“Racism and Nationalism”
Introduction & Starting Questions:
What is racism?
And racialization?
Do you think that racism is related to nationalism?
Do you
have examples from the literary works we read, and/or from your daily life?
1.
Racialization: "a process of categorization, a representational process of defining an Other (usually,
but not exclusively) somatically."
This process of categorization attributes meaning to a "real or
alleged biological characteristic." (Racism by Robert Miles 75).

2.
Related Issues: race vs. ethnicity.
Does race matter?
Nationalism – as belief, ideology, politics and cultural construct.
(See Anderson page.)
3 approaches: 1) primordial, 2) functional (e.g. psychological function), 3) narrative (Breuilly)
3.
Eric Hobsbawm two meanings of state-subject relations
1) A relation known as citizenship, in which the nation consists of collective sovereignty based in
common political participation, and
2) A relation known as ethnicity, in which the nation comprises all those of supposedly common
language, history, or broader cultural identity.
(Verdery 227)
“Racism and Nationalism”
I. Main Argument: There are many kinds of nationalism and racism, just as they can be
related to each other in many different ways.
As a whole, the connection between
nationalism and racism is neither perversion, nor a question of formal similarity, but that
of historical articulation.
In the gap between nationalism and racism, racism is a
supplement of nationalism, adding to its ambiguous nature.
II. Summary
A. Introduction – Racist organizations tend to use nationalism as an excuse, but
racism’s connections with nationalism remain controversial.
The Presence of the Past [on Racism]
B. Different kinds of Racism
--theoretical
vs.
spontaneous;
external
vs.
internal;
auto-referential
vs.
hetero-referential or hetero-phobic racism (38-39); institutional and sociological;
racism of extermination and of oppression
-- continuities of colonial racism (not all the French colonizations has disappeared…)
“are mediated …or overdetermined …by the reflection of more far-reaching
historical events and tendencies” (42).
-- Nazism vs. Colonial racism:

Colonial racism – the external racism that continues to exclude a forcibly
conquered minority from citizenship;

Nazism—eliminate an internal minority
C. Colonial racism – The racial exteriority of the ‘native’--not always the case.
There
is a dual movement of assimilation and exclusion of the ‘natives’; the subhuman
nature attributed to the colonized comes to determine the self-image developed
within the colonized nation … ( Pocahontas)

The imperialist superiority – “The colonial castes of the various nationalities …
worked together to forget the idea of ‘White’ superiority.
(43)
D. Interiority-exteriority configuration – interiorization of the exterior: e.g. “Third
World within” (immigrants who move to their mother country) // exteriorization of
the interior
E.
The
constantly
states
shifting
–between
two
frontiers
humanities
–
irreducible
..humanity
of
to
the
frontier
destitution
and
between
that
of
‘consumption,’ the humanity of underdevelopment and that of overdevelopment.
(44)
Today’s anti-immigrant racism can associated with anti-Semitism and voice
the desire for extermination.
The Field of Nationalism [Nationalism & Racism]
A. Nationalism –many kinds: e.g. the nationalism of the dominant vs. the nationalism of
the dominated; of liberation and of conquest; in a chain of many related terms: civic
spirit, patriotism, populism, ethnicism, …; connected to imperialism, racism, fascism
and Nazism.
B. Constant Split:
“…the notion of nationalism is constantly dividing.
There is
always a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ nationalism. … one which derives from love, one
which derives from hate.”
C. Nationalism and Racism
a.
racism represents a necessary tendency in their [racisms’] constitutions, and it
overlaps with nationalism
b. the connection of the two is a matter of historical articulation (50)
c.
Nazism – culmination of nationalism, or a special kind of nationalism.
d. Reciprocity of the two: racism is constantly emerging out of nationalism e.g.
Third World nationalism
e.
A gap (54): “…the gap subsists between the representations and practices of
nationalism and racism.
It is a fluctuating gap between the two poles of
contradiction and a forced identification—it is perhaps, as the Nazi example
shows, when this identification is apparently complete that the contradiction is
the most marked” (54) in which racism is not an expression of nationalism, but a
supplement of nationalism or more precisely a supplement internal to
nationalism.
The Paradoxes of Universality [Theoretical Racism]
A. Racism—covers both the universal and the particular.
“[R]acism… adds to the
ambiguous nature of nationalism, which means that, through racism, nationalism
engaes in a ‘headlong flight forward’, a metamorphosis of its material
contradictions into ideal contradictions. 
B. Theoretical racism’s desire to know
(1) Classification and hierarchy: “operation of naturalization par excellence or,
more accurately, of projection of historical and social differences into the realm
of an imaginary nature” (56).
