94   Toward a Genealogy of Racisms
projects in the nineteenth-century Dutch East Indies should allow us to re-engage Foucault on a number of these fundamental questions. In looking to the sexual politics of race and the racial derivation of the language of class on imperial terrain, we are better positioned to interrogate the racial underpinnings of Europe's bourgeois order. We are in the felicitous position to draw on Foucault's insights and go beyond them.
r
IV
CULTIVATING BOURGEOIS BODIES AND RACIAL SELVES
The emphasis on the body should undoubtedly be linked to the process of growth and establishment of bourgeois hegemony; not, however, because of the market value assumed by labor capacity, but because of what the 'cultivation' of its own body could represent politically, economically, and historically for the present and the future of the bourgeoisie. Its dominance was in part dependent on that cultivation ... (HS:i25).
In the two preceding chapters, I closely followed Foucault's treatments of modern racism in The History of Sexuality and the lectures, as he traced its emergence through a discourse of sexuality, normalizing power, and the technologies of the biopolitical state. In The History of Sexuality, modern racism is a late effect in the biohistory of bourgeois hegemony; in the lectures that genealogy is more nuanced, more complicated, and in some ways more blurred. There, a discourse of races (if not modern racism itself) antedates nineteenth-century social taxonomies, appearing not as a result of bourgeois orderings, but as constitutive of them. It is to this shift in analytic weight and to incumbent colonial implications that I turn here. I want to suggest that by drawing on Foucault's deeper genealogy of racial discourse in the lectures, we can re-examine his history of bourgeois sexuality to enrich that account in ways more consonant with what we are beginning to understand about the work of race and the place of empire in the making of Europe's bourgeois world.
Thus, I want to keep two sorts of issues in focus: how we can use Foucault to think about a specific range of colonial issues, and, in turn, what these colonial contexts afford us for rethinking how European bourgeois culture recounted the distinctions of its sexuality. Two themes of the lectures are of interest here: one is Foucault's attention to racism as part of a
go   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
state's "indispensable" defense of society against itself. This resonant and recurrent theme in the racial discourses of colony and metropole was critical to how European colonial communities expressed the "defense" of its privileged members. I look here at how the regulatory mechanisms of the colonial state were directed not only at the colonized, but as forcefully at "internal enemies" within the heterogeneous population that comprised the category of Europeans themselves. What is compelling in Foucault's analysis is less its novelty than its anticipation and confirmation of some of the very directions that studies of nationalism and colonialism are now taking.
On the other hand, Foucault by no means prefigured nor anticipated all these new directions. While he insisted on the primacy of a discourse on social war within Europe's eighteenth-century borders, giving only marginal attention to France's simultaneous colonial ventures that were under way, students of colonialism have made tentative efforts to sort out that connection. Lisa Lowe, for example, has drawn on eighteenth-century French travel literature to show how that literature became "the means through which internal domestic challenges to social order could be figured and emplotted as foreign challenges."1 While Foucault plotted the rise of modern racism out of these domestic tensions, Lowe, like Ben Anderson, turns that same observation of noble and popular attacks on monarchical sovereignty to a different end to show how critical this early period of colonial expansion was in "registering and regulating" Europe's domestic conflicts.2 If empire already figured in the class politics of eighteenth-century Europe, as Lowe, Pratt and others suggest, then surely it becomes harder to imagine a nineteenth-century bourgeois order that excludes empire from it.
Still, other insights of Foucault's, particularly his identification of a nineteenth-century shift in the tactic of power away from discipline to a "technology of security," dovetail with new directions in colonial studies in important ways. Key to this "technology of security"—like biopower more generally—was its joining of the governing of a population to new interventions in the governing of the self. While this form of power emerged around 1800 (as signaled in Discipline and Punish), in the course of the nineteenth century it comes to legitimate increasing intervention in
1. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orienialisms (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 54.
2. Lowe 54.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves    97
the ethics of conduct, geared to the management of "how to live" (TM:46). In the late colonial order, such interventions operated on European colonials in gendered forms that were class-specific and racially coded. Management and knowledge of home environments, childrearing practices, and sexual arrangements of European colonials were based on the notion that the domestic domain harbored potential threats both to the "defense of society" and to the future "security" of the [European] population and the [colonial] state.
