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HOMI BHABHA "THE OTHER QUESTION . . . THE STEREOTYPE AND COLONIAL DISCOURSE"

(1983)

Bhabha, Homi. "The Other Question . . . Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype andColonial Discourse." Screen 24.6 (1983): 18-36.

Bhabha begins by contending that colonial discourse depends on the "concept of ‘fixity’ in theideological construction of otherness" (18). This fixity is the "sign of cultural/historical/racialdifference" (18). Its major discursive strategy is the stereotype which Bhabha defines as a"form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ alreadyknown, and something that must be anxiously repeated" (18). The essential ‘duplicity’ of theAsian or the ‘sexual licence’ of the African seemingly needs no proof but in fact cannot beproved. It is this ambivalence that is integral to the stereotypical structure of colonialdiscourse and ensures the stereotype's "repeatability in changing historical and discursiveconjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalisation; produces that effectof probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess ofwhat can be empirically proved or logically construed" (18).

Bhabha wants to shift emphasis from the identification of images as positive ornegative (which implies a "prior political normativity" [19]) to the "processes ofsubjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse" (18). The goalis to displace the stereotype "by engaging with its effectivity, with the repertoire of positionsof power and resistance, domination and dependence” (19) that constructs the colonial subject(both coloniser and colonised). Bhabha does not want to deconstruct colonial discourse toreveal its ideological misrepresentations or repressions and thus to "subject its representationsto a normalising judgement" (19). He thinks that it is essential to "construct its regime of‘truth’" (19) in order to understand the "productivity of colonial power" (19). He wants tounderstand the "productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse – that ‘otherness’which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained withinthe fantasy of origin and identity" (19) in order to reveal the boundaries of colonial discoursein order to transgress them.

Bhabha is interested in the "construction of the colonial subject in discourse and theexercise of colonial power through discourse" (19) and, to this end, bases his project on the"articulation of forms of difference – racial and sexual" (19) precisely because the "body isalways simultaneously inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economyof discourse, domination and power" (19). Racial and sexual epithets "come to be seen asmodes of differentiation, realised as multiple, cross-cutting determinations, polymorphous andperverse, always demanding a specific and strategic calculation of their effects" (19).

In traditional film analyses, racial and cultural differences have either not beenemphasised as the central object(ives) of critical analysis or a mistaken conception of thestereotype as offering a secure point of identification. For Bhabha, the stereotype is, bycontrast, a "complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it isassertive" (22). Colonial discourse is an apparatus of power that turns on the "recognition anddisavowal of racial/cultural/historical differences" (23). It subjects peoples by producing"knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised" (23), "knowledges of coloniser andcolonised which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated (23) and designed to "construethe colonised as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order tojustify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction" (23). Colonialdiscourse

produces the colonised as a fixed reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet

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entirely knowable and visible. It resembles a form of narrative whereby theproductivity and circulation of subjects and signs are bound in a reformed andrecognisable totality. It employs a system of representation, a regime of truth,that is structurally similar to realism. (23)

Alluding to Foucault, Bhabha argues that it is a "form of governmentality" (23) (in spite of theshifting positionalities of its subjects due to gender, class and ideological differences) thatmarks out a "subject nation" (23).

For Said, Orientalism is not the misrepresentation of an Oriental essence. Said's pointis that Orientalism is based on the copula is, that "point at which Western rationalismpreserves the boundaries of sense for itself" (24). Said puts it this way: the Orientalist

will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with aword or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or moresimply to be, reality. . . . The tense they employ is the timeless eternal. (qtdin Bhabha 23)

Orientalism consists of both the historically constituted signifiers of stability of form/manifestcontent (the lexigraphic, the encyclopaedic) and content/latent content, a "site of dreams,images, fantasies, myths, obsessions" (24).

