Europe, Race and Diaspora

EUROPE, RACE AND DIASPORA

SUSAN ARNDT

Identity is a fiction created by inventing difference and difference is a fiction invented because identities are needed – needed not for survival, but for surviving as the fittest. It is these very needs to claim privileges and perform power which determine the criteria on which patterns of identity and difference are based. A most prominent stage offering such needed criteria is, of course, the human body. “[T]here can be no natural way of considering the body,” as Mary Douglas stresses, “that does not involve at the same time a social dimension… If there is no concern to preserve social boundaries, I would not expect to find concern with bodily boundaries.”1 This dynamics of inventing bodily differences to pillar social ones, that is, to embody mental, cultural and religious differences and hierarchies, can be traced as far back as to antiquity. One of the most powerful drawings of borderlines on the human body has been the classification of complexions, resulting in the distinction and categorisation of ‘skin colours’. Thus framed, over centuries a “regime of looking” was fabricated that has led people to “believe in the factuality of difference [of ‘skin colours’, S.A.] in order to see it.” 2 Skin colour, in turn, became the grounding pillar for the colonialist invention of ‘human races’ and the thus related symbolic order of racialised positions and identities.

In my article, I discuss notions of ‘race’ in a diachronic perspective. In doing so, I touch upon various points of time in European (or, to be more precise, Greek, German and English) history. Thus framed, I read race in general and whiteness in particular as a colonial myth, social position and critical category of analysis. To conclude, I elaborate on the concept of the ‘racial turn’.

1 Douglas, Natural Symbols, 170. 2 Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness, 5.

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The Social Meaning of Physical Difference in Classical Greek Philosophy

In the face of Greek slavery and wars of conquest, Ancient Greece and particularly Alexander the Great needed strategies to legitimate their acts of violence and injustice, which paradoxically undermined those very achievements upon which Greek society proudly founded its very notions of superiority. As a result, forms of demarcation were fabricated which established a worldview pillared on a division between ‘Greeks’ and the ‘rest’, who were generalised as ‘Barbarians’. This division was grounded in a theory of ‘pure descent’, dependent on blood and/or geographical ties. Applying this paradigm, Aristotle elaborated the first and last formal and systematic theory of slavery. He argued that slavery was both natural and just, for in the same way that he saw the union of male and female as a natural drive resulting from the need to reproduce, he saw the pursuit of survival necessitating slavery. Additionally, he argued that nature defined who was born to be a slave and who a master: “[T]hat some should rule and others be ruled is a thing that is not only necessary, but also expedient; from the hour of their birth some”, and he meant the ‘Barbarians’, “are marked out for subjection” and “others”, that is the Greeks, “for rule”.3 This allegedly naturally given order of master and slave would, as Aristotle continued to argue, manifest itself in physical attributes, which, in turn, would determine competences.

Nature would like to distinguish between the bodies of freemen and slaves, making the one strong for servile labour, the other upright, and although useless for such services, useful for political life in the arts both of war and peace.4

Besides bodily attributes such as ‘physical stature’, the colour and texture of hair as well as ‘skin colour’ played an important role in Greek attempts to invent bodily differences as markers of differing competences and mental dispositions as well as cultural hierarchies. In that vein, it was postulated that climate and other environmental factors influenced physical attributes. Just as much as Greek mappings positioned Greece in terms of geopolitics and climate as the centre of the world, the ‘skin colour’ of the Greeks was defined as being the centre and norm of all ‘skin colours’. This is mirrored in the fact that the Greek term for ‘skin colour’, andreíkelon, refers to what is considered to be the Greek complexion only.

3 Aristotele, Politics, I.5. 4 Ibid.

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In as far as it translated as ‘human-like’, it seemed to even imply that all complexions different from andreíkelon performed beyond humanity.

Andreíkelon was contrasted with both the ‘skin colour’ of the Ethiopians, that is, all non-Egyptian African peoples, who had – as was etymologically implied – “burnt faces” as well as with ‘white skin’. Thus andreíkelon was situated as less dark or affected by the sun than black, yet darker than ‘white skin’. The demarcation line between andreíkelon and ‘white skin’ was, however, drawn in a manner that was by no means clear or consistent – a fact which corresponded with the considerable polyvalence of ‘white skin’ in Greek society. There were two main connotations of ‘white skin-colour’: Firstly, Greeks considered it a marker of Persians and people of Europe’s ‘extreme north’ such as Scythians, who were later replaced in discourse by the Galls and Germanic peoples. In this context, ‘white skin’ (as opposed to the ‘black skin’ of the Ethiopians in the ‘extreme South’) implied cowardliness, harmlessness and effeminateness.5 While in this respect whiteness was positioned as non-Greek, ‘white skin’ was secondly also the locus of an internal differentiation within Greek society along the lines of the structural categories of gender and class. In due correspondence with the climate theory’s postulate that ‘white skin’ was untainted (by the sun), bourgeois women, whose life was centred in the shadows of the house, were situated as white. In this case, whiteness carried implications not only of femininity (a connotation that resembles the interpretation of the whiteness of Persians), but also of beauty and grace. Moreover, in contemporary texts and pictures Greek philosophers are presented as pale or ‘white-skinned’ – a depiction often visually further heightened by their wearing of white clothing, which befits their prestigious social standing.6 This characterisation of philosophers as ‘white’ can undoubtedly be interpreted as suggesting that they were distinguished not by physical, but rather mental work inside the house. Moreover, it implies that whiteness was accorded potentials of wisdom, spirituality and a prestigious social standing and thus evaluated in a far more ambiguous and positive way than blackness.

Christian Colour Symbolism as Negotiated in Wolfram van Eschenbach’s Parzival

The knowledge accumulated in classical antiquity that cultural differences manifested themselves physically and that physical differences conversely

5 Poiss, “Die Farbe des Philosophen”, 152. 6 Cf.: Jackson, “Aristotle’s Lecture Room and Lectures.”

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corresponded to mental and physical capabilities was further fostered in the ensuing centuries and enriched in discursive accordance with aspects of the Christian faith and the thus informed knowledge. In fact, emerging Christianity appropriated and abrogated the colour symbolism of antiquity.

