Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

IAN ANTHONY BETHELL
What we have here, in other words, in texts that claim historical and
scientific accuracy, is the elaboration and corroboration of ethnic stereotypes,
more powerful for being embedded in contexts which convey a
certain amount of historical and ethnographic information [...] As always,
the stereotype operates principally through a judicious combination of
adjectives which establish characteristics as eternal verities immune from
the irrelevancies of historical moment: “ferocious”, “warlike”, “hostile”,
“truculent and vindictive”. 24
Hulme observes that these characteristics may have been appropriate in
one historical moment, but have since become blanket terms that disallow
and disavow any escape from within their enclosure. The context here is a
world in which partial characteristics are applied to entire realities. Words
that would fit into the particular context of Hulme’s and Bush’s arguments
would be ‘passive’, ‘hardworking’, ‘immoral’, ‘lascivious’, ‘domineering’,
among others, having replaced words such as ‘warlike’ and ‘hostile’. 25 The
fact that the black woman is forced into hard labour is never considered.
She works like a man, or better, and that is all that is seen from a slave
master’s perspective. This is the only time she is visible to the master’s
eyes, and in this way a partial description of her life is made to appear as
the whole. As Zora Neale Hurston puts it: ‘Women get no bonus just for
being female down there. She can do the same labors as a man or a mule
and nobody thinks anything about it’. 26
Understandably then, many slave masters believed that they were in
no way misrepresenting the slaves as that part of their lives was all they
could see, and moreover, slaves were not people—they were chattel. The
black woman had no alternative than to allow for the perpetuation of
those terms. She was often positioned by planters and abolitionists as the
‘domineering matriarch’ who was hard-working and fought to keep her
family together. 27
Arguably, Joan Dayan’s assertion that ‘slavery never ended’ adds credence
to the difficulty of deconstructing this enclosure as it highlights
that the only difference now is that the word ‘slavery’ has been abolished,
which does not signal that the attitudes, prejudices and realities that went
along with it have disappeared. Therefore, the depiction of the slave woman’s
character as a lascivious, hard-working, domineering ‘mammy’ is
24
Hulme (1986), op. cit, p. 49. See: Burton, op. cit., p. 4-5.
25
Ibid.
26
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (Philadelphia,
J. B. Lippincott Inc. 1938), p. 59. Hurston’s observations are taken
out of their time but they articulate the same trend in representation as the
slave master’s image of the enslaved woman.
27
Bush (1990), op. cit., p. 5.
• HOMINES • Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 299