White narrative, black words

Some thoughts on Orwell and Kelly's question.

Stoler suggests that racism is not primarily a visual ideology: rather the visual differences of race serve to signal the non-visual, "more salient" distinctions of exclusion "on which racism rests". The visual can point to skin colour or other physical attributes; it can also refer to a difference that is constructed: the different architectures of the colonial club/local buildings, the colonial grotto, clothing.

Physical Difference always exists (not even the King of Pop gets away from that), it is the abstract differences that become value laden, that maintains and further seperates this distance. Turning back to Hegel, we could say that after the moment of recognition, before the physical struggle that determines master/slave, is the ideological struggle.

Anyway, turning to Orwell's writing and its apparent misogyny and racism: these words, these sentiments, seem parallel to the physical attributes that distance the text from us, in our '(more) enlightened', pomo-poco-politically correct age. If we think of our identities as 'white' bodies of discourse, then Orwell/Conrad's text (not Orwell/Conrad) might seem 'blacky' racist, or better to say 'brown': "white canonical goodness" intertwined with "black racist sentiment". All very chocolatey and no doubt I am crazy from overwork.

But the point being that, if the text displays some kind of "metissage", how do we approach the text? To "whiten" it would probably be to consider the misogyny/racism ironic, a mask of blackness to highlight the whiteness within. If one feels the content cannot be treated ironically, then it is destined to remain blackly offensive.

So anyway, my response to Kelly's question on how to handle racism in Orwell's text is, partially, the horribly waffly sounding "make of it what you will". The caveat is: having the power to make of it what you will, be gentle, for literary texts in some ways are "Other" to us, just as the native is "Other" to the European: going in directions which need not necessarily converge. Attempting to "Colonise" the text, peculiarly, reproduces the imperialist ideology in a literary kind of way.