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The Race to be hero
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RACE AND GENDER IN ROY CAMPBELL'S LIGHT ON A DARK HORSE
JUDITH LÛTGE COULLIE
While blackness and
femininity are interrogated,
whiteness and masculinity
come to seem to be
incontestable and axiomatic.
Thus race comes to mean
that which is not white,
while gender appears
to signify femininity only
~E
.......
ven though contemporary
theories question the
apparently self-evident truths about
race and gender, analysis in South
Africa still tends to focus on the
construction of the black and/or
feminine subject. This rejection of the
devaluation in hegemonic discourses
during apartheid of all who were not
white and male is understandable; but
there are dangers inherent in this, for
while blackness and femininity are
interrogated, whiteness and masculinity
come to seem to be incontestable
and axiomatic. Thus race comes to
mean that which is not white, while
gender appears to signify femininity
only. This is beginning to change,
more noticeably with regard to
whiteness ± hardly surprising, given
the conspicuous self-consciousness
(fostered by the TRC, by conferences
and commissions of inquiry into
racism and the recent public apology
for whites) that has infused white
South Africa since the advent of
democracy in 1994. And while ``men's
studies'' ± inspired by feminism, and
an accepted part of academic inquiry
in America and the UK since the
1980s ± is at last beginning to make its
mark in South Africa, 1 generally,
analysis of masculinity is still subsumed
under the rubric of gender
studies. And gender here usually
means a focus on women. A conference
held at the University of the
Western Cape in 1997 is a case in
point: the theme was gender and
colonialism, but most papers focused
on women's issues. The bias towards
women's studies is often justified by
the argument that traditional scholarship
is all about men anyway, and
that men do not need additional
attention. However, the resultant
``overgeneralization from male to
generic human experience not only
distorts our understanding of what, if
anything, is truly generic to humanity
but also precludes the study of masculinity
as a specific male experience''
(Brod 1987:40). And such experience
is shifting, localized and complex:
``The more anthropologists, sociologists,
and historians explore the
meanings of being a `man', the more
inconsistent, contradictory, and varied
they become'' (Stimpson 1987:xi).
This paper aims to contribute to the
growth of scholarship on race and
gender in South Africa by examining
(by means of post-structuralist and
psychoanalytic theories) the particular
construction of Roy Campbell's white
male autobiographical hero, thus indicating
that neither whiteness nor
masculinity is simply given, ``normal'',
universally relevant or without ``pernicious
effects'' (Brod 1987:2).
In terms of both poststructuralist
and psychoanalytic theory, self is a
process, a site ± constituted ``within
power relations within particular historical
moments'' (Nussbaum
1989:10) ± for interpretations of experience.
The de-centred subject controls
neither consciousness nor the
unconscious: ``The unconscious comes
into existence simultaneously with the
subject's first assimilation of cultural
prohibition'' (Silverman 1983:55). The
subject is thus subjected to the social,
but is also the agent of action and may
thus initiate change. Julian Henriques
(1984:117) and his co-authors argue
that the material individual is conceived
of as a subject, which
is the effect of a production, caught in the
mutually constitutive web of social practices,
discourses and subjectivity; its reality
is the tissue of social relations ... [Analysis]
... must refer to the specificities of the different
practices in order to describe the
different subject positions and the different
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