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The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power : Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
_________________________
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Pan-Africanism or Sexual Imperialism: White Supremacy, Hellenomania, and Discourses of Sexuality
2. The Madness of Gender in Plantation America: Sex, Womanhood, and U.S. Chattel Slavery, Revisited
3. Sexual Imitation and the Lumpen-Bourgeoisie: Race and Class as Erotic Conflict in E. Franklin Frazier
4. Sexual Imitation and the “Greedy Little Caste”: Race and Class as Erotic Conflict in Frantz Fanon
5. Colonialism and Erotic Desire—in English: The Case of Jamaica Kincaid
6. Neo-colonial Canons of Gender and Sexuality, after COINTELPRO: Black Power Bodies/Black Popular Culture and Counter-insurgent Critiques of Sexism and Homophobia
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
_______________________________
SAMPLE CONTENT
1
Pan-Africanism or Sexual Imperialism
WHITE SUPREMACY, HELLENOMANIA, AND DISCOURSES OF SEXUALITY
Before somebody else dies, literally, I want to begin with an illustration; to make my ultimate point about white sexual violence, historically, and Black people. I want to begin with a powerfully illustrative reference, or set of references. Yet as soon as I get speci¤c, to make this case poignant and current, current events manage to date my examples, make them look old, manufacturing new cases overnight which insist upon our attention despite all ¤ltering by the popular as well as academic media. I could recall the public strip-searching of Black Power activists, deployed nationwide to at once humiliate and titillate; the new gang plunger rapes of Black males in police departments (or prisons) on one U.S. coast, for example, before a carnival of bullets was ¤red on an unwitting Black male by a special police squad in search of its own serial rapist; the town showerhanging and draggings to death of Black men in the South and the Rocky Mountains; or the state murder of a young Black female, on the other U.S. coast, whose person was seen as so dangerous that she was said to pose a lethal threat even after she had fallen asleep, afraid, in her stalled car. From coast to coast, and beyond, I want to begin with one current illustration, but . . .
The entire history of our African presence in American captivity lays bare a raw sexual terror that de¤nes the cult of white supremacy here and elsewhere. Whether we think of the ceaseless assault on Black family existence, the obscene hysterics of apartheid lynching, the physical violations of direct and indirect colonization, or the sadomasochistic torture of formal enslavement and its transoceanic trade in ®esh, we see that the rule of Europe has assumed a notably erotic form. Even so, despite a certain common sense rooted in Africana resistance to the ravages of empire, the carnal dynamics of white domination rarely receive sustained critical attention.
An eruption of “sexual [intellectual] discourse” in the 1980s and ’90s changed this situation very little, if at all. In certain quarters of the United States of America, not to mention the West at large, the professed social construction of gender and sexuality has acquired the status of a cliché, however controversial a theory it may remain for some. The biological naturalization of erotic life is refuted, in principle, by the facts of cultural formation. Still, only certain forces of culture are acknowledged by such accounts. The really nasty fact that sexual personas and practices are ritually constructed as well as theorized in the service of colonial imperial structures of “race,” or white supremacy, has not been the subject of academic commerce under Occidentalism.1 The much-celebrated denaturalization of sex is not concerned with this program. The even trendier refrain of “race, gender, class, and sexuality” actually obscures key aspects of social life insofar as it rei¤es these contingent Western analytic categories as discrete empirical phenomena that can be ideologically negotiated at will. As a rule, therefore, the erotic brutality of what is termed race is cleanly repressed by the very language of sex in “First World” orientations, and quite consequentially for so-called “Third World” peoples.
