Race and the Education of Desire by Ann Laura Stoler

Author:Ann Laura Stoler [Stoler, Ann Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 1995-10-04T07:00:00+00:00

Discourses of Race/Languages of Class

One might argue that racialized notions of the bourgeois self were idiosyncratic to the colonies and applicable there alone. But a repertoire of racial and imperial metaphors were deployed to clarify class distinctions in Europe at a very early date. While social historians generally have assumed that racial logics drew on the ready-made cultural disparagements honed to distinguish between middle-class virtues and the immorality of the poor, as well as between the “undeserving” and the “respectable” poor among themselves, it may well be that such social etymologies make just as much sense reversed. The racial lexicon of empire and the sexualized images of it, in some cases, may have provided for a European language of class as often as the other way around. In a study of race and politics in Jamaica and Britain, Tom Holt cautiously notes that “this language of class [may have] provided a vocabulary for thinking about race, or vice-versa. It hardly matters; what is important is the symmetry of the discourse. . . .”72 For my reading of Foucault, however, these racial etymologies of the language of class matter very much. They place the making of racial discourse, and a discourse on slavery in particular, as formative in the making of a middle-class identity rather than as a late nineteenth-century addition to it.

Certainly, Foucault’s contention that the language of class grew out of the discourse of races would support such a claim. From Montaigne to Mayhew to Balzac, in Britain, the Netherlands, and France, imperial images of the colonized native American, African, and Asian as eroticized savage or barbarian saturated the discourses of class. In an intriguing analysis similar to Foucault’s, Hayden White argues that the “race fetishism” surrounding the eighteenth-century notion of the “noble savage” was “soon transformed . . . into another, and more virulent form: the fetishism of class.”73 But, unlike for Foucault, the template is not only an earlier racial discourse directed at internal enemies within Europe, but one prompted by imperial expansion. White writes:

Like the “wild men” of the New World, the “dangerous classes” of the Old World define the limitations of the general notion of “humanity” which informed and justified the Europeans’ spoliation of any human group standing in the way of their expansion, and their need to destroy that which they could not consume.74

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