Colonial Desire

Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race

Robert J. C. Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134938872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

The language of contemporary cultural theory shows remarkable similarities with the patterns of thought which characterised Victorian racial theory. Far from being marked by a separation from the racialised thinking of the past, Colonial Desire shows we are operating in complicity with historical ways of viewing 'the other', both sexually and racially. Colonial Desire is a controversial and bracing study of the history of Englishness and 'culture'. Robert Young argues that the theories advanced today about post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century. 'Englishness', Young argues, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.

1: HYBRIDITY AND DIASPORA

Walk through the majestic iron gates with which Greenwich Park faces the river Thames, and make your way up the steep grassy hill which overlooks the Isle of Dogs, and the level, desolate flats of East London. Follow the snaking, restless river westwards towards Rotherhithe, where the Mayflower pub irreverently marks the spot from which the puritanical Pilgrim Fathers emigrated to America in 1620. Keep climbing upwards, taking care not to stumble against the roots of any trees. As you reach the top, you find yourself standing before a large eighteenth-century building with elegant Georgian windows over-looking the river. You are facing the Old Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Walk round its walls until you come to a brass strip set in the pavement. The smooth, gold band in the ground marks the Prime Meridian, or Longitude Zero. At the top of this small hill, you have found yourself at the zero point of the world, at the centre of time itself. Paradoxically, for Greenwich to be the centre of the world in time it must be inscribed with the alterity of place. Stand to the left-hand side of the brass strip and you are in the Western hemisphere. But move a yard to your right, and you enter the East: whoever you are, you have been translated from a European into an Oriental. Put one foot back to the left of the brass strip and you become undecidably mixed with otherness: an Occidental and an Oriental at once. It was with a supremely knowing gesture towards the future that in 1884, the division of the newly homogenized temporal world into East and West was placed not in Jerusalem or Constantinople but in a South London suburb. In that gesture, it was acknowledged that the totality, the sameness of the West will always be riven by difference. With each passing decade London has been ever more successful in living up to its officially proclaimed heterogeneous identity, so that now, turning back towards the river and looking down at the park laid out below you, at the Londoners stretched out on the grass or wandering to and fro according to trajectories unknown to anyone except themselves, just walking home or coming and going from one country to the next, you could scarcely imagine a more varied mingling of peoples, whose ancestors hark back to the Caribbean and Africa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Tibet, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Balkans, mixed and merged with others whose predecessors turned up in the British Isles as Angles, Celts, Danes, Dutch, Irish, Jews, Normans, Norsemen, Saxons, Vikings…. The cleavage of East and West in that bronze strip on the hill has gradually been subsumed into a city that, with the potent attraction of economic power exerting the magnetic field of force of the North over the South, has drawn the far-off peripheries into the centre. And with that historic movement of intussusception, the Prime Meridian, the Longitude Zero, the centre of the world, has become inalienably mixed, suffused with the pulse of difference.

The Secret Agent, Conrad’s tale of an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, to destroy the imperial metropolitan centre at its heart, also charts a story of a complex cultural interaction taking place in the everyday life of the city. It shows that the London of 1894 was already defined by incongruous combinations of relationships, mentalities, genders, classes, nationalities and ethnicities. For Conrad, the anarchic ambiguities of the narrative become identified with a rivenness within English culture itself. Today the Englishness of the past is often represented in terms of fixity, of certainty, centredness, homogeneity, as something unproblematically identical with itself. But if this was ever so, which is seriously to be doubted, it is noticeable that in the literary sphere such forms of Englishness are always represented as other, as something which other people possess, often as an image of consummate masculinity—so, for example, in Jean Rhys’s novels, it is the distant, unresponsive men whom the heroines look to lean on that are always presented as possessing these untroubled characteristics.¹ If we consider the English novel, we find that what is portrayed as characterizing English experience is rather often the opposite, a sense of fluidity and a painful sense of, or need for, otherness. Perhaps the fixity of identity for which Englishness developed such a reputation arose because it was in fact continually being contested, and was rather designed to mask its uncertainty, its sense of being estranged from itself, sick with desire for the other.

