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ABSTRACT
In this paper I examine the temporal dimensions of racialised and colonised embodiment. I draw on the work of Alia Al-Saji, whose phenomenological reading of Frantz Fanon examines the multiple ways in which racism and colonialism affix the racialised and colonised body to that of the past; a temporalisation that serves not only to anachronise these bodies, but also to close off their projective possibilities for being or becoming otherwise. Such a move reflects the nature of racialisation itself, which following Charles Mills, does not just exteriorise or ‘other’ racialised bodies, but relies equally on a forgetting, or a disavowal and leaving behind of this very process. The result, I argue, is to render whiteness and white bodies as temporally present and even futural in their orientation, free from the vestiges of racism's history and free to adopt any number of stances on its continuing legacy. It is against this that I argue that the familiar exhortation to ‘get over’ racism whenever the charge is levelled, is not only dangerous in its denial of racism, but also disingenuous in purporting to move beyond a racially divided world, when in fact this very gesture serves to reinscribe differential racialised temporalities.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Dr Helen Ngo is an Honorary Fellow with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University (Australia), having completed her PhD in Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook (USA). She works at the intersection of phenomenology and critical philosophy of race, and is author of The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lexington, 2017), and co-editor of Philosophies of Difference: Nature, Racism, and Sexuate Difference (Routledge, 2018). She has also published in journals such as Philosophy and Social Criticism and Australian Feminist Law Journal.
Notes
1. This is primarily for the sake of readability; I do not claim that they are coterminous or interchangeable terms, nor do I wish to collapse the two. I have chosen to use the broader term ‘racialised’, however, since processes of colonisation under consideration are indelibly linked to and motivated by racialisation – even though I acknowledge that Indigenous peoples are impacted in specific and different ways to non-Indigenous racialised subjects, and do not suggest that this difference can or should be effaced. At times I revert to the term ‘colonised’ in the paper when I am considering the specific case of colonialism.
2. It might be objected that the question finds this form as a way of avoiding the more direct (and obtuse) form, ‘What race are you?’ – but I would disagree. While I accept that there is some repackaging here in observance of the social etiquette of not naming race directly, I find it significant and telling that the question morphs from present tense (‘What race are you?’) to a question of past and of origin. There are of course other loose alternatives: ‘What ethnicity are you?’, ‘What language do you speak?’ but these are not nearly as popular as ‘Where are you from?’.
3. This comes from a video produced for The Feed (SBS Viceland). The longer commentary goes as follows:
… and for as long as I can remember, white people have loved asking me where I am from. Every cab ride, every barbeque, every first date … [cut to montage] Until Now. The tables have turned motherf – kers! Suddenly we find out about s.44 of the Australian Constitution … and questions about white people's ancestry are all the rage! (Available from https://www.smh.com.au/video/video-entertainment/video-comedy/a-message-from-australians-who-look-a-bit-foreign-20170815-4x5uh.html Accessed 29 September, 2018)
4. Heidegger writes elsewhere: ‘It is essential to the basic constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still be settled.’ (Heidegger, 279).
5. For an elaboration of this point, see Alexis Wright's, ‘What Happens When You Tell Somebody Else's Story?’ (Citation2016).
6. As Al-Saji explains, the later Merleau-Ponty more critically rethinks the Husserlian presentation of the present as a ‘now-point’, as well as the past characterised in terms of retentional intentionality. For Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible, the ‘internal interdependence’ of the past and the present is not sufficiently captured by this concept of retention, and thus fails adequately account for the passing of the present into the past, except by way of external interjection. This means that the past is not ‘recognized as internally necessary’, and there remains in this account of retentional intentionality, a seriality and rectilinearity that Husserl is not able to overcome. (Al-Saji Citation2009: 210–215).
7. Dimitriu further explains Husserlian protention thus:
As for protention, Varela describes it accurately when he says that ‘the only definite thing is that without exception something will come’. When we hear a melody, we will always protend further notes of the music. What exactly these notes will be depends entirely on the particular situation in which we are embedded. Nothing changes, however, the fact that we will protend a new note. (Dimitriu, 214)
8. This also marks a point where Moreton-Robinson draws exception from Fanon's characterisation of the colonised subject (which takes place in the Algerian context), although on the question of colonised temporality I think they would agree.
