Race, cultures, Identités: Une approche féministe et postcoloniale by Hourya Bentouhami-Molino (review)

This book probes the unstable, indefinable nature of the notions of “race,” “culture,” and “identity” from a perspective described as feminist and postcolonial. According to the author, all attempts to understand the notion of identity should take into account not only the historical situation – decolonization – but also the economic conditions in which postcolonial racism operates: redistribution in a globalized economy, fragmentation of the working class, international labour law. Postcolonial racism differs from biological racism in that it is ‘nondifferentialist,” race-free, as it were, “seeming to assert that biological races do not exist while insisting that cultural differences between peoples are irreducible” (p. 8).

The author develops her thinking over six chapters that aim to demonstrate the relevance of the postcolonial approach in a range of humanities and social science fields: geography, law, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature and gender studies.

In the first chapter Bentouhami-Molino undertakes to forge a “new geography of knowledge.” She shows that the geographical representations that began to develop in Europe in the seventeenth century were not neutral but driven by imperialist aspirations of entrepreneurial and territorial conquest: an “irremediably ‘ethnocentric’ system of geometrical rationalization” based on value asymmetry between the (European) centre and peripheries at varying distances from that centre. She also notes the semantic slippage from physical attributes and climatic specificities (warm south, temperate north) to moral and sexual qualities (effeminate, cruel East, virile yet gentle West). This slippage, characteristic of Montesquieu’s writings, occurs even today: the “man of the south” is assumed to be hypersexualized and Oriental women to be subject to his male desire and violence. To rethink the situation, the author suggests “provincializing Europe”; in other words, making an effort to understand how life is experienced in non-Western societies. Here she draws heavily on Indian subaltern studies, which restore subaltern collective memory such as that of the peasantry.

In the second chapter she examines the contribution of postcolonial studies to the field of law, mentioning first the role of law in the constitution of different categories of persons: in this case those to be granted the status of citizen or subject and those to be refused that identity, a refusal used to justify colonization. In the colonial conquest, people were subjugated through “identity expropriation” (p. 43). The author inquires into the legal processes that produced race and made whiteness a property right – a paradoxical right because whiteness is inalienable (it cannot be sold). As she sees it, inalienability is precisely what gives the attribute of “whiteness” its value, making it a morally desirable identity marker but also a resource for accessing a considerable number of social advantages.

Philosophy is the subject of the third chapter, which begins with a long passage on defining the real: definitions must take into account both the content of reality and the problem of granting legitimacy to utter or name the real. “Racialized” persons or slaves could be denied all ability to speak for themselves and to utter the real. The author’s key reference here as she examines the relevance of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to the colonial period is Frantz Fanon. There are three components to her critique. First, whereas according to Hegel the struggle between master and slave is for mutual recognition, in the colonial scheme of things, acquiring freedom requires “surrendering” freedom and therefore implies asymmetry of consciousness. Freedom here was offered rather than acquired through struggle; it was therefore merely a “hollow word.” Moreover, Hegel’s slave eschews objects and seeks instead the master’s love, a subjective, alienating quest that leads him to surrender the objective conditions of liberation. Her third point concerns the affective dimension of the colonial situation: the slave seeks to possess the white woman to escape his race. For him, then, acquiring freedom necessarily implies negating his own person.

The fourth chapter describes “the discomfort of psychoanalysis.” In Totem and Taboo...