ABSTRACT
Within colonialist discourse, metaphors, tropes, and allegorical motifs played a constitutive role in "figuring" European superiority. For Hayden White, troping is "the soul of discourse," the mechanism without which discourse "cannot do its work or achieve its ends.,,1 Although tropes can be repressive, a defense mechanism against literal meaning, they also constitute an arena of contestation; each is open to perpetuation, rejection, or. subversion. 2 The idea of race, for example, can be seen as less a reality than a trope; a trope, as Henry Louis Gates Jr has pointed out, of difference. Apart from the association of "race" with metaphors of pedigree and horse-breeding, "race" also "tropes" through schematic exaggeration: people are not literally black, red, white, or yellow but display a wide spectrum of nuanced tones, which did not prevent Hollywood from painting actresses (for instance, Sarita Montiel in Run of the Arrow, 1957) with red makeup according to racial conventions. Even the notion of colors being clearly distinct is itself a trope; in fact, some "Black" people are lighter than some "White" people. A cognate trope is the notion of racial "blood," which has historically served to signify religious affiliation ("Jewish blood"), class belonging ("blue blood"), national appurtenance ("German blood"), and race ("black blood"). Still, the troped nature of "blood" did not prevent the US army, as late as World War II, from segregating "black" blood plasma from "white" blood plasma. Anxieties about other kinds of mixing, about the exchanges of other fluids, were projected on to blood itself. Despite their quasi-fictive nature, then, racial tropes exercise real effectivity in the world.