A metaphor for death and grief as early as antiquity, black became a symbol of filth and dirt in medieval colour symbolism.7 This idea is manifested in the proverb, “To wash an Ethiop/blackamoor is to labour in vain”, which refers to the impossibility of an undertaking or futile effort. It presumably dates back to Aesop, who utilised the image as evidence of nature’s power and permanence. A reference to this very proverb appears in the Bible, in the Book of Jeremiah, 13:23, where the question is asked: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?”8 With respect to the Christian belief system, black became a symbol of hell and the devil, and, correspondingly of sin, guilt, shame, malice and the obligation of penance – to make it short: of evil.9

White, however, was established as the antithesis of black, that is, the colour of purity, innocence (also meaning virginity), virtue and the divine.10 This was often visualised in the transcendence of the heavenly and the white of angels. Just as much as white became a general metaphor for Christianity and its home, Europe, Black was a metaphor for Africans as well as those who adhered to ‘Othered’ religions, most prominently, Moslems and Jews.

Thus framed, Christian colour symbolism also informed a politics of ‘skin colour’ that squeezed – in a truly conceptualising process of abstraction – the billions of ‘skin colours’ of the world into a simplifying matrix in which ‘white skin-colour’ was made to be the marker of normality, superiority and perfect physical beauty. That Andreikolon had lost not only its power, but even its visibility, of course, due to the decline of the Greek empire.11 In doing so, the Greek notion of whiteness of being a symbol of femininity and – as far as the Greek female body was referred to – even a marker of beauty was strengthened. Blackness, in turn, was defined to mark inadequate morality, ugliness, promiscuity, shame, sin, disobedience and acts that were regarded as sexually abnormal and physically deformation. “Always we find the link between blackness and

7 Cf.: Jordan, White over Black, 7. 8 The Bible (King James Version). Online-Edition: http://www.biblegateway.com/ (10.11. 2006). 9 Cf.: Jordan, White over Black, 7; Hall, Kim. “Fair Texts/Dark Ladies”, 69. 10 Cf.: Fryer, Staying Power, 10, 135; Jordan, White over Black, 7. 11 Cf.: Fryer, Staying Power, 10, 135; Jordan, W. White over Black, 7; Briggs, This Stage-Play World, 96.


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the monstrous, and particularly a monstrous sexuality.”12 In this context, a causal link between ‘black skin colour’ and a duty and obligation to serve white people was invented.

This was manifested, for example, in the curse that Noah puts on his grandson Canaan after Ham saw his (drunken) father’s nakedness, urging him and his descendants to become the servants of Japeth and his lineage. Although no reference is made to ‘skin colour’ in this whole passage, it is discursively present. First, the name Ham is derived etymologically from ‘dark’ and ‘hot’ and hence refers to particular African and Middle Eastern climate zones. Second, Ham and his son Canaan are, according to Biblical genealogy, considered the progenitors of many African and Middle Eastern cultures, and hence people who were (and still largely are) conceived to be Black, while Japeth is regarded as the progenitor of most European and thus, according to the Biblical understanding, white peoples, from the Greeks and Iberians to the Scythians and Irish.

Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival is a relevant cultural-historical document that demonstrates how ‘skin colour’ was conceptualised in the 12th and 13th centuries as a category of difference that was interwoven with religious difference and heavily influenced by Christian colour symbolism, thus demonstrating an awareness of the believed superiority of whiteness. Parzival’s most central trait is his Christian faith. Although he is not described explicitly as having ‘white skin’, the importance of (his) whiteness comes to light in a reflexive fashion when other characters are introduced as being non-white: Belacane, who is positioned as a “dusky moorish Queen”13, and Feirefiz, her son.

Before Gahmuret meets Parzival’s mother Herzeloyde, he falls in love with Belacane and sires Feirefiz with her. When leaving Belacane, he claims that he does not do so because of her “swerze”14 [blackness], but rather because of her faith.15 The mere fact, however, that he evokes blackness as a marker of difference (even though to declare it being non-relevant), suggests that in the binary opposite of Islam/Christian a difference of ‘skin colour’ resonates, too.

The fact that van Eschenbach is well aware of the meaning of ‘skin colour’ is, indeed, manifested throughout the text, for example in the words with which the narrator depicts the love encounter between Gahmuret and Belacane: “The Queen disarmed him with her own dark

12 Newman, “And Wash the Ethiop White”, 148. Cf.: Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human, 41-42. 13 Eschenbach, Parzival (Penguin), 30. 14 Eschenbach, Parzival (Reclam), I.2 91 5, p. 158. 15 Cf.: Ibid., I.1 55 25: 96-97; I.2 94 11-15, p. 162/163.

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hands … The Queen yielded to sweet and noble love with Gahmuret, her heart’s own darling, little though their skins matched in colour.”16 In as far as Gahmuret and Belacane’s love is described as “sweet” and “noble”, it seems to be unaffected by racialising notions; however, the very qualification evoked by the fact that their skin is described as “ungelîch”; that is, different, marks that there is knowledge about ‘skin colour’ being a relevant category of difference. Moreover, theorems of later ‘race theories’ are already anticipated in Parzival in as far as the child (Feirefiz) sired by their love is portrayed as divergent from the norm of human nature in that he is born with a skin that “was pied”.17 He was “both black and white… His hair and all his skin were particoloured like a magpie.”18

By comparing Feirefiz to a magpie, the rhetorical figure of ‘colonial Othering’ by employing animal metaphors is applied. Moreover, by inventing him as a freckled human being (as is implied by his name Feirefiz translating as pied son), the racist thesis is employed that a cross-breeding of different ‘races’ will lead to abnormalities. Even if these are called “marvels”, they position him as differing from the white norm. What is more, by making Belacane kiss the “white patches” of her son’s skin, van Eschenbach has her even position whiteness above Blackness,19 thus devaluing (her own) Blackness. In doing so, she is made to echo and affirm the epic’s opening lines, where the magpie allegory is introduced.20 Here, in the logic of Christian colour symbolism, the white (of the magpie) represents the colour of honour, loyal temper, courage, and Heaven and is contrasted with black (of the magpie) as the symbol of cowardice, shame, infidelity and Hell.