9. This resonates with Charles Mills’ remarks:
Two hundred years after Locke, closing the temporal bracket so to speak, Native Americans would be depicted as a ‘dying race’, a people who, unable to use the time, located not on the White time-track but in a prehistoric other time, ‘a futureless past’, were in any case almost out of time, scheduled for extinction. (Mills Citation2007: 31)
10. Merleau-Ponty writes:
Time must not merely be, it must come about; time is never completely constituted. Constituted time – the series of possible relations according to the before and the after – is not time itself, it is merely the final registering of time, and it is the result of time's passage, which objective thought always presupposes but never manages to grasp. … Constituted time is a milieu that is distinct from myself and that is immobile where nothing passes by and where nothing happens. There must be another time, a true time, where I learn what passage or transition is in itself. (Merleau-Ponty: 438)
11. Video interview with Mark Knight excerpted here: ‘Serena Williams: Cartoonist Mark Knight defends depiction of US Open tantrum amid accusations of racism’, ABC News, 11 September 2018 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-11/cartoonist-mark-knight-defends-serena-williams-depiction/10230044 Accessed 28 September, 2018. Text transcribed by me.
In the face of the controversy, newspaper The Herald Sun then defiantly reprinted the cartoon on its front page, supposedly in defence of satire against a ‘PC world gone mad’ http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-19/mark-knight-cartoon-of-serena-williams/10281910 Accessed 28 Sept 2018.
12. Corbould points to an article by Richard Waterhouse which explores the Australian reception of this genre: ‘Minstrel show and vaudeville house: The Australian popular stage, Citation1989 1838–1914’.
13. A comment from cartoonist Darren Bell (of King Features) provides an interesting counterpoint to the caricaturing of Black people in the US:
If you’re tempted to make their lips look like airbags, or to make their nose take up half their faces, you’re being lazy. Especially when, as in the case of Serena, her lips and her nose aren't especially large. … If you look at Serena and you’re inclined to exaggerate her nose and her lips, odds are that is why they stand out to you. And if you’re not purposely trying to tap into those 100-year-old stereotypes, then as a professional, you’re supposed to be aware of that impulse and put it in check. I go through that thought process when I draw anyone. (Cavna Citation2018)
14. Per Prime Minister John Howard: ‘I do not believe, as a matter of principle, that one generation can accept responsibility for the acts of an earlier generation. I don't accept that as a matter of principle’ (Davies Citation2008).
15. This conviction of ‘colour-blindness’, unsurprisingly, was evident in defences of Knight's cartoon depiction of Serena Williams, with Herald Sun editor stating ‘It had nothing to do with gender or race. this was about a bad sport being mocked.’ The naturalisation of racial difference was also evident in fellow cartoonist Paul Zanetti's remarks: ‘All he has done as cartoonists do is tell the truth. All he did was depict her in satirical manner’. (‘Herald Sun backs Mark Knight's cartoon on Serena Williams’, Herald Sun, 12 September 2018) https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/herald-sun-backs-mark-knights-cartoon-on-serena-williams/news-story/30c877e3937a510d64609d89ac521d9f Accessed 28 September 2018.
16. Goody writes:
The very calculation of time in the past, and in the present too, has been appropriated by the west. The dates on which history depends are measured before and after the birth of Christ (BC and AD, or BCE and CE to be more politically correct). The recognition of other eras, relating to the Hegira, to the Hebrew or to the Chinese New Year, is relegated to the margins of historical scholarship and of international usage. (cited in Mills, 30)
17. This brings us closer to Al-Saji's point about the ‘backward movement of institution’ in relation to Merleau-Ponty's re-reading of Husserl. (Al-Saji Citation2009: 217–218).
18. Otherwise known as Sydney Cove. I note that the date marks this declaration and the raising of the Union Jack flag, rather than the landing of the First Fleet, as widely assumed (this took place a week earlier in Botany Bay). I further note that this event follows Lt. James Cook's earlier declaration of British possession of the island of Bedanug (renamed ‘Possession Island’) in August 1770.
19. The National Australia Day Council, for example, champions the day as a day ‘for all Australians, no matter where our personal stories began, [to] reflect on being Australian, celebrate contemporary Australia and recognise our history’. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australia-day-explained-why-it-s-really-held-on-26-january-and-the-push-to-change-the-date Accessed 2 October 2018.
20. McQuire makes a similar point:
Australians may want us to ‘get over it’, to stop being so ‘sensitive’. But then, why do we still set aside a day of remembrance on ANZAC day to commemorate those who risked their lives at war? And why don't we acknowledge the brave Aboriginal fighters who sacrificed everything in the frontier wars? (McQuire Citation2014)
21. Here I have in mind something along the lines of how White Australia's pre-occupation with a certain self-image (Hage Citation2000) speaks to a kind of ‘narcissism’, which in turn might express other modes of being temporally ‘stuck’.