In most of this week’s reading I found a strong connection with literature and its various genres. In Frantz Fanon’s article “The Negro and Psychopathology” he mentions how an image is constructed by a child in Africa about ‘Negroes’ and he in school identifies himself/herself with the ‘explorer’ or with the ‘white’. Therefore, we see that the construction of the image starts from the childhood in school with readings; it develops and strengthens till the child grows. Fanon states “…..there is a constellation of postulates, a series of proposition that slowly and subtly – with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, radio – work their way into one’s mind and shape one’s view of the world of the group to which one belongs.” In other words they are the ‘Ideological State apparatus’ as stated by Louis Althusser which constructs images, desires, wishes etc in our mind.
In Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s reading ‘Interrogating “whiteness”’ the above argument can very well be observed. There is a discussion on American literature in America as ‘white’ and an African – American literature as ‘black’ where the American literature or the ‘white’ literature is taught by white persons and Afro – American literature by persons of color. One can see not only the authors probably but even teachers are segregated by the color of the skin and I wonder whether students are also segregated. For instance white student will choose to study American literature and a non white student will choose Afro –American literature. However, we see in this article the important role of one of the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ i.e. books or literature. Fishkin mentions how Dana Nelson examines ‘the ways in which seventeenth – , eighteenth – and early nineteenth – century white writers constructed versions of their own identity (and of American identity) by defining themselves as unlike various racial and ethnic “others”’. Hence, Fanon says that the root of this problem is books – the magazines, adventures of Mickey Mouse, Tarzan stories – which the Antillean child reads are written by white men for white kids so the devil or the demon is always associated either with ‘Negroes’ or ‘Indians’ which distances the African kid from her/his culture and brings her/him closer to the ‘white’ culture which is after all an illusion especially when he grows up and develops a contact with Europe. The only solution to this problem as suggested by Fanon is creation of books and magazines for the African kids and until then this problem would exist.
It is also very interesting to note that in India people are obsessed with the skin color as white. The color white is also associated with beauty. There are various creams for both men and women to become fairer and it is further interesting to see that these companies are growing faster in the market which can be understood with the demand of these products in the country. Both men and women want to get married to a white skin person. While reading these articles I was wondering whether the connection with the white skin is actually deriving from the same root as the authors in this week’s reading are arguing about.
I find your mention of literature interesting, for I, too was concerned by the role of literature in performing race. This summer, I was working on my thesis, doing some research and trying to define more clearly my project. I was initially interested in the portrayal of race in the literature of my country, for, so far, there has been almost nothing written about that. I come from Reunion Island, a very mixed island with people of different backgrounds, and I wanted to see the racial portrayal of Reunion Island’s people in local literature (that is a literature written by the locals themselves), but above all, understand where it came from. What motivated me to do so, were texts like Fanon’s. In today’s readings, Fanon’s article ends with that thought that race and its perceptions can be deconstructed, but how? How to strengthen the weak ego of the Black school boy? At first, I thought of history. The little black boy needs to know about his own history in order not to mimic the Other’s values or attitudes that is reinforced by an institutionalized history. Then, I started to think about literature. When I was doing some research this summer, I started to look more carefully at racial depictions in creole literature and did some more research to understand the roots of such representations. I found myself stopping all my research and choosing to work on the same topic but applied to a different community for it was too hard to face the findings. I did not wish to know the truth behind these racial portrayals for it was shattering all that I had known so far. I started to drawback and started to look at the few studies made so far about racial depictions in creole literature and realized there was a similar movement from other local writers. That made me realize that the deconstructionist process Fanon, somehow, mentions and even encourages, is a deep one that is truly multidimensional. It is not enough to teach history to the young black school boy or to make available magazines, books, movies that are going to offer a different view of the interaction of the Other with the Black person, there is something else that is deeply seeded and that will require more than countering an existing racial view with a reconstructed one. I, honestly, feel hopeless, at this moment, on how to change racial depictions that support a certain view in literature, for I am not ready to go into a place where my whole system of values would be shattered just by studying the matter.