His white patches seem to enable Feirefiz, in contrast to his mother, who is Black only, to live in Europe and among Christians. Yet the fact that he has black patches makes Feirefiz Parzival’s antithetical ‘Other’. Analogously, in terms of religion, Feirefiz is in-between. While Belacane merely claims that she intends to get baptised, Feirefiz wholeheartedly takes this step. It is true that this allows him to see the Grail, marry its carrier and thus enter Parzival’s world. Because he was born a Moslem, however, he is not allowed to belong to it. While in other medieval works,

16 Cf.: Ibid., 34; Cf.: “Dôpflac diu küneginne/ Einer werden süezer minne,/ und Gamuret ir herzen trût./ ungelîch war doch ir zweier hût” (I.1 44 27-30: 78/79). 17 Ibid., I.1 57, 16: 100-101. 18 Ibid., 25.10-16: 40; Cf.: „wîz und swarzer varwe er schein .../Als ein agelster wart gevar/sîn hâr und ouch sîn vel vil gar.” (I.1 57 17, 27-28, 100-101). 19 Cf.: “diu küngîn juste in sunder twâl/ vildicke an sînbu blanken mâl” (I.1 57 19-20, p. 100-101). 20 Ibid., I.1 1 1-14: 6-7.


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such as the romance King of Tars, a person’s converting to Christianity is accompanied by his becoming white (or his casting off of dreadful physical features), there is no indication here that Feirefiz’s ‘skin colour’ or position in the symbolic order of ‘skin colours’ changes. On the contrary, ultimately, Parzival summons him to go back to where he belongs – namely to India, as the Orient is now geographically confined. This reveals that Feirefiz is to remain a ‘foreigner’ in Europe – and that the religion he was born into plays just as much a fundamental role therein as ‘skin colour’. In actual fact, it is not Feirefiz who goes down in history as the first white Christian leader in the Orient, but rather his son, Priest Johannes, born a Christian and by a white mother, who goes down in history as the first white Christian leader in the Orient. Ultimately, the characters of Belacane and Feirefiz do “not tell us that differences in skin colour were not important at that time, but rather that religious and cultural differences were already colour-coded… The black/white dichotomy fuses with the one between Islam and Christianity.”21

This fusion was performed particularly in the religiously informed war for supremacy between the Spaniards and Northern African peoples in the Iberian Peninsula, which started in the early 8th century and was won in 1492 by the Spaniards. On the side of the Spanish, the war was accompanied by a rhetoric of anti-Islam racism that relied heavily on the aforementioned religious colour symbolism. A manifestation of this is the very fact that the apostle James, who became the Spaniards’ patron called “matamoros” [moor-killer], was enveloped in whiteness – as is documented not least in 16th century paintings which surround him in light, dress him in white clothes and portray a desire for white skin.

‘Skin Colour’ as a Category of Slavery and 16th Century Early Colonialism

Following Columbus’s infamous error that made Europe get to know the Americas, Europeans began in the 16th century to conquer and populate territories outside of Europe. In doing so, they appropriated their riches, oppressed, enslaved and murdered their peoples. Such actions contradicted everything which Europe claimed to have stood for ever since antiquity and, more specifically, in the Renaissance: freedom, democracy, ethics, ‘civilisation’ and the primacy of human dignity.22 Hence they longed for a

21 Loomba, “Religion, Colour, and Racial Difference”, 47-48. 22 Cf. Arndt, “Myths and Masks of ‘Travelling’: Colonial Migration and Slavery in Shakespeare’s Othello, The Sonnets and The Tempest.”

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reason which could explain and legitimate that which was neither to be justified nor legitimated– violence, war, genocide and terror. As a consequence, Europeans started to create a myth of European superiority to those peoples whom they were about to murder, enslave and disown. This claim of superiority was pillared by both Christianity and the implementation of ‘skin colour’ as a naturally given category of difference, which were now fed into a newly created category: ‘race’.

Being applied by various theologians, scholars and writers as early as the late 16th century, the idea of an existence of ‘human races’ centred on a message which was as simple as it was silly: the ‘white race’ is superior to all other ‘races’.23 Integral to this invention was a racialising religious discrimination against adherers of non-Christian religions.

Part and parcel of this invention of ‘race’ was that – in an obvious rebirth of Aristotle’s theory of slavery and an exploitation of Christian colour symbolism - the ‘white race’ was defined to be entitled to enslave and colonise those the whites claimed to be their racial ‘Other’. This process of ‘Othering’ comprised both demonisation and exotification as two sides of the same coin. Central to both layers of alterisation is the century-old rhetoric of equating the ‘Other’ with ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘culture’ and constructing it as the link between man and animal. In thus dehumanising the colonised, the colonial space could be depeopled in a virtual way – which was, in turn, a precondition to claim that the colonial space were a terra nullius waiting to be ‘discovered’ and become Europe’s ‘New World’. Reality was, however, that this terra nullius needed first of all to be produced by eradicating local and deep-rooted cultural, political, religious and social structures, which led to genocide and the deportation of enslaved people.

This emergence of ‘race’ with whiteness as its superior centre was, in turn, catalytic as it evoked an excessive celebration of white ‘skin colour’, as particularly performed in Early Modern England under Elizabeth I and as is documented in many contemporary paintings.24 The self-glorification of Elisabeth I as the white-painted queen is based on the aspiration of the ageing queen to present her unmarried and childless status in terms of Christian imagery of virginity and virtue. Yet, the excess of whiteness embodied and promoted by her in politics, cosmetics and arts also framed

23 Cf.: Jordan, White over Black, 10. 24 Cf. Hall, “‘These Bastard Signs of Fair’. Literary Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, 65.