It is striking that many novelists not only of today but also of the past write almost obsessively about the uncertain crossing and invasion of identities: whether of class and gender—the Brontës, Hardy or Lawrence—or culture and race—the Brontës again (the irresistible, transgressive Heathcliff is of mixed race), Haggard, Conrad (not only The Secret Agent, but also of course in Heart of Darkness, the imbrication of the two cultures within each other, the fascination with the ‘magnificent’ African woman, and among many other novels, his first, Almayer’s Folly, the story of an inter-racial marriage), James, Forster, Cary, Lawrence, Joyce, Greene, Rhys.² So much so, indeed, that we could go so far as to claim it as the dominant motif of much English fiction. Many novels of the past have also projected such uncertainty and difference outwards, and are concerned with meeting and incorporating the culture of the other, whether of class, ethnicity or sexuality; they often fantasize crossing into it, though rarely so completely as when Dr Jekyll transforms himself into Mr Hyde.³ This transmigration is the form taken by colonial desire, whose attractions and fantasies were no doubt complicit with colonialism itself. The many colonial novels in English betray themselves as driven by desire for the cultural other, for forsaking their own culture: the novels and travel-writings of Burton, Haggard, Stevenson, Kipling, Allen or Buchan are all concerned with forms of cross-cultural contact, interaction, an active desire, frequently sexual, for the other, or with the state of being what Hanif Kureishi calls ‘an inbetween’, or Kipling ‘the monstrous hybridism of East and West.’⁴ This dialogism was emphasized in the colonial arena, but it can also can be shown to be specific to English cultural identity in general. We shall see that even what is often considered a founding text of English culture, Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), is predicated on the fact that English culture is lacking, lacks something, and acts out an inner dissonance that constitutes its secret, riven self. For the past few centuries Englishness has often been constructed as a heterogeneous, conflictual composite of contrary elements, an identity which is not identical with itself. The whole problem—but has it been a problem?—for Englishness is that it has never been successfully characterized by an essential, core identity from which the other is excluded. It has always, like the Prime Meridian, been divided within itself, and it is this that has enabled it to be variously and counteractively constructed.

Englishness is itself also uncertainly British, a cunning word of apparent political correctness invoked in order to mask the metonymic extension of English dominance over the other kingdoms with which England has constructed illicit acts of union, countries that now survive in the international arena only in the realm of football and rugby. The dutiful use of the term ‘British’ rather than ‘English’, as Gargi Bhattacharyya observes, misses the point that in terms of power relations there is no difference between them: ‘British’ is the name imposed by the English on the non-English.⁵ (Even so, others remain excluded: the United Kingdom is in fact the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, with Northern Ireland left hanging on, hanging off dangling, as if it is ready to move away and re-embrace the rest of Eire.⁶)In the nineteenth century, the very notion of a fixed English identity was doubtless a product of, and reaction to, the rapid change and transformation of both metropolitan and colonial societies which meant that, as with nationalism, such identities needed to be constructed to counter schisms, friction and dissent. Today’s self-proclaimed mobile and multiple identities may be a marker not of contemporary social fluidity and dispossession but of a new stability, self-assurance and quietism. Fixity of identity is only sought in situations of instability and disruption, of conflict and change. Despite these differences, the fundamental model has not altered: fixity implies disparateness; multiplicity must be set against at least a notional singularity to have any meaning. In each case identity is self-consciously articulated through setting one term against the other; what has happened is that the hierarchy has now been reversed. Or has it?

The need for organic metaphors of identity or society implies a counter-sense of fragmentation and dispersion. There is a story behind the way in which the organic paradigm so beloved of the nineteenth century quickly developed alongside one of hybridity, grafting, of forcing incompatible entities to grow together (or not): to that extent, we still operate within its legacy of violence and corruption. The characteristic cultural movement produced by capitalist development in the nineteenth century was one of simultaneous processes of unification and differentiation. The globalization of the imperial capitalist powers, of a single integrated economic and colonial system, the imposition of a unitary time on the world, was achieved at the price of the dislocation of its peoples and cultures. This latter characteristic became visible to Europeans in two ways: in the disruption of domestic culture, and in the increasing anxiety about racial difference and the racial amalgamation that was apparent as an effect of colonialism and enforced migration. Both these consequences for class and race were regarded as negative, and a good deal of energy was expended on formulatirtg ways in which to counter those elements that were clearly undermining the cultural stability of a more traditional, apparently organic, now irretrievably lost, society. Yet by the 1850s there were already those such as Herbert Spencer who were asserting that ‘progress consists in a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous’.⁷

Today’s comparative certainty has arisen because heterogeneity, cultural interchange and diversity have now become the self-conscious identity of modern society. It is striking, however, given the long history of cultural interaction, how few models have been developed to analyse it. In the nineteenth century, models such as diffusionism and evolutionism conceptualized such encounters as a process of the deculturation of the less powerful society and its transformation towards the norms of the West. Today the dominant models often stress separateness, passing by altogether the process of acculturation whereby groups are modified through intercultural exchange and socialization with other groups. Since Sartre, Fanon and Memmi, postcolonial criticism has constructed two antithetical groups, the colonizer and colonized, self and Other, with the second only knowable through a necessarily false representation, a Manichean division that threatens to reproduce the static, essentialist categories it seeks to undo.⁸ In the same way, the doctrine of multiculturalism encourages different groups to reify their individual and different identities at their most different, thus, according to Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, encouraging extremist groups, who become ‘representative’ because they have the most clearly discernibly different identity.⁹ It is only recently that cultural critics have begun to develop accounts of the commerce between cultures that map and shadow the complexities of its generative and destructive processes.¹⁰