Historicity and Sexuality or Aryanism and Hellenomania
We can see how this is done in the now-canonical deliberation on homosexuality conducted by John Boswell (“Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories”) and David Halperin (“Sex before Sexuality”) in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, the prominent anthology edited by Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (1989). They frame a spurious debate between “genetic essentialism” and “social constructionism” (17) in which all parties involved restate the basic dogma of Occidentalist historiography. Boswell, author of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980), posits a timeless gay subject across a symbolic order that includes ancient Greece, the Roman empire, the Christian feudal period, and industrial Europe. Halperin counters this bold embrace of biological determinism in the spirit of his own claim to fame, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (1989a). The position he promotes, that human sexuality itself is contingent, presumes the same ideological time-space of his theoretical opposition. Halperin reviews classical Athens and modern Europe alone, with nothing in between, while drawing conclusions about all of human civilization. This foundational discussion considers no other culture or history beyond the “rise of the West,” which is an “Eternal West,” as Samir Amin notes in Eurocentrism (1989).2 The geopolitics of empire that enable this generalization receive no treatment whatsoever: Hidden from History hides them from history, as it
were.
An anti-colonial analysis easily destroys this dichotomy of biological essence and social construction, not to mention the other major, unquestioned dichotomy here: that of heterosexuality and homosexuality. By and large, however, a racialized con®ation of Occidental speci¤city and “universal humanity” determines the fashion in which the historicity of erotic identi¤cation is recognized. Abdul JanMohamed critiques the ¤rst volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978) for its general “ethnic and cultural narcissism” in Domna Stanton’s Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS (JanMohamed 1992, 116). This sort of reading should be expanded and applied to the later volumes of Foucault’s project, particularly volume 2, The Use of Pleasure (1985), in which the modern development of sexuality is reiterated with a difference often ignored by his enthusiasts. Foucault con¤rms that the term “sexuality” did not appear until the beginning of Europe’s nineteenth century, yet he immediately warns that this fact “should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted.” “It does point to something other than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which ‘sexuality’ refers” (Foucault 1985, 3). The focus of volume 1 on the “¤elds of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity” that generate the cultural experience of sexuality is seen as incomplete, in volume 2, without a larger historical lens (4). In other words, the history of sexuality in its strictly modern con¤guration is transformed into a more comprehensive genealogy of desire of which the contemporary sexual formation is simply one part: “in order to understand how the modern individual could experience himself as a subject of ‘sexuality,’ it was essential ¤rst to determine how, for centuries, Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire” (5–6). Foucault’s genealogy of desire is nevertheless written as “the history of desiring man” and “the games of truth by which human beings came to see themselves as desiring individuals” (6–7, emphasis mine). The West is again inscribed as the archaeological essence of humanity and its world historicity, erotic and otherwise. So when Foucault explores a culturally speci¤c thematic complex of sexual problematization that cannot be restricted to a single Occidental epoch, as it is reformulated with a remarkable constancy (22) throughout the core of Greek and Greco-Roman thought, the Christian ethic and the morality of Modern Europe (15), this unfolding of sexual regimes is narrated as a universal history. A chronology of empire dictates a normative genealogy of desire, indeed a colonial telos for all individuals or human beings.
The racist appropriation of historicity has a long history itself. Africa and Africans, most of all, have been hurled into the zone of pre-history (if not antihistory) by human sciences well beyond G. W. F. Hegel. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg observed that the invidious representation of Negroes as a people without history was based upon the insidious representation of us as a people without a worthy culture (Schomburg 1925, 237). In his opening remarks at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, Alioune Diop proclaimed, “History with a capital ‘H’ is a one-sided interpretation of the life of the World, emanating from the West alone” (A. Diop 1956, 9). Anna Julia Cooper defended her Sorbonne doctoral thesis with a similar charge: “To assume that the ideas inherent in social progress descend by divine favor upon the Nordic people, a Superior Race chosen to dominate the Earth, assuredly pampers the pride of those believing themselves the Elect of God” (A. Cooper 1998, 293). Cedric J. Robinson rehearses these ideas sharply in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, capturing that rigid depiction of the African “as a different sort of beast: dumb, animal labor, the benighted recipient of the bene¤ts of slavery. Thus the ‘Negro’ was conceived. . . . From such a creature not even the suspicion of tradition needed to be entertained. In its stead there was the Black slave, a consequence masqueraded as an anthropology and a history” (Robinson 1983, 4). The rewards of history and culture (or history as culture, and vice versa) are conventionally reserved for white persons exclusively; and Pan-Africanism resists these racist cultural politics of history as ¤ercely as Western discourses of sexuality reinscribe them.
