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culture”. 2 And if the tragic mess of colonialism teaches anything at all, it should teach us that
representations are entangled in a web of epistemic violence. 3 Untangling this is a vital task.
Racism toward Africa, particularly sub‐Saharan Africa and its people has changed in the face of
modernity. Once portrayed as backward for its savagery during the colonial era, where modernity
was inseparable from Victorian cultural imperialism, it is now seen as backward in a way that changes
the meaning of savagery and modernity’s ideals to discriminate in the same fashion. Maurice Wade
discusses this in terms of cultural chauvinism, stating:
…brown and black Others… [were] regarded as inferiors, an attitude… manifested in
referring to them as ‘heathen’, ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’, ‘uncivilized’, and the like [and] for the
most part, inferiority was imputed to these non‐white, non‐European peoples on the basis
of their sociocultural differences… Their statues as heathen, savages, barbarians and
uncivilized peoples resided in their non‐European mode of living. They were judged
inferior because their social, cultural, and political forms were assessed on the
unquestioned assumption of the clear and vast superiority of the Christian European
social, cultural, and political institutions and conventions. 4
With culture as the point of contention, skin color became “the visible metaphor for the
essentialist traits that the colonized subject was attributed as an integral part of his/her identity.” 5 It
was constructed as the representation of degeneracy and backwardness, providing “a justification for
the ideology of improvement that postulated the need to ‘civilize’ non‐Western peoples, which, in
turn, served as the philanthropic justification of the colonial enterprise, its deep driving force being
economic profit.” 6
I would argue that this is not so different from what we see today. The ideology of
improvement has shifted as the West has shed its Victorian clothing, to where the ideology of
improvement is to again model after the West in its self‐proclaimed state of modernity. This notion
of modernity is one where individuals are categorized according to essentialist norms of identification
and their validity as individuals is based on their relationship to the state as rights‐bearer. Within
this, African states are meant to recognize and guarantee the rights of individuals as defined by
Western categories, for instance LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), or face consequences
from the Western hegemony of the international legal system. Critical approaches to these processes
should not in any way condone the actions of politicians and states that seek to persecute and even
exterminate people. Condoning, or reprimanding, is not the task of scholarship. What such a critical
approach can do, is illuminate this through, for instance, the notion of double‐consciousness.
Double‐consciousness signifies how “oppressed subjects are both coerced and persuaded to
define themselves according to the oppressor’s stereotypical constructions of their identity, which
they are made to internalize.” 7 Because oppressed peoples have “an intuitive knowledge of the
workings of power,” they are rendered aware of how they need to “comply with the exigencies of the
dominating group while resisting in alternative ways” in order to survive. 8 This compliance and
resistance is a varied process and can be examined through the notions of mimicry, hybridity, and the
double‐inscription of colonial presence. 9
If we are to examine it today, we can see how compliance with early colonial civilizing norms of
sexual and gender roles persist in post‐colonial societies even while the West has supposedly
progressed beyond them, an idea which could also be debated. And the other side of this, resistance,
is directed against the current ideals of modernity in the name of preserving a produced ideal of
traditional culture in society. There is another way of looking at compliance‐resistance in terms of
compliance with the current Western norms of modernity with resistance as safeguarding a different,
perhaps more true‐to‐reality notion of (local) traditional culture which is meant to be untouched by
(global) cultural hegemony.
In the new modernity, Europe and the West is painted as a haven of tolerance and acceptance
where women, sexual, religious, and ethnic minorities, differently‐abled people, and others are all
equal under the law and therefore equal in society. On the other hand Africa, depicted as a uniform