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England’s ambitions to enter the European project of trading African people as slaves and of conquering what had been declared the ‘New World’.25

This excess of whiteness found its aesthetic counterpart in a hyperbole of fairness that characterises English Renaissance literature. In Shakespeare’s works, for example, where the word ‘race’ is used 18 times with reference to humans, fairness is one of the 10 most commonly used words. Interestingly, besides the conventional appraisal of fairness as a most cherished attribute of the female body, in his sonnets he also ascribes fairness to a white aristocratic man. This seems to correspond to the economic and political need of early colonialism to constitute whiteness as a new marker of power, which then, of course, could not remain a realm of women, but needed to become a domain of English/European masculinity. Yet by thus praising homoerotic love, he simultaneously challenges contemporary notions of fairness. This becomes even more striking in as far as – in the so-called “dark lady”-corpus of his sonnets –, Shakespeare opposes the beauty ideal as propagated and embodied by Queen Elisabeth I in particular and the Elizabethans in general. His lyrical I ascribes fairness not to a brunette white “dark lady” – as is commonly claimed irrespective of the fact that the woman is dressed in blackness and associated with slavery yet never called a lady and associated with “darkness” only once – but to a Black female slave who has been forced into prostitution, who is never in the corpus called dark or a lady, but who is more likely an African female slave forced into prostitution. This, for example, is manifested when in sonnet 130 he declares:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun … If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;/If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head; I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks.26

In his challenge of Elizabethan notions of fairness and beauty the lyrical I even goes as far as resituating blackness as embodiment of beauty:

25 After all, Elisabeth I supported John Hawkin’s efforts to enslave and trade Africans just as much as Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonial ambitions of conquest. Further, she decreed in 1596 und 1601 that Blacks were to be expelled from England, being concerned with keeping it white. Cf. Arndt, Mythen von Weißsein und die englischsprachige Literatur, forthcoming. 26 Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 369.

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In the old age black was not counted fair,/Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name; But now is black beauty’s successive heir; And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.27

Here, just as much as in The Tempest and Othello, Shakespeare portrays and challenges the colonialist inventions of his time, even establishing himself as an early critic of racism, colonial endeavours and notions of white superiority.

‘Race’ as a Transforming Structural Category of Enlightenment

In as far as the missionary project to Christianise the world was part and parcel of colonial liturgy and practice, Black slaves and other colonised people were baptized. As a consequence, in the 18th century, the persuasiveness of the European ideologem that Christians could not be slaves faded – even though still adduced as late as 1719 by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe.

Simultaneously, when in the process of colonial settlements and deportations it became obvious that comparable latitudes and climatic conditions could support highly varied complexions and, conversely, that differing climatic conditions could produce similar shades of ‘skin colour’, doubts about the suitability of established patterns of explanation, such as climate theories, became stronger and more widely uttered and doubts increasingly began to emerge as to whether ‘skin colour’ (alone) was strong enough to pillar the category of ‘race’.28

Since the myth of ‘race’ was needed, however, to pillar slavery and colonialism just as much as its anti-Judaist and anti-Islamic rhetorics and action, Europe did not disavow it, but rather was eager to reorient it in order to reinforce it. Thus, from the mid-17th century onwards, natural scientists and philosophers set out – in a pan-European project – to establish a scientific underpinning for the existence of ‘races’ that did not discard Christianity and ‘skin colour’ as categories of difference (and related theological explanations and climate theories) completely, but rather complemented them by new theoretical approaches and criteria. In doing so, century-old criteria, such as the texture of hair, the form of the nose and lips and the shape of the face, cheekbones and skull, were revitalised and new criteria such as the skeleton, the skull and the

27 Ibid., 375. 28 Cf.: Lim, Walter S. H. The Arts of Empire, 130; Jordan, White over Black, 14-17.


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constituency of blood, were probed and dismissed – and revitalised, only to be dismissed and probed again. It can be observed that the manifold attempts of proving the existence of human ‘races’ penetrated deeper and deeper into the human body – starting off from complexion and hair and ending up with the attempt to verify racialising genes – only to, most recently, revitalise skin colour and Christianity as identitary determinants of the white European Self.

This tendency to search for intrinsic features of the body as markers of mental, cultural and religious differences continued to rely on theology and philosophy, but also brought about many newly aligned scientific disciplines, such as phrenology, physiognomy, comparative anatomy and anthropology, which were to produce racist theories of bodily measurement. This tendency found its peak during the Enlightenment. Connoting the constructed bodily differences culturally, mentally and religiously, binarisms already probed in antiquity, such as civilisation as opposed to barbarism and reason and progress as opposed to the absence of these, were amalgamated with the somewhat younger binarism of Christianity as opposed to Islam, Judaism and paganism.

Immanuel Kant, who was strongly influenced by David Hume, introduced the term ‘race’ to the German intellectual discourse on the Enlightenment; initially he used (following the example of David Hume) the English term ‘race’ (rather than the German equivalent ‘Rasse’), also employing it in the beginning at times as a synonym for ‘class’. Putting himself in the tradition of antiquity and Renaissance, Kant believed in the existence of hereditarily determined skin colours – whereby he describes other sub-criteria, such as perspiration odours, blood characteristics (of Blacks) and a less sensitive skin (of the Indians) as relevant, too. He also claimed that these physical differences were to be interpreted mentally and positioned in a hierarchy. Thus, for example, he insisted that the difference between whites and Blacks was not fundamental with regard just to colour, but also to the ability to experience deeper feelings. Thus framed, he identifies four races.29

