Paradoxes of the Other: (post)colonial Racism, Racial Difference, Stereotype-as-fetish

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. RADICAL DIFFERENCE. In a historical overview of some of the first Western writing to be recorded in Southern Africa, novelist J M Coetzee makes reference to a series of disturbing depictions of racial otherness. Take for example the following description of the Khoi-San as published in Amsterdam in 1652: “The local natives have everything in common with the dumb cattle, barring their human nature ... [They] are handicapped in their speech, clucking like turkey-cocks ... Their food consists of herbs, cattle, wild animals and fish. The animals are eaten together with their internal organs. Having been shaken out a little, the intestines are not washed, but as soon as the animal has been slaughtered or discovered, these are eaten raw, skin and all ... A number of them will sleep together in the veldt, making no difference between men and women ... They all smell fiercely, as can be noted at a distance of more than twelve feet against the wind, and they also give the appearance of never having washed” (Hondius, cited in Coetzee, 1988:12).