Race and the Victorians
- The reign of Victoria o Mark Twain on occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubliee. British history is 2000 years old and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together.
- Post-colonial Theory o Racism is a projection on a colonial ‘Other’ of what is despised, troubling in the self o Racism reflects anxieties and issues in the metropole o Bill Schwartx, The White Man’s World (2011): ‘black and white are reciprocal entities… neither can exist without the other, for each is already the other’ (p. 184)
- Historical debate on race in the British Empire o Brattlinger, Taming Cannibals, Race and the Victorians o Racism endemic to systemn (expansive view) o ‘Ideologies of racism and imperialism were deeply symbiotic and often indistinguishable frm each other.’ – at home and abroad o ‘Light touch’ of other historians
- Others agree with Brattlinger… o Kenan Malik: racism is a ‘means of reconciling the conflict between ideology of equality and the reality of the persistence of inequality by attributing it to nature’ o Hannah Arendt – one of the inevitable offshoots of capitalism is colonisation – you need a mechanism for justification of exploitation
• Extreme inequality in colonies
• Needs to be justification
• Criminals in metropole – justification is racist discourse
- Opponents/Restrictions o Identity more complex and fluid than just race o Although because of 1970s cultural turn we are obsessed with race, this was not the case in 19th century o Darwin: Empire did not matter that much, thus imperial discourse about race does not matter o Porter: universal benevolence o Class mattered more than race o Contradiction in the superiority of Whites in their behaviour o Brattlinger: feared more other European races
- Race, Empire and Ideology o Some definitions:
• Ideology: meaning in the service of power
• Whiteness: an index for imagining what the
- Post-colonial Theory o Racism is a projection on a colonial ‘Other’ of what is despised, troubling in the self o Racism reflects anxieties and issues in the metropole o Bill Schwartx, The White Man’s World (2011): ‘black and white are reciprocal entities… neither can exist without the other, for each is already the other’ (p. 184)
- Historical debate on race in the British Empire o Brattlinger, Taming Cannibals, Race and the Victorians o Racism endemic to systemn (expansive view) o ‘Ideologies of racism and imperialism were deeply symbiotic and often indistinguishable frm each other.’ – at home and abroad o ‘Light touch’ of other historians
- Others agree with Brattlinger… o Kenan Malik: racism is a ‘means of reconciling the conflict between ideology of equality and the reality of the persistence of inequality by attributing it to nature’ o Hannah Arendt – one of the inevitable offshoots of capitalism is colonisation – you need a mechanism for justification of exploitation
• Extreme inequality in colonies
• Needs to be justification
• Criminals in metropole – justification is racist discourse
- Opponents/Restrictions o Identity more complex and fluid than just race o Although because of 1970s cultural turn we are obsessed with race, this was not the case in 19th century o Darwin: Empire did not matter that much, thus imperial discourse about race does not matter o Porter: universal benevolence o Class mattered more than race o Contradiction in the superiority of Whites in their behaviour o Brattlinger: feared more other European races
- Race, Empire and Ideology o Some definitions:
• Ideology: meaning in the service of power
• Whiteness: an index for imagining what the