To what extent Kant’s theories on ‘race’ were linked to the aspiration to legitimise slavery, is exhibited, for instance, in his hypotheses that, among the “hundreds of thousands of blacks” (and cynically enough he refers here only to slaves), “not a single one [was] ever found who was able to imagine anything great with regard to art or science, or any other honourable characteristic”. By contrast there were ample examples of how “the whites continually rose above [...] the lowest masses and, through

29 Cf.: Kant, “Von den verschiedenen Racen der Menschen”, 11-32.

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excellent ability, acquired respect in the world. The difference between these two human races is so fundamental, and it seems to be just as fundamental with regard to the ability to experience finer feelings as with regard to colour.”30

Eager to integrate ‘race’ into his philosophical system, Kant constructed a hierarchy of ‘races’ that was based on ‘rationality’, ‘ethics’, ‘maturity’ and ‘educability’ as differentiating features. According to Kant, the assumption needed to be made that humanity was in a state of constant development and that a natural law existed according to which advanced ‘development’ resulted in ‘progressed civilisation’.31 Simultaneously, he translated, to apply Dipesh Chakrabarty’s stratagem of analysis, cultural differences into historical time gaps, meaning that if the Europeans encountered cultures which were different from their own, they simply reduced them to the formula of allegedly lagging far behind and longing to become like Europeans. Further, like other philosophers of the Enlightenment, he placed People of Colour and their cultures in the “waiting room of history”, where, as “not-yet cultures”, they were made to remain white Europe’s ‘Other’.32 Part and parcel of this construct was the myth of the “white man’s burden”. It positioned the white man as being capable, legitimised and even obliged to help those ‘Others,’ who, in his view, should be granted developmental latitude to progress and ‘civilisation’ – whereby, due to the Others’ allegedly naturally given inferiority, the condition of the white male subject could never be achieved by the ‘Others’. Being white presented itself hereby as normative and normalising, as the sole agent and, thereby, the sole existing subject in history. Thus framed, he declared slavery and the respective positions within its hierarchical order as defined by nature and hence legitimate.

In his lectures on the Philosophy of History (1830/1831), Hegel also explicitly advocates this line of thought. On ten of the work’s approximate 600 pages, he postulates that Africa is devoid of moral standards, ethics, humanity, love, religion and respect for life. Based on this, he denies Africa all historic change and social dynamic.

The way we [whites, S.A.] see [the Africans, S.A.] today is how they have always been [...] Africa [...] is not a historic part of the world, it exhibits no movement or development, and what has happened to it, meaning in its north, belongs to the Asian and European world ... What we actually

30 Kant, “Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen”, 253. 31 Cf.: Piesche, “Der ‘Fortschritt’ der Aufklärung – Kants ‘Race’ und die Zentrierung des weißen Subjekts”. 32 Cf.: Chakrabarty, “Introduction”, Provincializing Europe, 3-21.


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consider to be Africa is a place devoid of history and being untapped, completely captivated in its natural spirit, a place that must be presented here on the mere threshold of world history.33

What is more, he holds that Africans were lacking any sense of justice and freedom. This in turn would explain why Africans were to be enslaved by Europeans. He even goes as far as to claim that the “only substantial connection that the negro has had and will have with the European is slavery.”34 According to him, by enslaving Africans, Europe was teaching them an understanding of freedom. When, in the long run, Europe would be successful at this, it would put an end to slavery.35 Given the fact that Hegel gave his lectures on the Philosophy of History decades after the Haitian revolution (1791-1804) and the first successes of abolitionism, these considerations amounted to a cynicism that stayed far below Hegel’s intellectual capabilities.

This lack of concern for accuracy in intellectual reflection, which could not be missed by alert contemporaries and hence cannot be explained but by racism being en vogue during his time, also characterised scientists, such as the Dutch phrenologist Petrus Camper (1722-1789). He aimed to measure and plot the dimensions of the human skull in order to establish a direct link between ‘racial’ difference on the one hand and dichotomic structures in terms of intellect and reason on the other. However, he based his scale of ‘races’ on merely seven skulls, and one of the heads was presented misleadingly. “When geometrically calculating the skull volume of the Greek bust of Apollo,” which served as the model for the white norm, Camper added on “a few centimetres, certainly attributable to Apollo’s fine head of hair, rather than to his skull size.”36

‘Race’ as a Transforming Structural Category of Scientific Racism

The obvious lack of persuasiveness of patterns of explanation as provided by Hegel and Camper, however, once again did not result in abandoning these theories, but rather in reformulating them. After all, the end of slavery was tantamount to a reorientation of colonialism, which rushed towards its imperialist era. Simultaneously, European definitions of its

33 Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, 162-163, emphasis mine. 34 Ibid., 162. 35 Ibid., 163. 36 Becker, Mann und Weib, 41.

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Christian ‘Self’ continued to rely on an anti-Judaist and anti-Islamic rhetoric. Hence, ‘race’ theories were needed as desperately as before to disguise Europe’s violence and patterns of discrimination that were to serve its economic and political interests. Facing the mentioned difficulties of proving the existence of ‘races’ by measuring the visible body, scientifically-oriented ‘race’ theories started to concentrate on invisible determining factors, resulting from inherited dispositions. Among these, blood was increasingly considered of crucial importance37 when attempting to identify ‘races’ genetically.38 Even though the scientific ‘race’ theories thus reached a stage where they could no longer be reassessed by laymen, they did not manage to overcome their inconsistencies. This comes to light in an exemplary fashion with the mere fact that the number of identified ‘races’ increased exponentially. At the start of the nineteenth century it was commonly assumed that around five to seven races existed. At the turn of the century, however, a figure of more than one hundred ‘races’ was circulating.39

This renewed paradigm shift that had penetrated even deeper into the human body was accompanied by a further radicalisation of the theoretical interpretation of alleged racial differences. In 1855 Arthur de Compte Gobineau published his book An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, in which he introduced the idea of the Aryan race and made the ‘race’ theories speak even more tartly by propagating that ‘superior’ ‘races’ (like the Aryan one) should ward off the ‘inferior’ ones. This line of thinking, which was met with considerable interest in Germany, laid the path for the ‘race wars’ and ‘racial cleansing’ of the 20th century. As for Germany, as early as 1904-1908 the German colonial power reacted on the revolts of Herero and Nama in what was then Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika with a genocidal terror. Four decades later Germany turned to the horrors of National Socialism and the Shoah. Europe did not recognize, or chose not to recognize, how it had declined into a ‘racial fanaticism’ that initially led to a bloody colonialism frenzy and later to the National Socialists’ obsession with ‘race’ – and its climax, the Shoah.