Historically, however, comparatively little attention has been given to the mechanics of the intricate processes of cultural contact, intrusion, fusion and disjunction. In archaeology, for example, the models have been ones of diffusion, assimilation or isolation, not of interaction or counteraction. Significant historical work has been done on the exchange of commodities, of diseases, of healing systems and of religions.¹¹ Otherwise, the most productive paradigms have been taken from language. Pidgin and creolized languages constitute powerful models because they preserve the real historical forms of cultural contact.¹² The structure of pidgin—crudely, the vocabulary of one language superimposed on the grammar of another—suggests a different model from that of a straightforward power relation of dominance of colonizer over colonized. Today this structural device is often repeated in novels in English so that the vernacular idiom tacitly decomposes the authority of the metropolitan form. If language preserves one major product of contact, a second, less usual model, which will be retrieved and developed in the course of this book, is equally literal and more physical: sex. In the British Empire, Hyam observes in a curiously unguarded metaphor, ‘sexuality was the spearhead of racial contact’.¹³ The historical links between language and sex were, however, fundamental. Both produced what were regarded as ‘hybrid’ forms (creole, pidgin and miscegenated children), which were seen to embody threatening forms of perversion and degeneration and became the basis for endless metaphoric extension in the racial discourse of social commentary. So, for example, in The Nigger Question’ (1849), Thomas Carlyle speaks of how the anti-slavery lobby and liberal Social Science,

led by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of it,—will give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon-calves, unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities, such as the world has not seen hitherto!¹⁴

Both these models of cultural interaction, language and sex, merge in their product which is characterized with the same term: hybridity. The word ‘hybrid’ has developed from biological and botanical origins: in Latin it meant the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar, and hence, as the OED puts it, ‘of human parents of different races, half-breed’. The OED continues: ‘A few examples of this word occur early in the seventeenth century; but it was scarcely in use until the nineteenth’. ‘Hybrid’ is the nineteenth century’s word. But it has become our own again. In the nineteenth century it was used to refer to a physiological phenomenon; in the twentieth century it has been reactivated to describe a cultural one. While cultural factors determined its physiological status, the use of hybridity today prompts questions about the ways in which contemporary thinking has broken absolutely with the racialized formulations of the past.

A hybrid is defined by Webster in 1828 as ‘a mongrel or mule; an animal or plant, produced from the mixture of two species’. Its first recorded use in the nineteenth century to denote the crossing of people of difference races is given in the OED as 1861. Although this is certainly too late (it was used by Josiah Nott in 1843), this date is certainly significant.¹⁵ Prichard had already used the term ‘hybrid’ in the context of the question of human fertility as early as 1813.¹⁶ However, since the whole point of his argument was to deny that humans were different species, he never directly used the term ‘hybrid’ to describe humans, speaking instead of ‘mixed’ or ‘intermediate’ races. Its appearance between 1843 and 1861, therefore, marks the rise of the belief that there could be such a thing as a human hybrid. The word’s first philological use, to denote ‘a composite word formed of elements belonging to different languages’, dates from 1862. An OED entry from 1890 makes the link between the linguistic and racial explicit: The Aryan languages present such indications of hybridity as would correspond with…racial intermixture’.¹⁷

HYBRIDITY AND FERTILITY

In the nineteenth century, as in the late twentieth, hybridity was a key issue for cultural debate. The reasons differ, but are not altogether dissimilar. The question had first been broached in the eighteenth century when the different varieties of human beings had been classed as part of the animal kingdom according to the hierarchical scale of the Great Chain of Being. Predictably the African was placed at the bottom of the human family, next to the ape, and there was some discussion as to whether the African should be categorized as belonging to the species of the ape or of the human. The dominant view at that time was that the idea of humans being of different species, and therefore of different origins, conflicted with the Biblical account; moreover, the pressure of the Anti-Slavery campaign meant that the emphasis was very much on all humans belonging to a single family. But there were some dissenters. Edward Long, a Jamaican slave-owner, argued in his influential History of Jamaica of 1774, that ‘for my own part, I think there are extremely potent reasons for believing that the White and the Negro are two distinct species’.¹⁸ In British scientific circles, the idea was first formally proposed by the Manchester surgeon Charles White in his Account of the Regular Gradation of Man (1799). With White we can see Long’s expedient prejudices move into the realm of scientific theory. Yet, as the li...