A basic anthropological hierarchy cultivates the will to universalize for the bene¤t of white Western dominance and hegemony. The “master race” of Europe is canonized as the paragon of social and biological development inasmuch as it pretends to embody certain universal laws of human civilization. Still, the claim (or presumption) of universality is far more than a mere ethnographic assertion; it re®ects a greater epistemological assertion which by no means requires cross-cultural historical veri¤cation. An immediate, transcendent approximation of objective reality is asserted in a manner that represses the ideological agenda of such a posture. Some supernatural force of reason is supposed to provide access to some truth whose scope is boundless in both space and time. Partiality and relativity are anathema to this perspective, which presumptuously claims to cover all people and all places beyond all con®icts of culture and history. The only earthly intelligence that need be consulted is the hyper-rationalist authority of Europe. A crude particularity is projected as the primordial identity of its colonized subjects. This is how the West is enshrined as the veritable essence of human being, human knowledge, human progress, human civilization. In his critique of Foucault, JanMohamed concludes that the history of Western sexuality can be written as a universal one only “if it averts its gaze” from “its dark other” (JanMohamed 1992, 116). But this insight misses a fundamental point. The West can and does regard itself as universal without averting its gaze at all, for the dark body of the non-West is coded as an eternal sign of the inferior evolutionary development of non-white humanity. The culture and history of Occidentalism can be represented, hence, as at once speci¤c and paradigmatic. Marimba Ani makes this brilliantly plain in “Universalism: The Syntax of Cultural Imperialism,” the penultimate chapter of her opus, Yurugu (1994).
As a result, the cultural categories of sex and sexuality can function in a way that routinely erases the history of race and empire from their critical frame of reference. After Foucault, and in the wake of Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey’s collection, this unique brand of universalist imperialism was canonized by a range of readers and anthologies, as well as single-authored works, under the commercial rubric of Queer Theory or Gay and Lesbian Studies. By no stretch does all or most of this work concern itself with historicity. Many instead use static Occidental conceptions of sex and seize colonized cultural bodies for the erotic bene¤t of the colonizer. The anthropology of Will Roscoe (1992) and Gilbert Herdt (1984) is especially noteworthy in this respect.3 The shift in gender and sexuality paradigms effected by Judith Butler (1989, 1993) was more philosophical (or discursive) than historical, despite her critical engagement with Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Lesbian historicizations may be less long historical, given classic Greek phallicism (e.g., Faderman 1981), while, at any rate, the Greek isle of Lesbos remains explicitly central, at least at the level of etymology. On the intellectual whole, then, whether the racist historiography of human civilization is directly or indirectly advanced, the rise of modern Europe from the ground of Hellenic reason is presumed in a neo-colonial politics of racialization which itself constitutes a greater politics of sexuality (or sexualization).
A more thorough consideration of this conspicuous yet camou®aged power might begin with attention to another prominent anthology, Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (1990). This example of the “new [erotic] historicism” follows the lead of Foucault, namely his grounding of the singular concept of homosexuality (and, by necessary extension, heterosexuality) in the social history of nineteenth-century Europe. While it claims to denaturalize erotic identity by locating speci¤cities of time and space, this collection too is typical in its rei¤cation of white cultural dominance or hegemony. It is equally notable, furthermore, for the way it exposes the Aryanism of empire despite itself, which is to say, the way it exposes what could be termed a Greek fetish in contemporary Western sexual theories.
The central issues at hand are writ large in Before Sexuality’s willfully provocative title. Sexuality is casually de¤ned on the opening page of Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin’s introduction in clearly analytic terms: “the cultural interpretation of the human body’s erogenous zones and sexual capacities” (3). Obviously, there can be no “before sexuality” in this sense of the word which would examine human eroticism in the abstract, as an ostensibly organic whole. However, this initial de¤nition is forgotten as other meanings appear and a ritual appropriation of human bodies for white bodies alone becomes evident.