Human nature is defined in terms of some
natural differences, with causes (interbreeding, heredity) given.
“There is
therefore a latent contradiction in the ‘naturalism’ of race, which has to be
overcome in a movement beyond this towards an originary, ‘immemorial’
‘super-nature’, which is always already projected into an imaginary divided
between good and evil, innocence of perversion.” (56)
(2) Anthropological universals: a persistent question is “the difference between
humanity and animality.”
To explain the
cultural differences, scientists use concepts
such
as
individuality,
selection,
reproduction and interbreeding.
(3) Aestheticization (and sexualization) of social
relations: e.g. worker as the perfect type of
future humanity.
(4) Humanism and racism—there is a humanist,
universalist component in the ideological
constitution of racism.
(e.g. John Rolfe’s
reason for marrying Pocahontas.)
(5) Racism as supernationalism: It is in race that
we unit.
culturally pure.
 a nation has to be racially or
Theoretical racism uses “specific universalization’ and
idealizes nationalism.
Two conclusions: 1) racist movements can be supranational; 2) racism is not the absolute
antithesis of humanism.
III. Discussion Questions
1) Do you have any examples to support Balibar’s theories (e.g. of theoretical racism,
the supranational tendencies of racism, its appeal to the universal, etc.)
2) Is it possible that nationalism is not racist in nature?
Example of Racial incorporation/exclusion. Pocahontas
th
Construction of the Pocahontas myth in the 19 century
The Pocahontas familiar to the twentieth century was largely the product of the nineteenth, as both
Philip Young and Robert Tilton have demonstrated. It was a time when, as Young points out,
"Americans began to search intensely for their history" and so resurrected the story, shaping the history
into a myth that (to echo Slotkin) allowed the nation to "remember"—but in fact allowed it to
create—a mythohistory that was both comfortable and comforting to the dominant group, white
Euro-Americans. That mythohistory offered a crucial ideological foundation for the nation's future as
well; as Tilton says, "On a national level . . . it had become clear by the second decade of the nineteenth
century that Pocahontas had rescued Smith, and by implication all Anglo-Americans, so that they
might carry on the destined work of becoming a great nation—a task that was still in its early stages"
(55). (Faery 152)
Captivity narrative and Pocahontas
Just as in the earlier period of colonization, stories of white women captured by Indians were also
players in the post-Revolutionary dramas of constructing a new nation, partners with the Pocahontas
figure in creating discursive scenes where the dramas of racial identity, both individual and national,
could be played out. Looking to its past for sources to construct the identity and culture it needed, the
infant nation found them in part in the related legends of the "Indian princess," lover and savior of
white colonists, and of white women's captivity among ''savage" Indians. In the crucible of these
founding myths, the nation strove to forge both a history and an identity that helped to shape, and were
in turn themselves shaped by, widely held beliefs in racial difference, the inevitability of white
supremacy, the superiority of Euro-American culture, and the providential nature of the design that
held Blacks in bondage and forced Native people to yield to white conquest.
…
They engaged the discursive elements necessary to consolidate the identity of the American subject and
the American nation as white and male, while at the same time their stories contained elements that
perpetually thwarted the effort.
(Faery 152-53)
Frustration (1) Pocahontas – all the same but not quite
These multiple figures and the stories or images they inhabit have engaged the ideology of a "white
nation" in various ways. Pocahontas's transformation into the Christian Lady Rebecca Rolfe was
celebrated because of the ways it symbolized the success of the project of anglicizing America; at the
same time, the mimicry of Anglo identity by the anglicized Pocahontas, always almost white, yet not
quite, unavoidably highlighted that such an identity was never given, but always made. Thus even in
her most eastward-facing guise, the Pocahontas figure in subtle ways unsettled the white identity of the
nation by reminding Americans of how contingent that identity was. As Homi Bhabha has pointed out,
the "effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing" ("Of Mimicry
and Man" 126) because ''to be Anglicized, is emphatically not to be English" (128).
(Faery 155)
Frustration (2)
But the image of the white woman captured by Indians, partner to the Pocahontas myth in the
production of racial difference, shadowed the success story of the Indian Englishwoman. If Pocahontas
could "become English," then the white captive could "become Indian," raising the spectre of the ease
with which Englishness could be erased or abandoned and making uncomfortably visible the
tenuousness of identity for English people translated to America. (Faery 160)
Rolfe’s “love”
Rolfe claimed that he was motivated not by
"the unbridled desire of carnal affection, but for the good of this plantation, for the honor of our country,
for the Glory of God, for my own salvation… namely Pocahontas, to whom my hearty and best
thoughts are, and have been a long time so entangled, and enthralled in so intricate a labyrinth that I
was even a-wearied to unwind myself thereout."
