Postcolonial masculinities and the politics of visibility

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Notes

1. “Ways of seeing” is a phrase popularized by art historian John Berger in his now classic study of the representation of women’s bodies in western art and media.

2. See Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology for a discussion of the “habitual” nature of whiteness in western societies, and the way in which whiteness “goes unnoticed” (132). Similarly, in this present issue, Carole Jones offers a detailed analysis of the way in which the white male’s field of vision fixes him at the “privileged centre of culture”.

3. This is not to ignore the feminist critique of Fanon’s writings on women and colonialism, and the equally vocal feminist defence of Fanon (see esp. Sharpley‐Whiting).

4. Ronald A.T. Judy suggests that the English translation of the heading for this part of Black Skin, White Masks is inaccurate. Fanon called this section of the book “L’expérience vécue du Noir”. In place of “The Fact of Blackness”, Judy suggests a better translation from the French would be “The Lived Experience of the Black” (53).

5. Bearing in mind the preceding discussion of the interdependence of ethnicity and gender, creative parallels might be drawn between the gender swapping of the characters in this short story and the ambiguous, race‐swapping behaviour of the eponymous hero of Kipling’s novel Kim (1901).

6. By contrast, another entry in the Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities, Robert Morrell and Sandra Swart’s “Men in the Third World”, takes the view that binary oppositions are essential to gender dynamics in postcolonial settings. For urban African youth, they argue, “two realities exist – an urban, modern reality and a premodernist and traditional reality” (101, 104). Contrasting Morrell’s other work on masculinities, this reductive two‐reality model sets “indigenous knowledge” against “the corrosive individualizing imperatives of globalization”, as if the two can be distinguished from one another (109).

7. The “hyper‐masculine” narrator of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), Ned Kelly, constantly uses the word “adjectival” as a substitute for swear words. Similarly, in relation to masculinity, adjectives provide substitutions and extensions of the noun, showing how masculinity resists fixity in favour of constant qualification.