Two literary quotations: The first is from Yeats, and here we encounter the complicity of culture:
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Here we find ‘race’ being used in its most traditional sense, as lineage: although by the 1930s even this could not claim to be innocent, to operate discretely from the prevalent teachings of racial science. The second quotation is from Tennyson, and here we come to the fantasy of colonial discourse:
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
In the manuscript, this is followed a few lines later by the question:
Could I wed a savage woman steept perhaps in monstrous crime.
In this characteristic ambivalent movement of attraction and repulsion, we encounter the sexual economy of desire in fantasies of race, and of race in fantasies of desire. To suggest that culture and racism were complicit in the nineteenth century is not to say anything new.
Yet the extent to which both the sciences and the arts were determined by assumptions about race is consistently underestimated. Even now Victorian ideas of race are sometimes discussed as if they were a separate entity, demarcated as ‘racial theory’ or ‘racialism’, an embarrassing interval in the history of science and Western knowledge.
This scientism is dismissed in the same way as biologism in the case of gender: but given that the categories of science in these areas are themselves culturally determined, a rejection of this kind is less effective than is often assumed.
The history of culture shows that Western racism is not simply an aberrant but discrete episode in Western history that can be easily excised, as the call to ‘stamp out racism’ assumes. As Lévi-Strauss argues, statements about race are statements about culture, and vice versa.
If it was through the category of race that colonialism itself was theoretically focused, represented and justified in the nineteenth century, it was also through racial relations that much cultural interaction was practised.
The ideology of race, a semiotic system in the guise of ethnology, ‘the science of races’, from the 1840s onwards necessarily worked according to a doubled logic, according to which it both enforced and policed the differences between the whites and the non-whites, but at the same time focused fetishistically upon the product of the contacts between them.
Colonialism was always locked into the machine of desire: ‘the machine remains desire, an investment of desire whose history unfolds’. Nineteenth-century theories of race did not just consist of essentializing differentiations between self and other: they were also about a fascination with people having sex—interminable, adulterating, aleatory, illicit, inter-racial sex.
But this steamy model of mixture was not a straightforward sexual or even cultural matter: in many ways it preserved the older commercial discourse that it superseded. For it is clear that the forms of sexual exchange brought about by colonialism were themselves both mirrors and consequences of the modes of economic exchange that constituted the basis of colonial relations.
The history of the meanings of the word ‘commerce’ includes the exchange both of merchandise and of bodies in sexual intercourse. It was therefore wholly appropriate that sexual exchange, and its miscegenated product, which captures the violent, antagonistic power relations of sexual and cultural diffusion, should become the dominant paradigm through which the passionate economic and political trafficking of colonialism was conceived.
Perhaps this begins to explain why our own forms of racism remain so intimately bound up with sexuality and desire. The fantasy of post-colonial cultural theory, however, is that those in the Western academy at least have managed to free themselves from this hybrid commerce of colonialism, as from every other aspect of the colonial legacy.