The Schemata that is My Stigmata

Chapter 7 of Levine’s interpretation of the historical topic of British Imperialism Ruling an empire details Britain’s exercise of power over the colonies. The “imperial supremacy” (103) is perpetuated through colonial employment, British education and Christian evangelization. We can derive from the evidence in Levine’s work how the shifts from the capitalism of Industrial Revolution Europe to the Modern period in the early 20th century affect the colonization processes, from a largely economical, profit-driven enterprise to the export of cultural capital. The shifts in literature and art are noted by Levine:
By the late 1800s, satire as well as the realism of the nineteenth-century novel yielded in popularity to colonial romancing. By the late nineteenth century, the empire became for fiction writers, for poets, for artists, a place of adventure and secrecy, of bravery and individualism (121).
To Levine, this emerging aesthetic movement is seen as a “literary and visual form of pro-imperial propanganda coincided with political efforts to drum up imperial support and interest in the British population at large (121). Perhaps this Eurocentric preoccupation with the exotic seen in the colonies can also be examined with Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism, where the best illustration in Levine’s Ruling an empire would be the fear of the dissolving barriers between the binary oppositions of Orient and Occident shown in the control of marriages between the colonizers and the colonized. The maintaining of the colonized in their category of a “lesser culture”(107) allows the colonizers to retain the mandate they had given to themselves in a moral purpose to spread imperial influence to alleviate the colonized from “alleged savagery and lack of civilization”(107).

Largely in agreement with Levine’s interpretation of the British Empire’s hegemony, Said’s Orientalism then applies in Gikandi’s Picasso, Africa and the Schemata of Difference. While Gikandi launches into an argument showing us how to rethink the “aesthetic of modernism” and the “schemata – and stigmata – of difference that both maintains and haunts it”, Yisa’s summary in his earlier post aptly provides the words to my feelings of Gikandi’s work, that “the primitive Other, even in the course of the Modernist reevaluation of traditions and long-held beliefs and ideologies, is valued (even valorized) solely as that whose use and purpose is servitude to the Eurocentric progress of civilization”(After Gikandi). The dismembering of Williams by Picasso at their introduction to each other sounded off the alarm for the objectification of the Other, and as much as I tried to prove to myself otherwise in the remainder of the article, the further details of Picasso’s use of the African forms in his art continues exacting violence in the representation of the exotic. Gikandi claims that Picasso’s “division of bodies from artistic models” allowed the African to be “cleansed of its danger and thus be allowed into what Aaran has aptly called ‘the citadel of modernism’”(456). The forced assimilation of the form is colonization in subliminality, and if we were to take Gikandi’s point for its value, no amount of masking and abstraction techniques will mitigate Picasso’s work from his “stereotypical notions of the black’s [EXCESSIVE] sexuality”(460).

Reading Auerbach’s chapter The Brown Stocking in Mimesis, the explanation of the stream of consciousness narrative style in Woolf’s To The Lighthouse brings helpful food for thought regarding the earlier mentioned points on Orientalism and the political and economical backgrounds of colonialism and imperial racism. The widely understood necessity of our tendencies to view everything in binary oppositions is reflected in the Modernist style of the “stream of consciousness” narrative. The consciousness of the Modernist individual is presented to be existing (proverbial “I think, therefore I am”, which Descartes never actually said, but maybe implied…), by Mrs Ramsay’s thought and feelings that are springboarded by the “objects of her creative imagination”(534). It is poignant, therefore, for us to think about Auerbach’s creative imagination by the object, which in this case, is Woolf’s word in Mrs. Ramsay’s world – “The Brown Stocking”. My agitation in the process of writing about the empire in Modernism in the previous paragraphs is placated, as, or so I think, Woolf’s and Auerbach’s aim to catharsise the anxieties of the Modernist reader.

There is, for sure, a schemata, and stigmata, of difference.

my bad for busting 2 paragraphs,

Weiquan