John Rolfe wrote to the governor of the colony asking permission to wed Pocahontas. Declaring
himself sensible of the "inconvenyences which maye thereby arrise," making him "looke aboute warely
and with circuspection, into the grounde and principall agitacions wch thus shoulde provoke me to be
in love wth one, whose education hath byn rude, her manners barbarous, her generacon Cursed, and soe
discrepant in all nutriture from my selfe, that often tymes with feare and tremblinge I have ended my
pryvate Controversie wth this, Surely theise are wicked instigations hatched by him whoe seeketh and
delighteth in mans distruction"—he means, of course, Satan. Rolfe must justify and mitigate his desire
for a "savage" woman by declaring his desire to convert the savage; thus he reasserts her "savagery," in
contrast to himself. Characterizing her as ''blynde," "hungry," and "naked," Rolfe, sensitive to the
"duetyes of a Christian," means to "leade" her, "gyve [her] breade," (Faery 118) and "cover" her (347).
By representing himself as the bringer of gifts into his union with a "naked" (and so uncultured)
Pocahontas, Rolfe obscures the fact that it was she and her people who saved and sustained the
colonists by giving them "breade" and obscures as well all that he stands to gain materially from the
marriage, all that he will take in taking her as his wife. He denies that he is motivated by "unbridled
desire of Carnall affection" (345) and of course omits any mention of possessing land as a result of the
marriage.
24
To those who doubt the nobility of his purposes, he says, "Lett them knowe tis not my
hungrye appetite to gorge my selfe with incontinencye'' (347). Rolfe even goes so far as to say, in
stressing that Pocahontas is not the best he could do for a wife, that he could get one "more pleasing to
the eye" (348). His declarations that he wants to marry her to win her to Christianity "for the good of
the Plantacon, the honor of our Countrye, for the glorye of God" (345) carried the day, and his petition
was granted. (Faery 119)
Myth –an example in John Davis’ Captain Smith and Pocahontas (1805)
Smith’s “death” and Rolfe
When Smith departs for England, he clears his reputation by declaring that he "never dropped the
slightest hint about marriage" to Pocahontas, and he tells the remaining colonists to tell her he is dead,
"to cure her of her passion" (87). She grieves unspeakably, "weeping along the banks of the river," her
hair "deshevelled" (88). Enter Rolfe, who assuages his own acute loneliness for Smith with
Pocahontas's company Appropriately enough for the man who steps into Smith's shoes, and who is
newly in love with this emblem of the continent he is hoping and helping to conquer, ''the breast of
Rolfe yielded to the empire of his passions" for Pocahontas (91; emphasis mine). When he finds her in
the forest "strewing flowers over the imaginary grave of captain Smith" (92 93), she is so surprised and
frightened at being detected that she faints into his arms: "He clasped the Indian maiden to his beating
heart, and drank from her lips the poison of delight"; her (necessary) response is "tenderness rather than
anger" (93). That response prompts an author's footnote, where Davis quotes Rochefaucault: "The
female bosom is never more susceptible of a new passion, than when it is agitated by the remains of a
former one" (93 94 n). (Faery 164)
Davis's novel established the sentimental tradition for representing Pocahontas in literature, 8 and the
Pocahontas he created has been repeated, with minor variations on the theme, again and again in the
succeeding two centuries, up to and including the recent Disney film. (Faery 165)
John Gadsby Chapman, The Baptism of Pocahontas at Jamestown, Virginia, 1613. The painting was
placed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in 1840.
Courtesy of the Office of the Architect of the U.S. Capitol and the National Archives. (image source:
http://www.learnnc.org/lp/media/uploads/2007/09/baptism_of_pocahontas_1.jpg )
John Gadsby Chapman’s painting, commissioned in 1837, depicts Pocahontas’ baptism in Jamestown,
Virginia, around 1613 or 1614. In the painting, Pocahontas (soon to be baptized Rebecca) wears a
white dress and kneels before a baptismal font in a church. Anglican minister Alexander Whiteaker
stands facing her, looking upward, with his left hand held up. Pocahontas is surrounded by other
American Indians and colonists. John Rolfe, who would marry Pocahontas after her baptism, stands
behind her, wearing burgundy. Pocahontas’ brother, Nantequaus, is turning away from the baptism.
Disney Versions:
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTAzNTk2OTI0.html
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTAzNTk2OTY4.html
Work Cited
Faery, Rebecca Blevins.
American Nation.
Verdery, Katherine.
Balakrishnan.
Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an
Norman U of Oklahoma P, 1999.
“Whither Nation and Nationalism?”
Verso, 2000: 226-234.
Mapping the Nation.
Ed. Gopal