Bhabha critiques Said for his reluctance to "engage with the alterity and ambivalencein the articulation of these two economies which threaten to split the very object of Orientalistdiscourse as a knowledge and the subject positioned therein" (24) by unifying the manifestand latent aspects through a "politico-ideological intention" (24) that enables Europe toadvance "unmetaphorically upon the Orient" (24). Bhabha draws upon Foucault's notion ofthe power/knowledge nexus which places subjects in a relation of power and recognitiondifferent from the traditional Hegelian self/other, master/slave dialectic which can then besubverted by being inverted in order to argue that colonial power is not possessed entirely bythe coloniser: both dominant and dominated are implicated within Orientalist or colonialdiscourse. Moreover, the historical enunciations of colonial discourse are necessarilyfunctionally overdetermined or displaced by the unconscious scene of latent Orientalism.Power functions productively as both interdiction and incitement: colonial texts are pervadedby the "return of the oppressed – those terrifying stereotypes of savagery, cannibalism, lustand anarchy which are the signal points of identification and alienation, scenes of fear anddesire" (25). The function of the stereotype as both phobia and fetish "threatens the closureof the racial/epidermal schema for the colonial subject and opens the royal road to colonialfantasy" (25).

Said hints at this: the journey, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontationare the "lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language,perception, and form of the encounter between East and West" (25). The patently foreignacquires a status more rather than less familiar with the result that one "tends to stop judgingthings either as completely novel or as completely well-known; a new meridian categoryemerges . . . that allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time, as versions ofa previously known thing" (25). Such a mode of perception is a means of "controlling whatseems to be a threat to some established view of things. . . . The threat is muted, familiarvalues impose themselves . . . the mind reduces the pressure upon it by accommodatingthings to itself as either ‘original’ or ‘repetitious.’ . . . The orient . . . vacillates between theWest's contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of delight in – or fear of – novelty" (26).

Bhabha appropriates the Freudian concept of the ‘fetish’ to describe this mediancategory between recognition of difference and its disavowal. Drawing upon Foucault's notionof the apparatus and, specifically, the "relations of knowledge and power within the apparatus"(26) as "always a strategic response to an urgent need at a given Historical moment" (26)(the apparatus being always linked to certain coordinates of knowledge which issue from it

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and also condition it), Bhabha argues for the reading of the stereotype in terms of fetishism:the "myth of origination – racial purity, cultural priority – produced in relation to the colonialstereotype functions to ‘normalise’ the multiple beliefs and split subjects that constitutecolonial discourse as a consequence of its process of disavowal" (26), just as the scene offetishism functions to reactivate the material of original fantasy (the anxiety of castration andsexual difference) as well as to normalise that difference and disturbance in terms of the fetishobject as the substitute for the mother's penis. The discourses of sexuality and race relatein a process of functional overdetermination: fetishism, as the disavowal of difference, is thatrepetitious scene around the problem of castration. The "recognition of sexual difference –as the pre-condition for the circulation of the chain of presence and absence in the realm ofthe symbolic — is disavowed by the fixation on an object that masks that difference andrestores an original presence" (27). The "scene of fetishism is . . . the scene of thereactivation and repetition of primal fantasy – the subject's desire for a pure origin that isalways threatened by its division, for the subject must be gendered to be engendered, to bespoken" (27). "Fetishism is always a ‘play’ or vacillation between the archaic affirmation ofwholeness/similarity – in Freud's terms ‘All men have penises’; in ours ‘All men have the sameskin/race/culture’ – and the anxiety associated with lack and difference – again for Freud‘Some do not have penises’; for us ‘Some do not have the same skin/race/culture.’" (27).

Within discourse, the fetish "represents the simultaneous play between metaphor assubstitution (masking absence and difference) and metonymy (which contiguously registersthe perceived lack)" (27). The fetish / stereotype "gives access to an ‘identity’ . . . predicatedas much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence" (27), comprised as it is ofthe recognition of difference and the disavowal of it. The stereotype is the primary point ofsubjectification in colonial discourse for both coloniser and colonised and is the scene of the"desire for an originality which is again threatened by the differences of race, colour andculture" (27). The disavowal of difference threatens to turn the colonial subject / negro intoa "misfit – a grotesque mimicry or ‘doubling’ that threatens to split the soul and wholeundifferentiated skin of the ego" (27) (as is indicated by the title of Fanon's book). Thestereotype is not a "false representation of reality" (27): it is a "simplification because it is anarrested, fixated form of representation" (27) that denies the "play of difference (that thenegation through the Other permits)" (27). Colonial culture offers the colonised subject a"primordial Either / Or. Either he is fixed" (27) as a

solely negating activity or as a new kind of man, a new genus. What is deniedthe colonial subject, both as coloniser and colonised is that form of negationwhich gives access to the recognition of difference in the symbolic. It is thatpossibility of difference and circulation which would liberate the signifier ofskin/culture from the signifieds of racial typology, the analytics of blood,ideologies of racial and cultural dominance or degeneration. (27)