Just pages after an unof¤cial de¤nition of sexuality, two additional and antagonistic ones are proffered as if they are not in radical con®ict with each other. First, under the curious header “Before What Sexuality?” Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin translate their book’s title to mean “before our sexuality” or “before sexuality as we understand it,” which they proceed to name as “our current Western, predominantly middle-class sexualities” (5). It appears that after installing a general framework of sexual-cultural universalism, the editors “come out of the closet,” as it were, geographically and economically, if not quite racially, as a relatively anxious afterthought. For this understanding of sexuality would yield a collection called something like Before Our Sexuality or Before Western Middle-Class Sexuality, surely not Before Sexuality, period. Their ¤rst of¤cial de¤nition thus begs a crucial question. In any case, the fact that the current world order de¤nes this Western bourgeois sexuality, racialized as white, as the proper model for all human sexuality is no doubt manifest.
Importantly, the same normative ideal drives the introduction’s second official de¤nition of sexuality, which would restrict its scope to those distinct features of modern regimes of erotic discipline (5). This is the understanding most associated with Foucault. The question is no longer a matter of what or whose. It is now a question of when. Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin’s continued use of other context-speci¤c terminology, such as “desire,” “erotic,” and “love” (not to mention “sex” and “sexual,” without “sexuality”) is not thought to pose a problem for the argument. Foucault is invoked as an authority to support this position in a highly problematic fashion. Completely ignored is his rearticulation of his History of Sexuality’s ¤rst volume in the second, and his move from a modern history of sexuality to a greater genealogy of desire. David Cohen and Richard Saller fault the second volume for “a kind of crypto-Hegelian subjectivity slowly unfolding itself as the centuries progress” (Cohen and Saller 1994, 59). They do not mention the racist Occidentalism at the center of Hegel’s infamous philosophy of history. Still, no Hegelian or anti-Hegelian genealogy of desire is conceivable in this second de¤nition, even though it continues to assume an eternal West with ancient Greece posed as modern Europe’s unquestionable matrix. There is no rupture in culture, strangely, but there is absolute rupture in sexuality (which is itself supposed to be cultural, of course). What Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin do retain from Foucault overall is this ritual construction of the idealized time-space of the West, which is, for them, the sociosexual prototype of human progress or human development. They conclude, accordingly, “In both senses of ‘before sexuality,’ the study of classical antiquity offers us a special opportunity to test our assumptions about what aspects of our lives might truly be common to all human beings and what aspects are distinctive to the modern world” (6). They draw a conclusion for all humanity while having imagined only their historicity, their antiquity and modernity, and theirs alone.
The gist of this project is shown further by a comment made in support of its “cultural poetics of desire” (Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990, 4). In an effort to study the cultural production of desire, while unmindful of the political production of culture itself, the editors summon the names of several “talented nonspecialists” or “stimulating collaborators” in their ¤eld of “classicism” (5). Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987), is listed along with Foucault. Yet Black Athena’s basic point is ignored entirely by the whole of Before Sexuality. Bernal proposes that there have been two principal paradigms explaining the origins of “classical Greece,” “the Ancient Model” and “the Aryan Model.” His Ancient model refers to the widespread recognition in Western historiography before the end of the eighteenth century that ancient Egypt was the predominant force in Greek civilization. His Aryan model refers to the subsequent disavowal of this “African origin of civilization,” to quote Mercer Cook’s “trans-Atlantic translation”5 of Cheikh Anta Diop (1974), and its replacement by the prevailing myth of an Indo-European or white progenitor of what is now dubbed the Greek miracle. This shift in explanations was effected by socio-political rather than purely epistemic factors. With this exploitation and effacement of Africa, its transformation into an alleged “dark continent,” classical Greece becomes the Aryan origin of a rational philosophy and universal culture which will supposedly climax, millennia later, in European modernity. Bernal’s notoriety notwithstanding, it is this Hellenomaniacal heritage, according to which Athena could not possibly, logically, be Black, that still structures bodies of work such as Before Sexuality, The History of Sexuality, and Hidden from History.
. . . . . . . . .
