a longish excerpt from the introduction to a new collective
work on the pornographic view of indigenous peoples
over the colonil period.
The work is a picture book, necessary because we need to
deconstruct a certain way of seeing things.
Reference below:
https://theconversation.com/les-imaginaires-sexuels-coloniaux-ont-faconne-les-mentalites-des-societes-occidentales-103132?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=La%20lettre%20de%20The%20Conversation%20France%20du%2024%20septembre%202018%20-%201119510013&utm_content=La%20lettre%20de%20The%20Conversation%20France%20du%2024%20septembre%202018%20-%201119510013+CID_06f3420977b92c56b74af46fe0f54739&utm_source=campaign_monitor_fr&utm_term=Les%20imaginaires%20sexuels%20coloniaux%20ont%20faonn%20les%20mentalits%20des%20socits%20occidentales
* * *
source: The Conversation
Extract from the Introduction to the collective work Sexe, race et colonies, La
domination des corps du XVe à nos jours, published under the direction of
Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Christelle Taraud and Dominic
Thomas by publishers La Découverte and for sale starting September 27 2018
(544 pages, 1200 pictures, over one hundred authors; preface by Jacques Martial
and Achille Mbembe, postface by Leïla Slimani).
translation: doxa-louise
‘The sexual imagination of colonizers forged the
prevailing mentality of Western societies’
Examining six centuries of history (from 1420 on) at the heart of colonial empires,
starting with the conquistadores, running through systematic slavery and up tp the
postcolonial period, our work Sexe, race et colonies. La domination des corps du XVe
à nos jours explores the central role of sexuality in power relationships.
It lays bare as well the manners with which slave-owning and colonizer countries
re-invented the ‘Other’ the better to dominate him, take possession of his body as
well as his territory, all the while making sense of the formidable visual production behind
the notion of the exotic and fantasies of the West: so many images that illustrate racial
and sexual domination.
A comprehension of the context of production, an appreciation of their means of
diffusion, acceptance, importance in visual history, aims to unfasten certain ways
of looking and deconstruct what was so carefully and massively fabricated. A novel
project as much by its editorial ambition, as by its willingness to bring together many
ways of seeing and critical approaches, the aim of this book is to present a panorama
of this forgotten and ignored past, up to its contemporary descendants, as we follow
step by step the domination of bodies.
Sexuality, domination, colonization. three terms that meet and mesh over six centuries
of practices and representations that make up this book. Yet, even if the history of
sexuality in colonies has been a research topic for over thirty years, it is still
unkown in its extent. Yet, sexual domination, in colonized spaces such as the
segregationist United States, was a long process of slavery practices producing
complex imaginary realms which, caught between the exotic and the erotic, find
nourishment in fascination/repulsion with race-imbued bodies.
This explains why, the multiple contemporary lines of descent of this history frame,
largely still, the relations between Western populations from the North and the
ex-colonized from the South. For, as the sexual imaginary realms of the colonizers
forged the thinking of Western societies, they as well determined those of the dominated.
A process of deconstruction is thus today more than ever necessary, linking up notably
with the images produced in the course of this history.
The colony, a territory for sexual domination
Sexuality in the colonies has no bounding taboos, including that of childhood: the
offerd images often show pre-pubescent young girls (as well, although less frequently,
young boys) in stagings with a strong sexual flavor. The violence of the fantasies projected
unto colonized populations is thus without limit, because the body of the ‘other’ is itself
placed outside the field to which norms apply, closer to the animal and the monster than
the human, closer to nature than to culture.
This explains why the body of the ‘other’ is conceptualized simultaneously as a symbol of
innocence and multiple depravations: a body which excites as much as it frightens.
In this context, ‘indigenous’ women are clothed with a sexual innocence which guides them
with great constancy toward ‘sin’, or an ‘atavistic sexual depravity’ tied to their race, reinforcing
the conquerer and dominant position of the master and the colonizer.
The existence of these ‘other’ women always viewed as easy, lascivious, lecherous,
perverse and thus necessarily insatiable also allows the construction, as a mirror image,
of the ideal white wife, prudish and chaste, reduced to a purely reproductive sexuality.
The sexual freedom of white men in colonies cannot, in effect, be transfered to women from
colonial metropoles. These are, a contrario, under greater surveillance, because they are
necessarily expected to present the sexual and moral example-worthiness of the colony,
from which white men escape in general. Thus, the ‘gigantic brothel’ created by slavery
and colonialism allows colonizers to view themselves and live as masters in spaces where
their sexual possibilities are maximized with respect to the norms and taboos of their own
societies, all the while excluding their wives from these rights.