37 Ibid., 10-11. 38 By taking this approach, ‘race’ theorists from various scientific disciplines were following a fundamental trend of nineteenth century science, which – as was demonstrated by Foucault – saw an academic turn away from sciences that were largely concerned with surface areas to sciences that sought to identify structures and fundamental relationships linking the surface and the underlying depths. Cf.: Wheeler, The Complexion of Race, 32-33. 39 Cf. Becker: Mann und Weib – schwarz und weiß, 11.


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‘Race’ as a Shared Discriminatory Category of Colonialism and National Socialism

Of course, the ideological framework of National Socialism did not emerge from a vacuum. Rather, it built upon an existing tradition to employ theorems of ‘race’ in order to maintain that bodily differences mark religious, cultural and mental hierarchies and that these hierarchies entitle those who declare themselves superior to violate human rights and wreak terror. While whiteness was still needed to support colonial endeavours (which Germany actually never ceased to pursue), National Socialism built upon a new hierarchy within whiteness, which positioned the category of Aryan as “Indo-German Herrenrasse” and, as profiled by Gobineau, the most ‘superior race’. Moreover, the colonial practices of expulsion, deportment, racialising legislation, concentration camps as well as committing mass murder and genocide represent an obvious basis for the terror and atrocities of National Socialism. What is more, the intent of National Socialism to rule Europe comprised, as was claimed by Adolf Hitler and discussed by Robert Young,40 the eager concern to reconquer the colonialised world. These and other obvious discursive and structural continuities between colonialism and National Socialism ask for theoretical paradigms that know how to compare National Socialism and colonialism – yet with an awareness for the power and meaning of given divergences.

Beyond Remembrance: Europe’s “Habit of Ignoring Race”

Even when National Socialism in Germany was crushed and – not least in this way catalytically influenced – Europe’s colonial world had been destroyed by revolutionary processes of liberation, the white Western world did not unlearn racism. What it did learn, however, was to taboo it. As Toni Morrison puts it, the “habit of ignoring race” is widely considered “a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture.”41 This is particularly true for Germany. The ‘race’ frenzy committed by National Socialism in the name of ‘race’ has given birth to a historical sense of shame in Germany, which, paradoxically enough, in turn, has resulted in a longing to silence

40 The historian Robert Young described National Socialism most appropriately as a “European colonialism brought home to Europe by a country that had been deprived of its overseas empire after World War I” (Young, White Mythologies). 41 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 9-10.

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‘race’/race and racism. Just as much as Germany’s endeavours of remembrance with respect to National Socialism thus by necessity had to remain insufficient, white European and US-American societies cherish forgetting with respect to the atrocities of slavery and colonialism.

Where the past is, however, not reassessed, it manages to rule the present. This is to say that Europe’s failure to face its history of slavery, colonialism and National Socialism appropriately makes its ideology of racism and the related myths survive largely unchallenged. Racism continues to exist structurally and discursively. It has invaded the white Western archives of knowledge as performed in media, language and education. As a consequence, there is a symbolic order of race which, up until today, assigns people social positions in a politically powerful way.

Here we have reached another gist of the matter of race: The “silence about ‘race’”42 did not come along with an overcoming of the racist rhetoric of ‘Othering’; in fact, it simply performs as a silence about (discussing) whiteness.43 Racialising hegemonies and differences that are anchored structurally and mentally and racialised positions cannot, however, be overcome by simply claiming that ‘races’ do not exist or that whiteness does not matter. It is possible neither to simply abandon the term and concept of ‘race’, nor to apply it claiming that one would simply no longer use it in a biologistic and evaluating way. On the contrary, to negate the social position, privileges, and rhetoric of whiteness amounts to naturalising and redoubling the hegemony of whiteness.

The ‘Racial Turn’: Race and Whiteness as Critical Categories of Analysis

A theoretical concept which I, relying on Shankar Raman, have labelled the ‘racial turn’,44 offers a methodological framework to negate the existence of human ‘races’ and yet to speak about what this myth has done with and to the world and how racism has infected Europe discursively and structurally. To say it in the words of Colette Guillaumin’s famous quotation: “Race does not exist. But it does kill people.”45 In a double movement of thought the racial turn leads away from ‘race’ (written in

42 Lentin, “Europe and the Silence about Race”, 487-503. 43 Cf.: Aanerud, “Fiction of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature”, 35; Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, 12. 44 Raman, The Racial Turn, 255; cf.: Arndt, “Weißsein – zur Genese eines Konzepts”. 45 Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, 107.


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inverted commas) as a biological construct and simultaneously towards race (written in italics) as a social position and analytical category of knowledge and criticism.