The negro's "race becomes the ineradicable sign of negative difference in colonial discourses.. . . We always already know that blacks are licentious, Asiatics duplicitous" (28).

Bhabha identifies two primal scenes, two myths of the origin of the marking of thesubject within the racist practices and discourses of colonial society (the term sceneemphasises the visible, the seen in a way that stresses the si(gh)t(e) both of subjectificationand power, and of fantasy and desire): the confrontation by the negro child of racialstereotypes where white heroes and black demons are offered as points of ideological andpsychic identification, and the gaze of the white (child) which fixes the negro in his blackness:"Look, a Negro . . . I'm frightened" (28). This moment is experienced in Fanon’s account asan "amputation, an excision, a haemmorhage that spattered my whole body with black blood"(28). The white child recognises and disavows the negro, while the negro disavows his ownrace to identify with the positivity of whiteness: in the "act of disavowal and fixation the

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colonial subject is returned to the narcissism of the Imaginary and its identification of an idealego that is white and whole" (28).

Looking, hearing, reading are sites of subjectification in colonial discourse that areevidence of the importance of the visual and auditory imaginary for the histories of societies.The "surveillance of colonial power" (28) functions in relation to the "regime of the scopicdrive" (28), the drive that represents the pleasure in seeing and which has the look as theobject of desire and which is related to the myth of origins, the primal scene, the problematicof fetishism and locates the surveyed object within the ‘imaginary’ relation.

The stereotype is an "arrested, fetishistic mode of representation" (29) within a fieldof identification that is the Lacanian schema of the Imaginary. The imaginary is that"transformation that takes place in the subject at the formative mirror phase, when it assumesa discrete image which allows it to postulate a series of equivalences, samenesses, identities,between the objects of the surrounding world" (29). The subject, however, "recognises itselfthrough an image which is simultaneously alienating and hence potentially confrontational"(29). There are thus two forms of identification complicit with the Imaginary – the narcissisticand aggressivity. The racist stereotype, similarly, gives knowledge of difference andsimultaneously disavows it and, like the mirror phase, the ‘fullness’ of the stereotype is alwaysthreatened by lack. Colonial discourse is a "complex articulation of the tropes of fetishism –metaphor and metonymy – and the forms of narcissistic and aggressive identification availableto the Imaginary" (29). The metaphoric or masking function of the fetish corresponds to thenarcissistic object-choice, while its metonymic figuring of lack corresponds to the aggressivephase of the Imaginary. The metaphoric/narcissistic and the metonymic/aggressive positionsfunction simultaneously in colonial discourse.

Colonial identity is "played out – like all fantasies of originality and origination – in theface and space of the disruption and threat from the heterogeneity of other positions" (29).The stereotype "requires, for its successful signification, a continual and repetitive chain ofother stereotypes . . . the same old stories of the Negro's animality, the Coolie's inscrutabilityor the stupidity of the Irish must be told (compulsively) again and fresh" (9).

The knowledge of the constructedness of the seemingly pre-constituted and ‘natural’poles of white and black is denied the negro because (s)he is "constructed within an apparatusof power which contains . . . an ‘other’ knowledge – a knowledge that . . . circulates throughcolonial discourse . . . that fixed form of difference" (30) that is the stereotype. The fetishismof colonial discourse also permits certain knowledge-effects that promote discrimination: theepidermal schema of colonial discourse (skin, unlike the sexual fetish, is not secret) impliesthat skin, as the "key signifier of cultural and racial difference in the stereotype" (30), isrecognised as "’common knowledge’ in a range of cultural, political, historical discourses, andplays a public part in the racial drama that is enacted every day in colonial societies" (30).The stereotype is that "’fixated’ form of the colonial subject which facilitates colonial relations,and sets up a discursive form of racial and cultural opposition in terms of which colonial poweris exercised" (31).