This explains how sexual practices, love and marriage depart, almost everywhere, from the
rules, pronouncements and laws promulgated by the very people trangressing them
joyously and continuously.
This sexual liberty of the master and/colonizer does come up against, paradoxically,
moral precepts and racial taboos, the refusal of white women to accept the cohabitation,
seen as humiliating and dishonrable by most among them, of other women and other
families; and, eventually, the growing fear, at the beginning of the XIXth century, of an
interbreeding echoing the idea of the degeneracy and disappearance of the white ‘race’.
This new moralizing, hygienistic and prophylactic complex viewpoint will lead nonetheless
to a growing call, although late in the game, to white women to populate empires, contribute
offspring without interbreeding and bring morality to colonial
life. These veritable recruitment campaign for wives - or prostitutes for brothels - will
first take place, at the margins of European society - orphenages, hospices, asylums,
prisons, brothels...- among categories of women already stigmatized, such as delinquants,
unwed mothers or prostitutes; colonial metropoles can then rid themselves of elements
that are ‘asocial’ and/or ‘immoral’.
Furthermore, everywhere within colonies, the racial question is at the heart of constructions on
sexuality because it is the central axis of political, economic and soxcial organization, particularly
in the slavery societies of the Carabbean, Brazil or the United States. On this set of questions with
respect to all geographical areas and all colonial empires, and for all historical periods, writers
and artists have left their mark all the while participating in the elaboration of the view which
metropolitans have of ’others’.
An immense production of images
Very early, as seen in the works assembled in this project (over 1200 documents reproduced,
for the majority for the first time), artists show us colonial societies and, irregardless of prohibitions,
call interbreedings into view all the while exhibiting the social hierarchies constructed on the
melanine content of different populations. Based on prejudice, particularly religious, these
hierarchies gave legitimacy to the racial domination of the modern period thus forming the first
substrate of a racism evident in the color of skin and socio-economic status. The first images
produced, from the beginnings of the XVth century to the end of the XVIIth, also invite one to
dream and bear witness, for the clear majority, to an admiration and fascination with ‘exotic’
peoples and their bodily presence.
However, the spread of slavery between Africa and America, conflict relationships in the
Mediterranean space, the rise in prominence of colonial empires and the emergence of
scientific racism will progressively erase this ‘moment of surprise’ to the benefit
of increasingly disparaging representations. At the turn of the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries,
one witnesses a decisive mutation which will transform ‘color prejudice’ into raciology.
Sexuality, prostitution, homosexuality and ‘race’ thus become intertwined during this period,
starting in 1830-1840, all through the XIXth century and ending around 1920.
Artists from all countries will in this contxt construct, in all possible artistic domains
(drawing, etching, painting...), a view of the world which disturbs the representaion of
these Elsewheres, up to the major break as a consequence of the emergence of new
visual supports such as photography, posters and cheap widgets, thus promoting a
taste for the Oriental, African or Japanese, all the while upping the exotic, erotic and/or
pornographic presence of the ‘Other’ to an outrageous level.
The democraticization of colonial pornography, at the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries,
understand, in effect, colonies ans ‘empires of cie’, themes also present in romantic fiction
and pseudo-science, as can be seen in the well-known book of doctor Jacobus, L’Art d’aimer
aux colonies (1893). Very quickly, the movie industry, which becomes the dominant mass
media of the period in Europe as well as America, will use the erotic potential of the the
colonies by offering images in a recurrent manner of white men presented as the masters
of colonized spaces, ‘protectors’ of white women, and ‘seducers’ and ‘liberators’ of ‘indigenous’
women, but also of mythical ‘siren women’, oriental or asiatic.
The century of the half-blood beauty
Lastly, the XXth century gives birth to a new paradigm in the form of utopia which finds
expression in numerous images on many supports: that of a ‘half-blood beauty’. But
everywhere, from South-East Asia to India, Subsaharian Africa to Magreb, from the
Caribbean to Polynesia, these mutations come at the price of a heady questionning,
such as that of the place of half-blood children: the latter becoming the ‘lost children’
of societies still very much fractured by color lines, legal or not. These new concerns,
exponentially grown by the Second World War with as background migratory crisis in
Europe and the United states and more and more virulent protests in colonial empires.
This last phase of colonial history, put in motion after 1945, is a period characterized by a
frenetic deployment of sexual violence, notably agains colonized women, within civil
societies: as if it were necessary to mark and beat up the bodies of the colonized and,
thus, punish their desire to be rid of their oppressors. As if it had become necessary, as well,
to destroy these indigenous women who had become the graphical icons of liberation
movements( and their allies of the moment in China, in the USSR, in Korea or in India)
and of fighters militarily and politically active in all anti-colonial struggles.
