Critique of Black Reason by Mbembe Achille

Author:Mbembe, Achille
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822373230
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2017-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

The Enigmatic Mirror

Race is at the center of this tragedy. To a large extent, race is an iconic currency. It appears at the edges of a commerce—of the gaze. It is a currency whose function is to convert what one sees (or what one chooses not to see) into a specie or symbol at the heart of a generalized economy of signs and images that one exchanges, circulates, attributes value to or not, and that authorizes a series of judgments and practical attitudes. It can be said of race that it is at once image, body, and enigmatic mirror within an economy of shadows whose purpose is to make life itself a spectral reality. Fanon understood this and showed how, alongside the structures of coercion that presided over the arrangement of the colonial world, what first constitutes race is a certain power of the gaze that accompanies a form of voice and, ultimately, touch. If the gaze of the colonist “shrivels me” or “freezes me,” if his voice “turns me into stone,” it is because he believes that my life does not have the same weight as his does.28 Describing what he called the “lived experience of the Negro,” Fanon analyzes how a certain manner of distributing the gaze ends up creating its object, fixing it, or destroying it, or returns it to the world but under the sign of disfiguration or at least of “another me,” a me that is an object, a marginal being. A certain form of the gaze has, in effect, the power to block the appearance of the “third-being” and his inclusion in the sphere of the human: “I simply wanted to be a man among other men.”29 “And here I am an object in the midst of other objects.” How, starting from the desire to be a human being like others, does one arrive at the realization that we are what the Other has made of us—its object? “And then we were given the occasion to confront the white man’s gaze. An usual weight descended on us. The real world robbed us of our share,” he continues.30

The final recourse of colonial racism is to dispute the humanity of this “triple person.” The struggle fixates first on the body. For Fanon, the appearance of the third-being within the field of racism happens first in the form of a body. “All around the body reigns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.” Very quickly the body becomes a weight—the weight of a “malediction,” which makes it into the simulacrum of the void and fragility. Even before it appeared, this body was already put on trial: “I thought I was being asked to construct a physiological self,” but “the white man” had “woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories.” The body from then on is an apparently formless form that incites surprise, dread, and terror: “Look, a Negro! Mama, look, a Negro, I’m scared!” He exists only through his inspection and assignation within a skein of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.