Shane Moran - Alternation Journal

JI~ivi (1 kiiztitz~za~z
Raclal Governr~zentallt)) Thornas ./efferson and Afr~can Colonrsat~on
overlappings. interactions, and echoes' (Foucault 1980: 149)".
These mai~ipulable I-epresentations are echoed again in an analogy Jefferson
draws repeatedly between colonised Afikan A~nericans and '~mported' 'wh~tc
his few accounts of 'race' actually takes note of such 'overlappings'. In the last
laborers' or, often, 'Ge~~nans' In the 'Autobiogl-aphy' passage he wrltes that 'their
of The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault (1980: 138) suggests that the
[colonised Afi-ican Americans'] place be par1 passu filled up by free white laborers'.
.om an 'ancient' regime of power organised by sovereignty to a 'modem' regime
This analogy simultaneously constructs an abstract equ~valence between 'free white
ised by 'a power to foster life'-or what he would eventually call
laborers' and colonised African Americans, and codifies a racial and national
entality-produced racism in the modern sense (Foucault 1980: 149f).
difference between white and black populations Jefferson thus again figures the
(1980: 1470 writes, 'racism in its modern, "biologizing", statist fonn ... took
paradox, however 'certain', 'that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same
m the mid nineteenth century with a shift in the mechanisms of power from 'the
government'. That is, he calculates what, precisely, 'the two races' share 'equally', or
olics of blood'-in which 'blood constituted one of the fundamental values' and
what form of being 'free' is corninon to both, and what, precisely, their governmental
r spoke through blood: the honor ofwar, the fear of famine, the triumph of death,
difference-'the two races ... cannot live ~n the same government'-consists ini7.
vereign with his sword, executioners, and tortures; blood was a reality with a
In sum, I ain suggesting here neither that Jefferson is a benevolent liberal who
olic function'-to 'the analytics of sexuality'. That is, through new 'technologies
could not quite overcome antiquated prejudices, nor that Jefferson's representation of
ife' concerned with disciplining the body and regulating populations, 'sex' was
colonisation as genuinely emancipatory is simply a false ideological surface masking a
uced as a crucial field for the deployment ofpower:
traditional, de-humanising and objectifying discourse of slavery. Rather, I want to
suggest that we read both his liberal language and his Inore traditionally objectifying
Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the
species. It was e~nployed as a standard for the disciplines and as a basis for
language as overlapping and interacting to produce a hybrid, liberal racism driven by
regulations .... Through the themes of liealth, progeny. race, the future of thc
the governmental investment of subjects with life as populations to be enumerated,
species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to
regulated, and manipulated-'we shall in the long run have rendered them perhaps
more good than evil', Jefferson writes to Sparks.
Finally, colonisation discourse allows us to read a historically specific system
of racialisation and nationalisation into Foucault's conception of 'modem technologies ed off as intruders, inventcd to deflect anxieties, and conjured up prccisely to nail blame.
of power', a conception which, as many critics have argued, had little to say about racial ~lcault. racism is more than an ad hoc response to crisis: it is a manifestation of preserved
and national form^'^. In particular, colonisation discourse allows us to interpret what
'lities, the expression of an underlying discoursr of permanent social war, nurtured by tile
Foucault (1979: 138) called the 'modernity' of these technologies. For Foucault, political technologies of "incessent purificatiotl". Racism does not rnerely arise in molnents
'modernity' does not refer to a simple, progressive development from sovereignty to
bio-power. In fact, the History of Sexuality suggests that different configurations o
power necessarily overlap:
... in actual fact the passage from one [regime of power] to the other did not
come about (any more than did these powers themselves) without
" See also letters to Dr. Edward Bancroft (26 Jan. 1789) (Jefferson 1899.V:66-68); RU
King (13 July 1802) (Jefferson l899.V111:162f); and J.P. Reibelt (21 Dec. 1805) (Jefferso
1899.VIII:402f).
'' Stoler has argued recently that the lectures which Foucault gave in 1976 at the Colltge de
France-only some of which have been published and even fewer translated-confer upon race
and racism a much more central role in the deployment of governmental power and knowledge. I
llave not been able to exa~nine these lectures. Stoler's (l995:69) own reading of these lectures
intriguingly suggests that Foucault's account of racialisation 'is no scapegoat tlleory of ra
Scapegoat tlleories posit that under economic and social duress, particular sub-populations a