The racial stereotype, colonial discourse, fetishism, and racism.

This paper draws on the work of Homi Bhabha to mount an explanation for a facet of (post)colonial racism, the 'paradox of otherness' as exemplified in the racial stereotype. The paradox in question operates at the levels of discourse and identification alike. As a mode of discourse the stereotype functions to exaggerate difference of the other, whilst nevertheless attempting to produce them as a stable, fully knowable object. As mode of identification, the stereotype operates a series of mutually exclusive categories differentiating self and other which unintentionally nevertheless relies upon a grid of samenesses. These two paradoxes follow a similar movement: an oscillation, at the level of discourse, between attempts to generate and contain anxiety, a wavering, at the level of identification, between radical difference and prospective likeness. Bhabha provides a structural and functional analogue with which to account for this double movement of otherness: Freud's model of fetishism. This is an analogue that both enables us to foreground the operations of displacement and condensation in racist stereotyping, and to draw a series of conclusions about the effective functioning of discursive and affective economies of racism. Radical difference In a historical overview of some of the first Western writing to be recorded in Southern Africa, novelist J.M. Coetzee makes reference to a series of disturbing depictions of racial otherness. Take for example the following description of the Khoi-San as published in Amsterdam in 1652: The local natives have everything in common with the dumb cattle, barring their human nature...[They] are handicapped in their speech, clucking like turkey-cocks... Their food consists of herbs, cattle, wild animals and fish. The animals are eaten together with their internal organs. Having been shaken out a little, the intestines are not washed, but as soon as the animal has been slaughtered or discovered, these are eaten raw, skin and all...A number of them will sleep together in the veldt, making no difference between men and women...They all smell fiercely, as can be noted at a distance of more than twelve feet against the wind, and they also give the appearance of never having washed (Hondius, cited in Coetzee, 1988, p. 12). On the one hand one is here confronted with an almost ethnographic mode of exposition, an ostensibly factual documentation of otherness. On the other, we have a writing that seethes with anxiety at the radical otherness which it witnesses and which it struggles to contain. So different is the world thus entered, in physical appearance,