3 - Separating difference from what it can do: nihilism and bio-power relations

Summary

Contemporary racist discourses, such as the British new racism, usually promote the differentiation of racial otherness: they include some aspects of blackness as the pseudo-assimilable, and they use this inclusion to legitimate the demonization and exclusion of other blacknesses as the unassimilable. The new racism defines the blackness which it wants to exclude not as that which is not-white and therefore inferior, but as that which is inherently anti-British. This ‘cultural’ definition of race opens up the possibility for a disciplinary differentiation of blacknesses.

Again, the new racism's disciplining of blackness through differentiation is not really ‘new’. Colonial discourses are also structured around multiple inclusions and exclusions: a small elite class is Europeanized and assimilated, while the ‘native’ masses are regarded as the enemies of culture itself. In Homi Bhabha's terms, the ‘agonistic’ mode of colonial authority does not simply silence or repress racial differences; it actually promotes new differentiations. With this (re-)production of differences, the stereotypical figures of racist colonial discourse, such as ‘the simian Negro [and] the effeminate Asiatic male’, become fundamentally split subjects. Bhabha concludes that colonial subjection would not be possible without this ‘discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles, where the trace of what it disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different – a mutation, a hybrid’.