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That colonialism has associations with eighteenth century humanism is not a controversial claim. The eighteenth century with its fascination with how the subject knows has a central place in Foucault‘s account of the rise of the human sciences in The Order of Things. More recently Leela Gandhi has explored how the virtual construction of subjectivity in the eighteenth century was closely associated with the conceptual formulation of humanity. In these humanist constructions the human became defined by its relation to the non-human in a process where ideas about racial difference were used to form the hierarchies in which subjects were racially located. For Foucault, in the eighteenth century, the subject becomes both an object of knowledge (one that is understood ‘scientifically‘) and a subject who knows one that is interpreted `metaphysically`). This apparently scientific reading of the ‘objective status‘ of the subject reflects on the construction of race as an indicator of Otherness. The wider claim made by Leela Gandhi is that this position has a vestigial presence in much of todays `science‘. It is this correlation between race and certain pseudo-scientific taxonomies relating to race which underpin, in the nineteenth century, those theories of degeneration that attempted to account for perceptions of imperial decline, and it is these ideas that influenced Stoker‘s writings. Most notably Dracula has received considerable critical attention on the novels reliance on a model of degeneracy that articulates contemporary anxieties relating to criminality and race; this common view of Dracula is one that associates the Other (the vampire) with theories of degeneracy. The novel is also, arguably self-consciously so, about knowledge. The oddly unheroic pursuit of the vampire hunters is apparent in their search through documentation in order to develop an explanatory theory for vampirism. It is this pursuit of knowledge which is also to be found in A,Glimpse of America (1886) and The Mystery of the Sea (1902). Knowledge as knowledge of the national and/or racial Other is the central issue to which Stoker keeps returning.
Adjusting the contrast National and cultural identity, ethnicity and difference have always been major themes within the national psyche. People are witnessing the rise and visibility of far-right politics and counter-movements in the UK and USA. Simultaneously, there is an urgent need to defend the role of public service media. This book emerges at a time when these shifts and conjunctures that impact on and shape how 'race' and racial difference are perceived. They are coinciding with rapidly changing media contexts and environments and the kinds of racial representations that are constructed within public service broadcasting (PSB), specifically the BBC and Channel 4. The book explores a range of texts and practices that address the ongoing phenomenon of race and its relationship to television. Policies and the management of race; transnationalism and racial diversity; historical questions of representation; the myth of a multicultural England are also explored. It interrogates three television primarily created by women, written by women, feature women in most of the lead roles, and forcefully reassert the place of women in British history. The book contributes to the range of debates around television drama and black representation, examining BBC's Shoot the Messenger and Top Boy. Finally, it explores some of the history that led to the belated breakthrough of Black and Asian British comedy. The book also looks at the production of jokes about race and colour prior to the 1980s and 1990s, and questioning what these jokes tell us about British multiculturalism in this period.
Kenyan eugenics lay beyond the local medical and biological forum that had created it; but the process by which the rejection of eugenic approaches to racial difference was digested in Kenya reveals how haphazard the decline of scientific racism was. There has been a tendency to view World War Two as a watershed in the historiography of scientific racism leading to the neglect of the possible
‘Greater Britain’. Ideas of racial difference and hierarchy were certainly alive in Britain before the end of the nineteenth century. However, even if one adds in the powerful influence of social Darwinism, it is unlikely that ideas of racial determination and significant hierarchies would have found their way into the consciousness of the general public without the driving force
-emphasize the intersectionality of gender and race and gloss over the fact that Negrophobia feeds on misogyny and misandry. The Martinican specificities are of paramount significance and, in order to grasp them, it is important to go beyond a strictly Freudian/Lacanian interpretation of gender and sexual politics, exploring notions such as the ‘family romance’ and ‘in the name of the father’ in the light of colonial paternalism and slavery. Gender and colonial politics Bergner identifies an ‘assumed incongruity between psychoanalysis and the politics of racial difference’ in
they drew upon a different population? In making its ‘mad’ population the colonial asylum incorporated ideas about perceived threats to social harmony, and racial difference entered the discourse of classification, as did the problem of bodily difference in the form of physical debility and deformity. In their efforts to train ‘lunatics’ to be ‘inmates’ and then proper ‘patients
recapitulation theory was the method to provide for the child a means of measuring progress. Progress was identified not only by comparison to the history of the English at various moments in their historical development, but also by contrast to other races. Late Victorian and Edwardian scientific constructions of racial difference stipulated that the strength of races which inter-mixed was
disseminated from Britain; the application of current ideas about the transmission of innate characteristics, in particular intelligence, shaped a new and extreme eugenic interpretation of racial difference. The Kenyan eugenicists did not, however, use the most obvious methods, such as pedigrees, statistics and intelligence testing, which were applied by British eugenicists when assessing the intelligence of
harmonious relations between Italians and the host community.7 This chapter offers a brief overview of the migration patterns of the Italian diaspora, explores the ways in which Italians and other immigrant groups in Scotland were racialised from the earliest days of settlement, and how, ultimately, long-enduring perceptions of racial difference shaped reactions to Italians at the outbreak of the Second World War. The stereotyping of the Italians as fifth columnists, traitors and cowards during World War Two, combined with the rhetoric of national unity fostered a sense of
‘races’ and peoples of the Empire gives us access not only to the racialised and gendered thinking of one key Victorian organic intellectual but more generally to the ways in which a popular novelist could articulate an imperial imagination. Racial difference was part of the everyday life of Victorian men and women. Trollope’s mapping of imperial places