Furthermore, in my definition the racial turn is concerned with surpassing conventional notions of ‘race’ as a matter of Blackness and overcoming contemporary visions that conceive white as ‘unraced’, ‘neutral’ and ‘universal’. The ‘racial turn’ identifies that whiteness has become the ‘unmarked marker’ and ‘invisible normality’ of processes of racialisation, thus resituating ‘race’ in its given relationality.46 Thus framed, the ‘racial turn’ deconstructs whiteness as the subject, norm and engine of the history of ‘race’.47 In this vein, whiteness is not to be misunderstood as a naturally given entity based on pigmentation or other bodily attributes. Rather, whiteness is to be read as having been fabricated by history. Not natural visibility, but practised, constructed and interpreted visibility is significant. The focus is not skin colour, but rather its ideological construction. Moreover, the racial turn identifies that whiteness is a “currency of power”,48 guarantees privileges and evokes collective patterns of perception, knowledge and action that have a discursive and structural impact on societal processes. What is important in this respect is that whiteness is at work even if masked by white people’s unawareness. Whiteness is not, as George Yancy convincingly argues, an individual choice, but a systemic position which is a form of inheritance whose longevity needs to be acknowledged and faced.49 Yet, in as far as whiteness interweaves with other structural categories – for instance sex, gender, nationality, education, religion, mobility or health – ruptures, qualifications and amplifications of power and privileges connected to whiteness occur. Caused by this networking of hegemonies and symbolic

46 Attitudes and behaviours of white people and cultures have already been analysed by earlier theorists of racism such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Edward Said (Cf.: Fanon, Les damnés de la terre; Memmi, Portrait du colonisé précédé du Portrait colonisateur; Memmi, Le racisme: description, définition, traitement; Said, Orientalism). Yet it was only in the early 1990s that the field of research known as ‘Critical Whiteness Studies’ emerged which takes whiteness into account in addition to Blackness and in its complex relationship to Blackness, thus resituating ‘race’/race as a relational category of knowledge and criticism. For an introduction to this field see Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness; Eggers, Kilomba, Piesche & Arndt, Mythen, Masken und Subjekte. 47 Cf.: Arndt, “‘The Racial Turn.’ Kolonialismus, Weiße Mythen und Critical Whiteness Studies”. 48 Cf.: Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness, 15. 49 Cf.: Yancy, What White Looks Like, 8-9, 14.

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orders, whiteness manifests itself (though within the systemic boundaries of whiteness) in a dynamic and complex way. This does not allow, however, negotiations that would stipulate individual whites as off-white.

When wishing to revisit the history of whiteness, whiteness needs to be employed as a critical category of analysis. It is this approach that has informed my article in an attempt to show firstly, that antiquity, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are to be identified in their ambivalences and that their merits need to be identified along with their responsibilities for the atrocities of colonialism and National Socialism. Secondly, as I wish to argue in conclusion, colonialism has to be acknowledged as complementary master category of renarrating Europe and its endeavours to lend itself substance and identity by means of outward demarcations to a fabricated racial and religious ‘Other’. If Europe revisits its routes of historical becoming, the knowledge will reveal that ever since antiquity it has harboured multifaceted national, cultural, religious and racial identities. Acknowledging these identities will strengthen Europe in its contemporary endeavours to unite its member states and become one, thus making identity patterns of being European permeate into the bare brickwork that has been erected by the European Union. What is more, if Europe revisits the historical routes that renarrate its mythical roots, it will reposition itself in the entangled history, present and future of the world and shoulder the responsibility for its man-made deficits whose longevity needs to be acknowledged and faced - and first and foremost when addressing the question of ‘What is Europe?’

Beyond white Europe

‘Europe’ was and is an indistinct term changing with the times, a metaphor like ‘the West’, ‘Occident’, ‘Orient’ and many others. Of course, Europe is not religiously or culturally a ‘naturally’ homogeneous, given entity. Rather, Europe is an historical and political construct that has throughout more than two millenniums struggled hard to lend itself substance and identity by means of outward demarcations to a fabricated racial and religious ‘Other’. Even today, while the European Union longs for a transnational European house, it overemphasises Christianity and whiteness as its foundation – blanking out that what might be a pillar for white Christian Europeans, and is a bed of thorns for Europeans of Colour and European Moslems. Europe has grown to be a trans-space that harbours multifaceted national, cultural, religious and racial identities. For coalescing, however, it needs to revisit its politics of belonging just as much as its history of becoming. Thus, antiquity, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment


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are to be revisited in order to relate their merits just as much as their responsibility for European atrocities committed in the eras of slavery, colonialism and National Socialism. It is this approach of renarrating Europe that will offer new ways of understanding Europe in a global perspective.

It may be true that Europe exported to its colonies in many areas around the world cultural, religious, political and economic models that had developed over the course of centuries on European territory. Yet Europe did not conquer a vacuum, but rather culturally, politically and religiously structured societies. Consequently, Europe never managed to form the world into the mirror image of itself. Modernity did not simply emerge and expand, but rather processes of globalisation caused the generation of polyphonous and “entangled modernities”.50 The respective processes of abrogation and appropration include, as Paul Gilroy claims, the impact of the intellectual heritage of the West on Black “writing and speaking in pursuit of freedom, citizenship, and social and political autonomy”.51 These processes, in turn, also had a retroactive effect on Europe itself – on intellectual debates as well as on cultural, religious, political and social structures.

Diasporic Transspaces

An evident central manifestation of the emergence of Europe as provincialised trans-space is the migratory movement that brought people, together with their cultural and religious identities and knowledge systems, from former European colonies to Europe. As a result, new diasporas emerged. When defining and classifying these diasporas, Robert Cohen has identified two significant factors: the notion of their rootedness in their countries of origin and their struggle to be accepted as belonging to the mainstream society of their adopted countries.52

By thus interweaving the countries of origin and residence and, moreover, creating diasporic identities that transcend Europe’s national borders, the diasporas act, as Etienne Balibar has proposed, as precursors of a transnational European house. Moreover, conventional white notions are challenged, which assume both European and white to be synonymous and, as a consequence, European and Black identities “to be mutually

50 Cf.: Randeria, “Entangled Histories of Uneven Modernities. Civil Society, Caste Solidarities and Legal Pluralism in India”. 51 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 2. 52 Cf.: Cohen, Global Diasporas.