_________________________
If you wanna readmore the book, you can download the book in digital version from link below :
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by Greg Thomas
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
_________________________
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Pan-Africanism or Sexual Imperialism: White Supremacy, Hellenomania, and Discourses of Sexuality
2. The Madness of Gender in Plantation America: Sex, Womanhood, and U.S. Chattel Slavery, Revisited
3. Sexual Imitation and the Lumpen-Bourgeoisie: Race and Class as Erotic Conflict in E. Franklin Frazier
4. Sexual Imitation and the “Greedy Little Caste”: Race and Class as Erotic Conflict in Frantz Fanon
5. Colonialism and Erotic Desire—in English: The Case of Jamaica Kincaid
6. Neo-colonial Canons of Gender and Sexuality, after COINTELPRO: Black Power Bodies/Black Popular Culture and Counter-insurgent Critiques of Sexism and Homophobia
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
_______________________________
SAMPLE CONTENT
1
Pan-Africanism or Sexual Imperialism
WHITE SUPREMACY, HELLENOMANIA, AND DISCOURSES OF SEXUALITY
Before somebody else dies, literally, I want to begin with an illustration; to make my ultimate point about white sexual violence, historically, and Black people. I want to begin with a powerfully illustrative reference, or set of references. Yet as soon as I get speci¤c, to make this case poignant and current, current events manage to date my examples, make them look old, manufacturing new cases overnight which insist upon our attention despite all ¤ltering by the popular as well as academic media. I could recall the public strip-searching of Black Power activists, deployed nationwide to at once humiliate and titillate; the new gang plunger rapes of Black males in police departments (or prisons) on one U.S. coast, for example, before a carnival of bullets was ¤red on an unwitting Black male by a special police squad in search of its own serial rapist; the town showerhanging and draggings to death of Black men in the South and the Rocky Mountains; or the state murder of a young Black female, on the other U.S. coast, whose person was seen as so dangerous that she was said to pose a lethal threat even after she had fallen asleep, afraid, in her stalled car. From coast to coast, and beyond, I want to begin with one current illustration, but . . .
The entire history of our African presence in American captivity lays bare a raw sexual terror that de¤nes the cult of white supremacy here and elsewhere. Whether we think of the ceaseless assault on Black family existence, the obscene hysterics of apartheid lynching, the physical violations of direct and indirect colonization, or the sadomasochistic torture of formal enslavement and its transoceanic trade in ®esh, we see that the rule of Europe has assumed a notably erotic form. Even so, despite a certain common sense rooted in Africana resistance to the ravages of empire, the carnal dynamics of white domination rarely receive sustained critical attention.
An eruption of “sexual [intellectual] discourse” in the 1980s and ’90s changed this situation very little, if at all. In certain quarters of the United States of America, not to mention the West at large, the professed social construction of gender and sexuality has acquired the status of a cliché, however controversial a theory it may remain for some. The biological naturalization of erotic life is refuted, in principle, by the facts of cultural formation. Still, only certain forces of culture are acknowledged by such accounts. The really nasty fact that sexual personas and practices are ritually constructed as well as theorized in the service of colonial imperial structures of “race,” or white supremacy, has not been the subject of academic commerce under Occidentalism.1 The much-celebrated denaturalization of sex is not concerned with this program. The even trendier refrain of “race, gender, class, and sexuality” actually obscures key aspects of social life insofar as it rei¤es these contingent Western analytic categories as discrete empirical phenomena that can be ideologically negotiated at will. As a rule, therefore, the erotic brutality of what is termed race is cleanly repressed by the very language of sex in “First World” orientations, and quite consequentially for so-called “Third World” peoples.