In short, these colonial variants confirm some of Foucault's claims, but not others. I want to focus not on the affirmation of bourgeois bodies as Foucault does in The History of Sexuality, but on the uncertainties and porous boundaries that surrounded them. I am concerned with the ways in which racial discourse reverberated between metropole and colony to secure the tenuous distinctions of bourgeois rule; how in this "management of [bourgeois] life," middle-class distinctions were made not only in contrast to a European-based working class, but through a racialized notion of civility that brought the colonial convergence of—and conflict between—class and racial membership in sharp relief. My starting point is not the hegemony of imperial systems of control, but their precarious vulnerabilities.
While convinced that an understanding of the relationship between bourgeois biopower and colonial taxonomies entails tracing discourses on morality and sexuality through empire and back to the making of the interior frontiers of European nation-states, I only suggest some of those trajectories here. This task demands a reassessment of the anthropology of empire as well as of Foucault's selective Europe-bound genealogies. As a first step, I treat bourgeois sexuality and racialized sexuality not as distinct kinds, as does JanMohamed, but as dependent constructs in a unified field. Not least, my account confirms those challenges levelled at a European historiographic tradition in which the "age of empire" and this "century of bourgeois liberalism" have been bracketed more often than treated as parts of a whole.3 In drawing on this emergent scholarship that
3. For one of the earlier and still definitive statements on this connection see Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) and, of course. James Mill himself, The Histnry of British India, 6th ed., 6 vols. (London: James Madden, 1858). For one specific effort to draw these linkages for the late nineteenth century, see David Johnson, "Aspects of a Liberal Education: Late Nineteenth-Century Attitudes to Race, from Cambridge to the Cape Colony," History Workshop Journal 36 (1993): 162-182. Also seejaved Maheed, Ungovemed Imaginings: James Mill's
g8   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
attempts to span metropolitan and colonial social histories, I pursue those questions we are just beginning to ask, and suggest why we have not asked them until now.4
Rethinking Colonialism os a Bourgeois Project
It is beyond the fifty degree longitude that one starts to become conscious of what it means to be European.5
It may be the case that Foucault's work speaks less to the making of colonized subjects than to how European colonials constructed themselves, that his insights address, as Gayatri Spivak notes, more the "constitution of the colonizer."6 Despite her allusion to Foucault's possible applicability to the normalizing contexts in which European colonials lived, Spivak never pursues this particular venture, dismissing it as a dangerous project. But even if we were to apply Foucault's story of the making of bourgeois distinctions to the ruling technologies of colonizing agents, that story and our treatment of it comes up against some serious problems. Some are Foucault's, and some our own.
Much, of the anthropology of colonialism, as I have argued for some time, has taken the categories of "colonizer" and "colonized" as givens, rather than as constructions that need to be explained.7 Scholars have
The History of British India and Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), who argues that the colonies were more than a "testing ground" for bourgeois liberal philosophy but the means through which European society "fashioned a critique of itself" (128). Also see Linda Colley ("Britishness and Otherness: an Argument." Journal of British Studies 331 [October 1992]: 309-329) who argues that for nineteenth century Britons "empire did serve as a powerful distraction and cause in common" ($25).
4. On the problematic bracketing of national from imperial history in Britain and a well-argued plea for a rethinking of it, see Shula Marks, "History, the Nation and Empire: Sniping from the Periphery," History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): m-119.
5. Louis Mallere t, L'exotisme indochinots dans la li Hera tu re francaise (Paris: Larose, 1936) 51.
6. The quote in full reads: "what remains useful in Foucault is the mechanics of disciplinariza-tion and institutionalization, the constitution, as it were, of the colonizer. Foucault does not relate it to any version, early or late, proto- or post-, of imperialism. They are of great usefulness to intellectuals concerned with the decay of the West Their seduction for them, and fearful-ness for us, is that they might allow the complicity of the investigating subject (male or female professional) to disguise itself in transparency" (Marxism and the Interpretation oľ Culture 294).
