Gut Reactions

Whence did my gut reaction to Alloula's “Colonial Harem” arise?

Alloula plainly saw me--a white male--as being in effect the colonial photographer. That was obvious to everyone in the seminar. The book was a polemic against people like me. Although I happened to be reading his text, I was not his intended reader--except in the limited sense that he considered people like me the "sender" of "this immense postcard" he was returning.

Alloula also saw what he was doing as political, an act of resistance--as Alloula put it himself, an "exorcism." The people he was resisting, presumably, were also people like me.

So there I was, willing to read Alloula and hear what he had to say, only to discover that Alloula's response to me was a book-length diatribe against me. And not even a diatribe addressed directly to me, but rather a diatribe about me with me present. Reading Aloulla was like being insulted and treated as invisible, both at the same time.

As irrational as this gut reaction might be, I think it's worth taking seriously, because I don't think I'm alone in having it. I think white males have this gut reaction constantly when they dip into works concerning colonialism, racism, sexism, etc. I think it's tiresome to be constantly positioned in the role of Pharaoh, and I think a white male has only three responses to being positioned in that fashion.

The first is to turn away, to reject, to roll one's eyes, to scoff.

The second is to deny that one is the target, by agreeing with and trying to identify with the Alloulas of the world.

The third is to take it--either because one thinks one deserves it, or because one accepts it as the price of hearing what the Alloulas of the world have to say.

The first reaction is probably the most common, and it fuels the widespread exasperation, on the part of conservative white males (and for that matter conservative white females), with the whole project of multiculturalism.

The second reaction is common among most white male academics. And after all, why not? They didn't create the colonial project--or sexism, or racism--so they can as readily choose to identify with the oppressed as with the oppressor. Which would be fine except that ordinarily they benefit from a power structure that favors white males as much as if they actively identified with and supported it. Which makes the second reaction a cheap and easy game.

The third reaction is the hardest, because it obviously requires accepting a position that is unpleasant. This is tough enough when one is merely reading a book or article. It's much more difficult when one actually engages face to face with the Alloulas of the world, as we’ll see in my next post.