ABSTRACT
Are human beings essentially the same or different? Is difference defined primarily by racial attributes? Colonial and racial discourses and their attendant fictions and sciences, as well as anti-colonial thought, have been preoccupied with these questions. The ‘othering’ of vast numbers of people by European colonialist thought, and their construction as backward and inferior, depended upon what Abdul JanMohamed calls the ‘Manichean allegory’, in which a binary and implacable discursive opposition between races is produced (1985: 60). Such oppositions are crucial, not only for creating images of non-Europeans, but also for constructing a European self. Therefore many anti-colonial and postcolonial critiques are preoccupied with uncovering the way in which they work in colonialist representations. But now, many critics are beginning to ask whether, in the process of exposing the ideological and historical functioning of such binaries, we are in danger of reproducing them. Do we end up overemphasising cultural/racial difference and alterity, albeit from a different ideological standpoint than those of colonialist discourses?