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exclusive”.53 Additionally, Paul Gilroy questions the belief that any act of “occupying the space between” Europe and Blackness is “a provocative and even oppositional act of political insubordination”. In his opinion, any notion of a “double consciousness” that claims that People of Colour in Europe and the US are both – for example, British and Nigerian –, would not exhaust “the subjective resources of any particular individual.”54 After all, processes of colonialism and globalisation have had a catalytic effect on the formation of the world and its subjects as a “socio-cultural continuum”55, to adopt Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s formula for creolisation. As for Édouard Glissant, this “unceasing process of” cultural interweaving56 and errant cultures is most pertinently expressed in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s57 metaphor of the rhizome.58 The root extends linearly, genealogically, lonesomely and predictably into the depths of the earth. Correspondingly, Glissant reads it as a metaphor for long-established cultures and territories. The rhizome, however, “maintains ... the idea of rootedness, but challenges that of a totalitarian root.”59 It expands, encountering others and cross-linking with them. In this manner, the rhizome presents itself in an unpredictable and dynamic way and hence is best suited to serve as a metaphor for complex and polyphonous cultures – and for overcoming conventional binarisms.60 Moreover, the rhizome proves to be the most appropriate way “of naming the processes of cultural mutuation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse”.61 It is this “rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation”, which Gilroy “call[s] the black Atlantic”.62

Referring to a transcultural and transracial dialogicity (in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin)63 between Western and non-Western cultures as well as Black diasporic cultures and their countries of residence, Gilroy’s stratagem of the Black Atlantic lays emphasis on historical processes that entangle Europe, “the Africans they enslaved,” the First Nations “they

53 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 1. 54 Ibid. 55 Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 310. 56 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 142. 57 Cf.: Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 58 Cf.: Deleuze & Guattari, Rhizom. 59 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11. 60 Cf.: Glissant, Kultur und Identität, 51. 61 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 2. 62 Ibid., 4. 63 Cf.: Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.


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slaughtered and the Asians they indentured”.64 In doing so, Gilroy insists on complementing the notion of diasporas as being “rooted” in their countries of origin and longing to become “rooted” in their adopted countries with the idea of “routes” as a strategic means to focus on the historical becoming of global positions and encounters.

Framing Postcolonial Literary Studies: Literatures in Motion and the Poetics of Relation

In 1946 Erich Auerbach predicted that the “Europeanization of the world” – as his quest for origins might be summarised using Wolfgang Reinhard’s65 more recent terminology – would lead to a unification and simplification, indeed a standardisation of cultures, which would also affect narrative structure and bring an end to cultural diversity. Glissant

also assumes that the literatures of the world are undergoing an interactive dynamic exchange. However, in contrast to Auerbach, he speaks of a global network of literature that is transculturally and rhizomically formed66 and influenced by historically grown and discursively based hegemonies. In an implicit allusion to the stratagem of “provincialising Europe” he asserts that any attempt to simplify and tame this complexity through the imposition of Western categories – as a mode of standardisation – amounts to a kind of ‘barbarism’. To accept that one is incapable of completely understanding the ‘Other’ is, however, a manifestation of ‘civilisation’ that helps one to recognise the “unity of liberating diversity”. It is this notion of transcultural literary performance that informs Glissant’s theory of a “poétique de la relation”.67

If literary studies wishes to do justice to the performances of entangled histories and the “literature in motion”68 created by these performances, it would do well to resituate its analytical tools and, correspondingly, its subjects, margins and terminology in conceptual accordance with this notion of a “poetics of relation”.

As far as terminology is concerned, this means, for example, coming to terms with Ottmar Ette’s observation that national literatures are no longer (if they ever were) composed of one’s being culturally, nationally or racially ‘rooted’ (i.e., born or patriated) in one’s respective country, but

64 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 1. 65 Reinhard, “Die Europäisierung der Erde und deren Folgen”, 76-93. 66 Cf.: Glissant, Kultur und Identität, 54. 67 Glissant, Poétique de la relation. 68 Ette, ÜberLebenswissen.

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work according to a mobile and rhizomic logic.69 Consequently, it is unadvisable to place migration literature in binary opposition to national literature – or Black British literature to British literature (thus implicitly suggesting British to be synonymous with white). After all, this would mean to stick to the asymmetrical contrasting of an ‘unmarked hegemonial norm’ and its ‘marked Other’. It is true, a symmetrical pairing of, for example, Black British and white British writing would be a much more convincing alternative to this than simply adding literatures by People of Colour invisibly to national literatures.70 Yet, if one wishes to escape the trap of this aporia in a consequent manner, a sustainable solution seems to lie in a fundamental and yet epistemologically manageable reconceptualisation of terms such as ‘national literature’, ‘British literature’, and ‘African literature’.71

With respect to the subjects and margins of literary studies, in order to pursue another level, complementary and comparatively informed philological structures and categories are needed that – in a creative process of academic dialogicity, – cut through and criss-cross conventional structures of literary studies.72 Thus framed, epistemological necessities (merely tamed by linguistic competences), rather than narrow and outmoded nation- or language-bound philological pigeonholes, should set the agenda.

This idea of literary studies in motion that is structured in a transcultural and translinguistic fashion forms in accordance with cultural studies, is hosted most appropriately by the concept of postcolonialism as performed in postcolonial literary studies. By selecting colonialism and its aftermath as the master narrative of postcolonial literary studies, a transcultural perspective well aware of structures of difference and power and of the meaning of migration and globalisation is pursued. This framework enables literature to be rearranged in a rhizomic (dis)order. This again enables literatures from the margins to emerge as new centres/ and to approach national literatures in their given polyphonic and transnational guise in terms of language, culture and racialised positions. Postcolonial literary studies thus offer the most appropriate analytical tools to identify the dialogicity of the literatures of the world and both their narrations about global entanglements and the corresponding “poetics of relation”.

69 Ibid., 234. 70 Ibid., 242. 71 Cf. Arndt, “Europe and the Occidental Turn. Migration, Transcultural Narration and Literary Studies without a Permanent Residence”. 72 Ette, ÜberLebenswissen, 88-92.


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Europe, Race and Diaspora

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