Historicity and Sexuality or Aryanism and Hellenomania
We can see how this is done in the now-canonical deliberation on homosexuality conducted by John Boswell (“Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories”) and David Halperin (“Sex before Sexuality”) in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, the prominent anthology edited by Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (1989). They frame a spurious debate between “genetic essentialism” and “social constructionism” (17) in which all parties involved restate the basic dogma of Occidentalist historiography. Boswell, author of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (1980), posits a timeless gay subject across a symbolic order that includes ancient Greece, the Roman empire, the Christian feudal period, and industrial Europe. Halperin counters this bold embrace of biological determinism in the spirit of his own claim to fame, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (1989a). The position he promotes, that human sexuality itself is contingent, presumes the same ideological time-space of his theoretical opposition. Halperin reviews classical Athens and modern Europe alone, with nothing in between, while drawing conclusions about all of human civilization. This foundational discussion considers no other culture or history beyond the “rise of the West,” which is an “Eternal West,” as Samir Amin notes in Eurocentrism (1989).2 The geopolitics of empire that enable this generalization receive no treatment whatsoever: Hidden from History hides them from history, as it
were.
An anti-colonial analysis easily destroys this dichotomy of biological essence and social construction, not to mention the other major, unquestioned dichotomy here: that of heterosexuality and homosexuality. By and large, however, a racialized con®ation of Occidental speci¤city and “universal humanity” determines the fashion in which the historicity of erotic identi¤cation is recognized. Abdul JanMohamed critiques the ¤rst volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978) for its general “ethnic and cultural narcissism” in Domna Stanton’s Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS (JanMohamed 1992, 116). This sort of reading should be expanded and applied to the later volumes of Foucault’s project, particularly volume 2, The Use of Pleasure (1985), in which the modern development of sexuality is reiterated with a difference often ignored by his enthusiasts. Foucault con¤rms that the term “sexuality” did not appear until the beginning of Europe’s nineteenth century, yet he immediately warns that this fact “should be neither underestimated nor overinterpreted.” “It does point to something other than a simple recasting of vocabulary, but obviously it does not mark the sudden emergence of that to which ‘sexuality’ refers” (Foucault 1985, 3). The focus of volume 1 on the “¤elds of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity” that generate the cultural experience of sexuality is seen as incomplete, in volume 2, without a larger historical lens (4). In other words, the history of sexuality in its strictly modern con¤guration is transformed into a more comprehensive genealogy of desire of which the contemporary sexual formation is simply one part: “in order to understand how the modern individual could experience himself as a subject of ‘sexuality,’ it was essential ¤rst to determine how, for centuries, Western man had been brought to recognize himself as a subject of desire” (5–6). Foucault’s genealogy of desire is nevertheless written as “the history of desiring man” and “the games of truth by which human beings came to see themselves as desiring individuals” (6–7, emphasis mine). The West is again inscribed as the archaeological essence of humanity and its world historicity, erotic and otherwise. So when Foucault explores a culturally speci¤c thematic complex of sexual problematization that cannot be restricted to a single Occidental epoch, as it is reformulated with a remarkable constancy (22) throughout the core of Greek and Greco-Roman thought, the Christian ethic and the morality of Modern Europe (15), this unfolding of sexual regimes is narrated as a universal history. A chronology of empire dictates a normative genealogy of desire, indeed a colonial telos for all individuals or human beings.
The racist appropriation of historicity has a long history itself. Africa and Africans, most of all, have been hurled into the zone of pre-history (if not antihistory) by human sciences well beyond G. W. F. Hegel. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg observed that the invidious representation of Negroes as a people without history was based upon the insidious representation of us as a people without a worthy culture (Schomburg 1925, 237). In his opening remarks at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris, Alioune Diop proclaimed, “History with a capital ‘H’ is a one-sided interpretation of the life of the World, emanating from the West alone” (A. Diop 1956, 9). Anna Julia Cooper defended her Sorbonne doctoral thesis with a similar charge: “To assume that the ideas inherent in social progress descend by divine favor upon the Nordic people, a Superior Race chosen to dominate the Earth, assuredly pampers the pride of those believing themselves the Elect of God” (A. Cooper 1998, 293). Cedric J. Robinson rehearses these ideas sharply in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, capturing that rigid depiction of the African “as a different sort of beast: dumb, animal labor, the benighted recipient of the bene¤ts of slavery. Thus the ‘Negro’ was conceived. . . . From such a creature not even the suspicion of tradition needed to be entertained. In its stead there was the Black slave, a consequence masqueraded as an anthropology and a history” (Robinson 1983, 4). The rewards of history and culture (or history as culture, and vice versa) are conventionally reserved for white persons exclusively; and Pan-Africanism resists these racist cultural politics of history as ¤ercely as Western discourses of sexuality reinscribe them.