The stereotype is located in those regimes of visibility and discursivity (fetishistic,scopic and imaginary) which constructs the signifier skin/race in accordance with the placeof fantasy in the exercise of colonial power. Fanon himself recognised that the "originality ofthe colonial context is that the economic substructure is also a superstructure . . . you are richbecause you are white" (qtd. in Bhabha, 31). Such a view provides a visibility to the exerciseof power: "skin, as a signifier of discrimination, must be produced or processed as visible"(31). Unlike the forgetting crucial to repression, discrimination must constantly reinforce therecognition of difference. What authorises discrimination is, however, the "occlusion of thepreconstruction or working-up of difference" (31): the "repression of production entails thatthe recognition of difference is procured in an innocence, as a ‘nature’; recognition is contrived

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as primary cognition, spontaneous effect of the ‘evidence of the visible’" (32). This isprecisely the kind of recognition (spontaneous and visible) specific to the stereotype: the"difference of the object of discrimination is at once visible and natural – colour as thecultural/political sign of inferiority or degeneracy, skin as its natural ‘identity’" (32).

As a result of this epidermal schema, the colonial subject undergoes a "crucial splittingof the ego" (32): the subject is both "primordially fixed and yet triply split between theincongruent knowledges of body, race, ancestors" (32). However, by acceding to the wildestfantasies of the coloniser, the stereotyped also reveals something of the fantasy (as desire,defense) of that position of mastery. The colonial scene of fantasy is a peculiar bind ofknowledge and fantasy, power and pleasure which informs a particular regime of visibility.In the "objectification of the scopic drive there is always the threatened reurn of the look; inthe identification of the Imaginary relation there is always the alienating other (or mirror)which crucially returns its image to the subject; and in that form of substitution and fixationthat is fetishism there is always the trace of loss, absence" (33). Accordingly, the "‘officialknowledges’ of colonialism – pseudo-scientific, typological, legal-administrative, eugenicist –are imbricated at the point of their production of meaning and power with the fantasy thatdramatises the impossible desire for a pure, undifferentiated origin" (33). This myth of originsis a "desire to return to the fullness of the mother, a desire for an unbroken andundifferentiated line of vision and origin" (34). What is being "dramatised is a separation --between races, cultures, histories . . . that repeats obsessively the mythical moment ofdisjunction" (34).

Colonial fantasy and the productions of colonial desire do not ascribe but ratherproduce identities "in the syntax of the scenario of racist discourse" (33) and in this way playa crucial part in the everyday scenes of subjectification in colonial society. Such fantasies areakin to the most "primitive defensive reactions" (33) such as projection and negation. Thenegro both disrupts and meets the demand of colonial discourse: the chain of stereotypicalsignification is curiously mixed and split, an articulation of multiple belief. The black is bothsavage and obedient servant, rampantly sexual and innocent as a child, mystical andotherwordly, and wordly, an accompanied liar. The ambivalence of colonial desire is notconcealed: colonial discourse frequently "proposes a teleology – under certain conditions ofcolonial domination and control the native is progressively reformable . . . it effectivelydisplays the ‘separation,’ makes it more visible" (34-35) and it is the "visibility of thisseparation which, in denying the colonised the capacities of self-government, independence,western modes of civility, lends authority to the official version and mission of colonial power.

In short, the racist discourse of colonialism recognises the difference of race, cultureand history as elaborated by stereotypical knowledges, racial theories, administrative colonialexperience, on the basis of which a whole range of political and cultural ideologies areinstitutionalised. Discriminatory and authoritarian modes of political control are authorisedby ‘knowing’ the native populace in these terms. The colonised population is both cause andeffect of the system and, as such, impprisoned in the vicious circle of interpretation. Hence,the necessity of such rules, justified by those moralistic and normative ideologies ofamelioration recognised as the Civilising Mission and the White Man's Burden. Colonialdiscourse subtends more practical political and economic exigencies: the barracks stand bythe Church which stands by the schoolroom.