7. See my "Rethinking Colonial Calegories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule," Comparative Studies in Society and Histary3t.i (January 1989): 134-161.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   99
focused more on colonizers' accounts of indigenous colonized societies than on how Europeans imagined themselves in the colonies and cultivated their distinctions from those to be ruled. In short, there may be so few colonial readings of The History of Sexuality because questions of what constituted European identities in the colonies and the problematic political semantics of "whiteness" have only recendy come squarely within the scope of our analysis.8
The ellipses deriving from that constricted vision are more than apparent now as students of African, Asian, and Latin American colonial contexts have come to dismantle the received notion of colonialism as a unified bourgeois project. We have boldly and deftly undone its hegemonic conceits in some domains, but still skirt others. We know more than ever about the legitimating rhetoric of European civility and its gendered construals, but less about the class tensions that competing notions of "civility" engendered.9 We are just beginning to identify how bourgeois sensibilities have been coded by race and, in turn, how finer scales measuring cultural competency and "suitability" often replaced explicit racial criteria to define access to privilege in imperial ventures.1"
We still need to turn away from a founding premise. Colonialism was not a secure bourgeois project. It was not only about the importation of middle-class sensibilities to the colonies, but about the making of them. This is not to suggest that middle-class European prescriptions were invented out of whole cloth in the outposts of empire and only then brought
8. On the variable meanings of "whiteness" see, for example, my "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power...": Catherine Hall's "Gender and Ethnicity in the 1830s and 1840s," White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London: Polity Press, 1992) 205-2J3.
9. For recent work on the gendered tensions of colonial projects, in addition to works already cited, see: Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strubel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992); Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji, 1835-1930: The Ruin of Empire? (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 19S6); Patricia Grimshaw, Poths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1989); Nancy Paxton, "Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Novels about the Indian Uprising of 1857," Victorian Studies (Fall 1992): c-30; Frances Gouda, "The Gendered Rhetoric of Colonialism and Anti-colonialism in Twentieth Century Indonesia," Indonesia 55 (April 1993): 1-22. For a critique of some of this literature see Margaret Jolly, "Colonizing Women: The Maternal Body and Empire," Feminism and the Politics of Difference, eds. Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (Boulder Westview Press, 1993).
10. On the substitution of a discourse of cultural competency for an explicitly racial discourse see my "Sexual Aifronts and Racial Frontiers...." Comparative Studies In Society and History 34,3 (July I992):ci4-£i.
loo   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
home. I want to underscore another observation: that the philanthropic moralizing mission that defined bourgeois culture in the nineteenth century cast a wide imperial net; that the distinctions defining bourgeois sexuality were played out against not only the bodies of an immoral European working class and native Other, but against those of destitute whites in the colonies and in dubious contrast to an ambiguous population of mixed-blood origin. If we accept that "whiteness" was part of the moral rearmament of bourgeois society, then we need to investigate the nature of that contingent relationship between European racial and class anxieties in the colonies and bourgeois cultivations of self in England, Holland, and France.
This issue of "contingency" is not easy to unpack in part because scholars have taken such different phenomena as evidence and have relied on such varied sources. The very range of questions we have started to pose reflect that breadth of approach and perspective. Should evidence ofthat contingency be the submerged presence of racially charged colonial images in the European bourgeois novel or the studied absence of them?" Were European bourgeois norms developed in contrast to a phantom colonized Other, and can we talk about common European bourgeois imaginings of empire at all? Was it the experience of empire that produced these linkages as Malleret's quote above suggests, or was it the metropolitan imaginings of what that experience was? Were the racial politics of colonialism the dominant backdrop against which European bourgeois sexuality was denned or did the eroticization of the exotic play more indi-recdy into how Dutch, French, and British middle classes garnered their moral authority over metropolitan working-classes, using representations culled from colonial contexts to define themselves? n Or was the language of class itself racialized in such a way that to subscribe to bourgeois respectability entailed dispositions and sentiments coded by race? Finally,
n. On the processes of imperialism consolidating within that "sanitized" realm of Europe's "unchanging intellectual monuments" in education, literature, and the visual and muscial arts, see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993)- Fredric Jameson argues that imperialism did more than leave "palpable traces on the content of metropolitan literary works," but on how modernism resolved the fact that there was always necessarily "something missing" and outside metropolitan experience in an imperial world. ("Modernism and Imperialism," Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990:44,51). 12. See Sharon TüTany and Kathleen Adams, Wild Woman: Inquiry into the Anthropology of an Idea (Cambridge: Schenkman, ig8f).
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves    101
if this relationship between the affirmation of bourgeois hegemony and colonial practices was contingent, should we assume that the latter was necessary to the former's "cultivation" or merely supportive of it?
This chapter broaches some of these questions more fully than others, but they should all be kept in mind. I pose them here to underscore how much recent efforts to identify these tensions of empire remain dependent on different assessments of what those connections were. Even a partial untangling should allow us a more analytically and historically nuanced story of what part colonialism has played in the construction of Europe's bourgeois order and some minimal agreement about what we might take to be a substantiation of it. In that effort, I turn first to the class tensions around racial membership in the Indies and then back to the work of race in fixing bourgeois distinctions in Europe itself.