A basic anthropological hierarchy cultivates the will to universalize for the bene¤t of white Western dominance and hegemony. The “master race” of Europe is canonized as the paragon of social and biological development inasmuch as it pretends to embody certain universal laws of human civilization. Still, the claim (or presumption) of universality is far more than a mere ethnographic assertion; it re®ects a greater epistemological assertion which by no means requires cross-cultural historical veri¤cation. An immediate, transcendent approximation of objective reality is asserted in a manner that represses the ideological agenda of such a posture. Some supernatural force of reason is supposed to provide access to some truth whose scope is boundless in both space and time. Partiality and relativity are anathema to this perspective, which presumptuously claims to cover all people and all places beyond all con®icts of culture and history. The only earthly intelligence that need be consulted is the hyper-rationalist authority of Europe. A crude particularity is projected as the primordial identity of its colonized subjects. This is how the West is enshrined as the veritable essence of human being, human knowledge, human progress, human civilization. In his critique of Foucault, JanMohamed concludes that the history of Western sexuality can be written as a universal one only “if it averts its gaze” from “its dark other” (JanMohamed 1992, 116). But this insight misses a fundamental point. The West can and does regard itself as universal without averting its gaze at all, for the dark body of the non-West is coded as an eternal sign of the inferior evolutionary development of non-white humanity. The culture and history of Occidentalism can be represented, hence, as at once speci¤c and paradigmatic. Marimba Ani makes this brilliantly plain in “Universalism: The Syntax of Cultural Imperialism,” the penultimate chapter of her opus, Yurugu (1994).
As a result, the cultural categories of sex and sexuality can function in a way that routinely erases the history of race and empire from their critical frame of reference. After Foucault, and in the wake of Duberman, Vicinus, and Chauncey’s collection, this unique brand of universalist imperialism was canonized by a range of readers and anthologies, as well as single-authored works, under the commercial rubric of Queer Theory or Gay and Lesbian Studies. By no stretch does all or most of this work concern itself with historicity. Many instead use static Occidental conceptions of sex and seize colonized cultural bodies for the erotic bene¤t of the colonizer. The anthropology of Will Roscoe (1992) and Gilbert Herdt (1984) is especially noteworthy in this respect.3 The shift in gender and sexuality paradigms effected by Judith Butler (1989, 1993) was more philosophical (or discursive) than historical, despite her critical engagement with Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Lesbian historicizations may be less long historical, given classic Greek phallicism (e.g., Faderman 1981), while, at any rate, the Greek isle of Lesbos remains explicitly central, at least at the level of etymology. On the intellectual whole, then, whether the racist historiography of human civilization is directly or indirectly advanced, the rise of modern Europe from the ground of Hellenic reason is presumed in a neo-colonial politics of racialization which itself constitutes a greater politics of sexuality (or sexualization).
A more thorough consideration of this conspicuous yet camou®aged power might begin with attention to another prominent anthology, Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin (1990). This example of the “new [erotic] historicism” follows the lead of Foucault, namely his grounding of the singular concept of homosexuality (and, by necessary extension, heterosexuality) in the social history of nineteenth-century Europe. While it claims to denaturalize erotic identity by locating speci¤cities of time and space, this collection too is typical in its rei¤cation of white cultural dominance or hegemony. It is equally notable, furthermore, for the way it exposes the Aryanism of empire despite itself, which is to say, the way it exposes what could be termed a Greek fetish in contemporary Western sexual theories.
The central issues at hand are writ large in Before Sexuality’s willfully provocative title. Sexuality is casually de¤ned on the opening page of Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin’s introduction in clearly analytic terms: “the cultural interpretation of the human body’s erogenous zones and sexual capacities” (3). Obviously, there can be no “before sexuality” in this sense of the word which would examine human eroticism in the abstract, as an ostensibly organic whole. However, this initial de¤nition is forgotten as other meanings appear and a ritual appropriation of human bodies for white bodies alone becomes evident.
