
  • For blacks, 'primitivism' (Culture) and 'blackness' (Nature) became interchangeable.
  • Biology was their 'destiny'.
  • Blacks were reduced to their essence: laziness, fidelity, trickery, childishness.
  • Nothing else existed but servitude, Christian forbearing, or fidelity.
Stereotypes
  • 'Stereotyped' means reduced to a few essentials, fixed in Nature, simplified.
  • Black stereotyping was common, with cartoonists creating a gallery of 'black types' with simple strokes.
  • Reduced to physical differences: thick lips, fuzzy hair.
  • Examples: Golliwog, Little Black Sambo, black waiters, Aunt Jemima.

STAGING RACIAL ‘DIFFERENCE’: ‘AND THE MELODY LINGERED ON …’

Persistence of Racial Stereotypes
  • Traces of racial stereotypes have persisted into the late twentieth century.
  • These stereotypes have always been contested.
  • The anti-slavery movement circulated alternative imagery of black-white relations.
Abolitionist Imagery
  • Abolitionists emphasized common humanity, not difference.
  • Slogan: 'Are you not a man and brother? Are you not a woman and a sister?'
  • Anniversary coins represented this shift, but black people were still seen as childish and dependent.
  • Represented as supplicants for freedom or grateful for being freed, often kneeling to benefactors.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
  • Written to appeal to anti-slavery opinion.
  • Blacks were seen as more fitted than whites for the 'highest form of the peculiarly Christian life'.
  • Stereotypes of savagery were countered with stereotypes of eternal goodness.
  • The imagery was modified, but sentimentalized stereotyping remained.