Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

IAN ANTHONY BETHELL
difference and inferiority. In The Idea of Race in Science, Nancy Stepan
illustrates this continued ‘Othering’ as it relates to blacks in general:
A fundamental question about the history of racism in the first half of
the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the battle against slavery
was being won by abolitionists, the war against racism was being lost.
The Negro was freed by the Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British
mind he was still mentally, morally and physically a slave. 32
Slavery’s end, therefore, made little difference to either sex. However, the
Victorian perspective made it difficult for the black woman to move into
the mainstream as a ‘normal’ human being. The Caribbean woman was,
therefore, never given equal status with her white European or American
counterparts. 33
Like Momsen, Bush illustrates the double-bind in which enslaved
women were locked. Their alterity was insisted upon and cultural differences
were elided to stabilise Englishness, or Europeanness, as it was
constructed against ‘Otherness’, as Gikandi discusses. Thus, the need to
deconstruct this image is essential in the face of what these critics have
termed blanket negativity. Peter Hulme refers to this trend in representation
as anthropology’s reductive analysis of ‘primitive’ cultures. 34
The focus on ‘making do’ was more reason for the Caribbean woman’s
further marginalisation in the mind of the coloniser. 35 She exhibited,
through necessity, some of the characteristics deemed to be contemptible. 36
32
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (Hamden,
Conn., 1982), p. 1.
33
See: Alice Walker, ‘Coming Apart’ You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
(New York, 1981), p. 42; Lola Young, ‘A nasty piece of work: a psychoanalytic
study of sexual and racial difference in “Mona Lisa”’ in J. Rutherford (ed.),
Identity-Community, Culture, Difference (London, Lawrence & Wishart,
1990), p. 195; Bell Hooks, Ain’t I a Woman (London, Pluto, 1982), p. 85; P.
H. Collins (1990), op. cit., p. 51.
34
See: Hulme (1986), op. cit., p. 55.
35
For more information on Caribbean woman’s role ‘making do’ during and after
slavery see: Momsen (1996), p. 216-217; Bush, (1990), op. cit., p. 17; Herbert
S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York,
Oxford UP, 1986); Beckles (1990), op. cit., p. 63; See: Scarano’s discussion in
‘Labor and Society in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Modern Caribbean
ed. by Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer (Chapel Hill, 1989), pp.
51-84; Delia Jarret-Macauley, ‘Exemplary Women’, p. 42; Bridget Brereton,
‘Society and Culture inthe Caribbean: The British and French West Indies,
1870-1980’, in Knight and Palmer eds. op. cit., pp. 90-91; Bush (1990), op.
cit., pp. 84-85.
36
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (Philadelphia: J.R. Lippincott Co., 1938),
p. 58.
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