Just pages after an unof¤cial de¤nition of sexuality, two additional and antagonistic ones are proffered as if they are not in radical con®ict with each other. First, under the curious header “Before What Sexuality?” Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin translate their book’s title to mean “before our sexuality” or “before sexuality as we understand it,” which they proceed to name as “our current Western, predominantly middle-class sexualities” (5). It appears that after installing a general framework of sexual-cultural universalism, the editors “come out of the closet,” as it were, geographically and economically, if not quite racially, as a relatively anxious afterthought. For this understanding of sexuality would yield a collection called something like Before Our Sexuality or Before Western Middle-Class Sexuality, surely not Before Sexuality, period. Their ¤rst of¤cial de¤nition thus begs a crucial question. In any case, the fact that the current world order de¤nes this Western bourgeois sexuality, racialized as white, as the proper model for all human sexuality is no doubt manifest.
Importantly, the same normative ideal drives the introduction’s second official de¤nition of sexuality, which would restrict its scope to those distinct features of modern regimes of erotic discipline (5). This is the understanding most associated with Foucault. The question is no longer a matter of what or whose. It is now a question of when. Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin’s continued use of other context-speci¤c terminology, such as “desire,” “erotic,” and “love” (not to mention “sex” and “sexual,” without “sexuality”) is not thought to pose a problem for the argument. Foucault is invoked as an authority to support this position in a highly problematic fashion. Completely ignored is his rearticulation of his History of Sexuality’s ¤rst volume in the second, and his move from a modern history of sexuality to a greater genealogy of desire. David Cohen and Richard Saller fault the second volume for “a kind of crypto-Hegelian subjectivity slowly unfolding itself as the centuries progress” (Cohen and Saller 1994, 59). They do not mention the racist Occidentalism at the center of Hegel’s infamous philosophy of history. Still, no Hegelian or anti-Hegelian genealogy of desire is conceivable in this second de¤nition, even though it continues to assume an eternal West with ancient Greece posed as modern Europe’s unquestionable matrix. There is no rupture in culture, strangely, but there is absolute rupture in sexuality (which is itself supposed to be cultural, of course). What Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin do retain from Foucault overall is this ritual construction of the idealized time-space of the West, which is, for them, the sociosexual prototype of human progress or human development. They conclude, accordingly, “In both senses of ‘before sexuality,’ the study of classical antiquity offers us a special opportunity to test our assumptions about what aspects of our lives might truly be common to all human beings and what aspects are distinctive to the modern world” (6). They draw a conclusion for all humanity while having imagined only their historicity, their antiquity and modernity, and theirs alone.
The gist of this project is shown further by a comment made in support of its “cultural poetics of desire” (Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990, 4). In an effort to study the cultural production of desire, while unmindful of the political production of culture itself, the editors summon the names of several “talented nonspecialists” or “stimulating collaborators” in their ¤eld of “classicism” (5). Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987), is listed along with Foucault. Yet Black Athena’s basic point is ignored entirely by the whole of Before Sexuality. Bernal proposes that there have been two principal paradigms explaining the origins of “classical Greece,” “the Ancient Model” and “the Aryan Model.” His Ancient model refers to the widespread recognition in Western historiography before the end of the eighteenth century that ancient Egypt was the predominant force in Greek civilization. His Aryan model refers to the subsequent disavowal of this “African origin of civilization,” to quote Mercer Cook’s “trans-Atlantic translation”5 of Cheikh Anta Diop (1974), and its replacement by the prevailing myth of an Indo-European or white progenitor of what is now dubbed the Greek miracle. This shift in explanations was effected by socio-political rather than purely epistemic factors. With this exploitation and effacement of Africa, its transformation into an alleged “dark continent,” classical Greece becomes the Aryan origin of a rational philosophy and universal culture which will supposedly climax, millennia later, in European modernity. Bernal’s notoriety notwithstanding, it is this Hellenomaniacal heritage, according to which Athena could not possibly, logically, be Black, that still structures bodies of work such as Before Sexuality, The History of Sexuality, and Hidden from History.
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