From: Andrew_Spencer-AT-baylor.edu
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1999 07:55:00 -0500
Subject: Re: Not White, Not Quite?


Thank you all for this information.  It has all been valuable, and I hope it
stimulates further discourse.  I have found the term applied to the Irish by
other writers, specifically ones arguing that to be postcolonial, one must be
of a minority race, and because the Irish are white, they do not fall into
this group.  I find it interesting that such a "liberal minded" stance for
criticism has proponents who are so willing to turn a blind eye to the
"colonization" or, at least, oppression, of members of a "majority race," i.e.
whites, all over the world.

Andrew

On Thu, 22 Jul 1999 23:11:52 -0400 (EDT) smd34-AT-columbia.edu (Suzanne Daly)
wrote:

>
>To return to the original question: "not quite/not white" is from Homi
>Bhabha's essay "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
>Discourse," and refers to no specific group. The essay's final paragraph
>reads, in part:
>
>In the ambivalent world of the "not quite/not white," on the margins of
>metropolitan desire, the *founding* objects of the Western world become
>the erratic, eccentric, accidental *objets trouves* of the colonial
>discourse -- the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and
>the book lose ... their representational authority. Black skin splits
>under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia,
>grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated white
>body."
>
>I've seen the term "not quite/not white" cited many times, but I couldn't
>tell you whether it has been used to refer specifically to the Irish.
>
>
>
>Suzanne Daly
>smd34-AT-columbia.edu
>
>
>
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