Colonial Oxymorons: On Bourgeois Civility and Racial Categories
If there is anything shared among historians about the nature of French, Dutch, and British colonial communities in the nineteenth century, it is the assumed fact that they were largely peopled by what Ben Anderson has called a "bourgeois aristocracy"; those of petty bourgeois and bourgeois origins, who saw their privileges and profits as racially bestowed.13 But this picture of European colonial communities is deeply flawed and not only for certain missionary groups, as Thomas Beidelman, John ComarofFand
13. At least one plausible accounting for this perspective is that it was extrapolated, as Victor Kieman does, from "the run of officials" who populated the British civil service in India. Thus Kiernan writes:
[they] belong to the type of the gentleman who was evolving in Victorian England. An amalgam of the less flighty qualities of the nobility with the more stodgy oí middle-class virtues, he had a special relevance to the empire, and indeed was partly called into existence by its requirements, made to measure for it by England's extraordinary public-school education." The Lards af Human Kind (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1969) 37. But even in India, this knighted bourgeoisie was not in the majority. David Arnold calculated that "nearly half the European population (living in India by the end of the nineteenth century] could be called poor whites" (104). "European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth-Century," The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7.2 (January 1979): 104-127. Also see Hugh Ridley's detailed and subtle analysis of the myth of an "aristocratic democracy" of whites in German, French, and British colonies in Images of Imperial Rule (London: St. Martin's Press, 1983) esp. 114-14^.
I02   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
Catherine Hall have so rightly pointed out.14 In the nineteenth century Indies, it is impossible to talk about a European bourgeois order that was not racially problematic at the outset.
What is striking is both how self-evident and tentative the joinings of middle-class respectabilities and membership in European colonial communities actually were. If colonial enterprises were such secure bourgeois ventures, then why were European colonials so often viewed disparagingly from the metropole as parvenus, cultural incompetents, morally suspect, and indeed "fictive" Europeans, somehow distinct from the real thing? While many historians would agree that colonized European-educated intellectuals and those of mixed-racial origin were seen as "white but not quite," this was also true of a large segment of those classified as "fully" European.15 If colonialism was indeed a class levelling project that produced a clear consensus about European superiority—a consoling narrative that novels, newspapers, and official documents were wont to rehearse—we are still left to explain the pervasive anxiety about white degeneration in the colonies, the insistent policing of those Europeans who fell from middle-class grace, the vast compendium of health manuals and housekeeping guides that threatened ill-health, ruin, and even death, if certain moral prescriptions and modes of conduct were not met.
The question is whether those who made up these European colonial communities in fact saw themselves as part of a firmly entrenched ruling class, and if so on what basis? Eric Hobsbawm's definition of Europe's nineteenth-century bourgeoisie offers a useful contrast:
14. See John ComarofT, "Images of Empire, Contests ofConscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa," American Ethnologist 164 (1989): 661-685, who demonstrates the colonial effects ofa nonconformist missionary movement in Africa whose members "were caught uneasily between a displaced peasantry, an expanding proletariat, and the lower reaches of the rising British bourgeoisie" (663). Also see T. O. Beidelman, Colonial Evangelism (Bloamington: Indiana UP, 1982).
ij. Homi Bhabha's provocative analysis ofa difference that is "almost the same but not quite" ("Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," The Location of Culture [London: Routledge, 1994)) has spawned a profusion of studies that examine the inherent ambivalence of specific colonial institutions that at once incorporated and distinguished colonized populations without collapsing the critical difference between ruler and ruled. My point is that this sort of colonial ambivalence was also a national one, directed at a much broader population whose class differences literally colored their perceived and proper racial membership as designated by colonial authorities.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   103
[It was] ... a body of persons of power and influence, independent of the power and influence of traditional birth and status. To belong to it a man had to be 'someone'; a person who counted as an individual, because of his wealth, his capacity to command other men, or otherwise to influence them.16
Some European colonial men would have numbered themselves within that class but not others. Some may have characterized themselves as having "power and influence" over the native population, but not over other Europeans. Still others, as George Orwell's subdistrict officer in "Shooting an Elephant" attests, were only too well aware of their dubious command over "the natives," and their limited mastery over themselves.17 While the colonial right to command was allegedly independent of "traditional birth and status," the rosters of high government officials in India and the Indies suggest otherwise. In the nineteenth century, these positions were increasingly delimited to those who could afford to send their sons to law school in Leiden or to an Oxbridge public school, to those of the "cultivated classes," and to those of "full-blooded" Dutch or British birth. If "everyone [European] in India was, more or less, somebody" as the British novelist Maud Diver professed in 1916, how do we explain the sustained presence of a subterranean colonial discourse that anxiously debated who was truly European and whether those who were both poor and white should be included among them?18 Contra Diver's claim, we know from a range of colonial contexts that class distinctions within these European colonial communities were not increasingly attenuated but sharpened over time, lending credence to Robert Hughes's contention for another colonial context that "the question of class was all pervasive and pathological."15 In fact, it is not clear how many "Europeans" in the colonies ever en-