Thus the practice of rape, by French forces, during the war in Indochina (1946-1954) and the
war in Algeria (1954-1962) is now well documented, as is that of the last lynchings - often
accompagnied by castration - in the United states in the 1950s.
Elsewhere, in Africa, this violence is evident in the revolt of the Mau Mau in Kenya between 1
952 and 1960, where hundreds of cases of sexual violence against women (many rapes)
and on men ( of which some castrations) have been noted.
These moment of extraordinary sexual violence also resonate with certain contemporary
post-colonial conflicts, as seen by the use of rape by Americans and their allies during the
War in Vietnam, between 1955 and 1975, but also by the Soviets during the first war in
Afghanistan, between 1979 and 1989 and, more recently still, by Allied troops in Irak,
the Russians in Chechnya or the UN Peace Corps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Legacies and postcolonial mutations
Starting in the 1970s, many artists will embark on the work fo deconstruction of colonial
stereotypes using the body as the centralobject - such as the French artist Jean-Paul
Goude or one of the greats of english Pop Art Peter thomas Blake, but aldo an ex-member
of the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas -, sexualized institutions (harem or bordello)
or sexual violence and rape. Thus, Coco Fusco and Guilermo Gomez-Pena,
with their famous show The Couple in the Cage (1993), or the South-African Brett Bailey,
with Exhibit B (2014), all try to deconstruct the power of representation of colonial sexual
domination.
In a similar vein, the Hottentot Venus will also find herself at the heart of a series of post-colonial
works, such as Venus Baartman by Tracey Rose, Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks, On t’appelle Vénus
by Chantal Lïal, Hottentot Venus 2000 by Renee Cox, calling out what she was made to endure
yet attempting to return her to her dignity, as with the film by Abdellatif Kechiche, Black Venus.
From all continents, artists will view this past with a critical eye: all want to go beyond the
colonial legacy by analysing the effect that the images from that period produce even today
on individuals and society.
on individuals and society.
Sexual Tourism
From another perspective, this same legacy goes on as well in Southern countries through
sexual tourism. The latter developed before independence then during decolonization
struggles and/or as part of the cold War (principally in Asia), and forms a true gloalized economy.
A number of ex-colonized countries have opted to ‘specialize’ in the sexual offer to
Westerners, but also to newly industrialized countries such as China, Turkey or the Persian
Gulf Emirates. Coming out of colonial prostitution - and in reserved areas of the city such as
Bousbir in Morocco or brothels for the American Army in Thaïland and the Philippines...
- sexual tourism still promotes the same fantasies and the same exhausted imaginary
realms erotic and pornographic.
Nonetheless, let us note that migrations South to North can also provoque events wherein
extreme sexual violence is invited such as the events of Koln, Germany in 2016.
In any event, a number of examples bring into question this ‘global right’ of men
to seize on, including by violence sexist and racist, all women: those which they consider
as the possession of ‘others’, but obviously those that belong to their own family, group,
culture, nation, «race»... Angela Davis has documenting this in the
context of the emergence of the Black Panthers in the United States in the 1970s:
‘They thought - and some think it still - that the fact of being of being a black man gave
them rights on black women.’
Yet, in the new reality which is ours in this nascent XXIth century, if structures of domination
persist unmistakebly, other inverse processes are at work as well. Postcolonial migrations,
at least in ex-colonial-metropoles, have thus produced, almost mechanically, a flowering of
mixted unions and their progressive acceptance. As a result, this process has given rise to
a certain globalized cosmopolitanism. That the very existence of these unions has caused,
all along its long history, more or less constant xenophobic reactions should not overshadow
the fact that the figure of the racialy-mixed person has become, at the same time, an aesthetic
reference point in world media culture. A model opposed and/or taken back everywhere, by
supremacists of all ilks and religious fundamentalists of all religions, who reject migrations and
minorities through polymorphous ‘community action’ and accompagnied, more often than not,
by strong conservatism cultural and social, notably with respect to mores.
As for ‘other’ women still seen as types such as the ‘Beurettes’ in France, the Congolaises’ in
Belgium, the ‘Pakistanis’ in the United Kingdom, they remain bound, practically as well as
symbolically, by roles predefined through legacies patriarchal and/or colonial.
One thus sees how the equation of women and men ‘other’ with their sex/sexuality, founding
principal of colonial doxa from its inception, but also social model of our now globalized cultures,
is far from over. Yet, at the same time, racial mixity has also become the horizon of a utopia meant
to come before, for some anyway, the eclosion of a true globalized society, post-racial and equal,
by a boomerang effect that colonizers were far from imagining when they, for the first time, set foot
in America, Africa, Asia and Oceania...
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