ABSTRACT
In the chapter entitled ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism’ included in his book The Location of Culture (1994), the postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha describes two ‘primal scenes’ from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks: ‘two myths of the origin of the marking of the subject within the racist practices and discourses of a colonial culture’ (75-6). One is the famous moment, rehearsed again and again in postcolonial criticism, when the body is first subjected to a gaze that converts its owner into a black subject: ‘Look, a Negro … Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened’. The second is the black child’s initial encounter with racial and cultural stereotypes in children’s fiction, where white heroes and black demons are proffered as points of ideological and psychical identification. Such dramas are enacted every day in colonial societies, says Fanon, employing a theatrical metaphor – the scene – which emphasizes the visible – the seen (76, original emphasis). In the remainder of his influential essay Bhabha goes on to deconstruct the
political and psychological operation of these ‘scenes’, with particular reference to ‘the stereotype’ as a mechanism for the development and deployment of colonial power. Before going on to consider his theorisation of the stereotype at greater length, I want to emphasise a point of methodology which bears closely upon my concerns in this chapter. In the paragraph following the one quoted above, Bhabha extends his identification of colonial subjectification from the realm of the visual to that of the auditory:
[What] these primal scenes illustrate is that looking / hearing / reading as sites of subjectification in colonial discourse are evidence of the importance of the visual and auditory imagination for the histories of societies.