16. Eric Hobsbawm, The vige of Capital: 184J-1878 (New York: Scribner, 197c) 244.
17. See Michael Taussig's "Culture of Terror—Space of Death," Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1984): 467-97 and my "In Cold Blood: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives," Representations 37 (Winter 1992): iji-89 that both broach the "episte-mic murk," the incomplete sorts of knowledge, and the terror of rumor through which many colonial officials operated.
18. Divers quoted in Hugh Ridley, images of Imperial Rule (London: St. Martin's Press, 1983) 129.
19. George Woodcock, The British in the Far East (New York: Atheneum, 1969) 163; Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (New York: Knopf, 1987) 323.
104   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
joyed the privileges of belonging to a "bourgeois aristocracy" at all.20 This is not to suggest that there was. not a large segment of the European population that made up a social and economic elite. Those of the Indies' stolid burgerstand (middle-class/ bourgeois citizenry) recruited from Holland included plantation and trading company management, upper-level civil servants, professional personnel in the fields of education, health, and agriculture. But while colonial sources bespeak a European colonial elite comprised of those from "good" families, birth in the Indies could exclude well-heeled Creole families from membership. In 1856, W. Ritter observed:
We count as European all those with white faces, who are not born in the Indies, all Dutch, English, French, Germans . . . even North Americans. Our readers will repeat: A European is a European and will remain so wherever he finds himself.... We know him well. But you are greatly mistaken, Readers, for a European ... in the Indies is an entirely different being than in his country.... There, he identifies himself so much with all that surrounds him that he no longer can be considered as a European, at least for the duration of his stay in the Indies, but rather as belonging to a specific caste of the Indische population... whose morals, customs and habits are certainly worthy of close examination.21
While Ritter's exclusion of all those born in the Indies from the category "European" was unusual, it belies an anxiety that was much more widely shared: that even for the European-born, the Indies was transformative of cultural essence, social disposition, and personhood itself. His Lamarckian distinction was rarely so explicidy expressed; namely, that "Europeanness" was not a fixed attribute, but one altered by environment, class contingent, and not secured by birth.22 Thus the Dutch doctor Kohl-
20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
21. W. L Ritter, De Europeanen in Nedeilandsdie Indie (Leyden: SythafT, 1856) 6.
22. These categories were further complicated by the fact that the Indies was never wholly a Dutch-populated colony and certainly not from its beginning when many of its European inhabitants spoke no Dutch, were unfamiliar with Dutch cultural conventions, and were not Dutch by birth. In the seventeenth century, Portuguese served as the lingua franca "on the streets, in the markets, in church and in the households where European men kept Asian mistresses." Jean Taylor, The Social Wbtld of Baiavia (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983) 18-19. *n tne nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonial enclave was an international community made
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   loj
brugge would write fifty years later that Europeans bom and bred in the Indies lived in surroundings that stripped them of their European sensibilities to such an extent that they "could easily . . . metamorphize into Javanese."23 What is at issue here is not a shared conviction of the fixity of European identity but the protean nature of it. In both cases, as we shall see, what sustained racial membership was a middle-class morality, nationalist sentiments, bourgeois sensibilities, normalized sexuality, and a carefully circumscribed "milieu" in school and home.
Ritter counted three major divisions among Europeans in the Indies: the military, civil servants and merchants for whom the lines of class distinction [were] "not clearly drawn." By his account, the Indies had no "so-called lower [European] classes."24 But such lower classes did exist and in increasing numbers throughout the nineteenth century as a burgeoning archive of government investigations on the problem of destitute Europeans in the Indies can attest. For the category "European" also included an ill-defined population of poor whites, subaltern soldiers, minor clerks, abandoned children of European men and Asian women, as well as Creole Europeans whose economic and social circumstances made their ties to metropolitan bourgeois civilities often tenuous at best.25 At later moments it was to include Japanese, Africans and Chinese.26 Being "European" was supposed to be self-evident but was also a quality that only the qualified were equipped to define.
