I’m right: race is at the center (of the colonial drama). Of course one knows this but my questions all started out with these novels being taught as examples of literary movements, the issues they raise not addressed at all, and with the fact that I assumed, from my education, that racism was something we’d decided to combat and eradicate. That was a liberal fantasy–of course we don’t want to get rid of it, if we don’t want to get rid of coloniality/modernity, and of course these novels are about teaching how to see race and maintain racism while also denying it, and the professors and critics had swallowed that. It’s taken me all this time to see it and I still don’t think about it in a very sophisticated way.
The Enigmatic Mirror
Race is at the center of this tragedy. To a large extent, race is an iconic currency. It appears at the edges of a commerce—of the gaze. It is a currency whose function is to convert what one sees (or what one chooses not to see) into a specie or symbol at the heart of a generalized economy of signs and images that one exchanges, circulates, attributes value to or not, and that authorizes a series of judgments and practical attitudes. It can be said of race that it is at once image, body, and enigmatic mirror within an economy of shadows whose purpose is to make life itself a spectral reality. Fanon understood this and showed how, alongside the structures of coercion that presided over the arrangement of the colonial world, what first constitutes race is a certain power of the gaze that accompanies a form of voice and, ultimately, touch. If the gaze of the colonist “shrivels me” or “freezes me,” if his voice “turns me into stone,” it is because he believes that my life does not have the same weight as his does.28 Describing what he called the “lived experience of the Negro,” Fanon analyzes how a certain manner of distributing the gaze ends up creating its object, fixing it, or destroying it, or returns it to the world but under the sign of disfiguration or at least of “another me,” a me that is an object, a marginal being. A certain form of the gaze has, in effect, the power to block the appearance of the “third-being” and his inclusion in the sphere of the human: “I simply wanted to be a man among other men.”29 “And here I am an object in the midst of other objects.” How, starting from the desire to be a human being like others, does one arrive at the realization that we are what the Other has made of us—its object? “And then we were given the occasion to confront the white man’s gaze. An usual weight descended on us. The real world robbed us of our share,” he continues.30 (Mbembe 110)
Earlier on in the book (page 2), race is a “foundational category”:
As Gilles Deleuze observed, “there is always a Black person, a Jew, a Chinese, a Grand Mogol, an Aryan in the midst of delirium,” since what drives delirium is, among other things, race.5 By reducing the body and the living being to matters of appearance, skin, and color, by granting skin and color the status of fiction based on biology, the Euro-American world in particular has made Blackness and race two sides
of a single coin, two sides of a codified madness.6 Race, operating over the past centuries as a foundational category that is at once material and phantasmic, has been at the root of catastrophe, the cause of extraordinary psychic devastation and of innumerable crimes and massacres.7
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 