Complicated local folk taxonomies registered these internal distinctions. Thus, the term indischen menschen might refer, as did Ritter, to those hybrid offspring of Dutch men and native women "whose blood was not
up of temporary and permanent expatriates who used Malay more easily than Dutch and many of whom had never been to Holland.
23. ]. Kohlbrugge, "Het Indische kind en zijne karaktervorming," Bliklien ín het zielenleven van den Javoan en zijner overheerschers (Leiden: Brill, 1907).
24. W. L. Ritter, De Europeanen in Nederiamlsche Indie (Leyden: Sythoff, 1856) 30.
i£. See Charles van Onselen, "Race and Class in the South African Countryside: Cultural Osmosis and Social Relations in the Sharecropping Economy of the South-Western Transvaal, 1900-1950," American Historical Review 95- (1990): 99-123 who argues for a more complex view of South African racial history that challenges prevailing assumptions about the homogeneity of race relations by attending to the divergent alliances and interests ofa broader class spectrum of subaltern whites.
26. A-Van Marie, "De group der Europeanen in Nederlands-Indie," Indonesia j.2 (i9£2): 77-121; Í-3 (IM*): 314-Z41; ff.j(i9Sl):48i-S°7.
io6   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
unmixed European," but it could also connote those with lasting ties in the Indies, marking cultural and not biological affiliations. Creole whites born in the Indies were distinguished from those who were not. Those who came from and returned to Holland when their contracts expired (trekkers) were distinguished from those for whom the Indies was a permanent residence for generations (blijvers). "Pure-blooded (zuiver) Dutch were distinguished from those mestizen, "Indo-European," metis, of mixed-blood origin.
But perhaps the most telling term in this racial grammar was that which prevailed throughout the nineteenth century for those who were white but impoverished, and usually, but hot always, of mixed-blood origin. Firmly dissociated from the European born, the term inlandsche kinderen neither referred to "natives" nor "children" as a literal translation might lead us to expect. It identified an ambiguous, hybrid population of those who were neither native nor endowed with the class background nor cultural accoutrements that could count them as truly European and fit to rule (accounting perhaps for Hitter's categorical exclusion of them). In the i86os, some officials estimated thousands of such impoverished whites in the Indies; by the turn of the century, others calculated as many as sixty thousand.27
The enormous administrative energy levelled at the destitute living conditions of the inlandsche kinderen and proposals for their amelioration joined the policing of individuals with the defense of Dutch rule in specific ways. It was this group that confused the equation of whiteness and middle-class sensibilities in a discourse that legitimated the state's interventions in how all Europeans raised their children and managed their domestic and sexual arrangements. The discourse on destitute and degenerate whites whose "Dutchness" was suspect underscored what could happen to European colonials who did not know "how to live." Debates about the moral degradation of the inlandsche kinderen did more than produce narratives about maternal vigilance, child rearing, and appropriate milieu. It prompted new institutional initiatives and government policies that made claims to racial superiority dependent on middle-class respectability for the entire European population. It made linguistic competence in Dutch the marker of cultural "suitability" for European middle-class norms. It im-
27. Algemene Rijksarchief, Verbaal 9 July i860. Governor-General's summary report lo the Minister of Colonies concerning the establishment of a technical/craft school in Surabaya; J. H. F. van de Wall, "Het Indoisme," De Reflector 39 (igi6):9S3.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   107
plicitly tied the quality of maternal sentiment and parental care to racial affiliation and nationality.
Architects of colonial policy worked offa set of contradictory premises. If the legitimation of European privilege and profit rested on a social taxonomy that equated Europeanness and bourgeois civilities, were those legally classified Europeans who fell short of these economic and cultural standards to be pulled back into these communities or banished from them? Was being poor and white politically untenable, a veritable colonial oxymoron? Were the unacknowledged children of European men and their native concubines to be reclaimed and redeemed by the state as Dutch, French, and British citizens or categorically barred?
These questions of racial identity and class distinction pervaded the colonial discourses in the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, British Malaya, and India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at different moments but in patterned ways. Mixed bloods were seen as one problem, poor whites as another, but in practice these persons were often treated as indistinguishable, one and the same. In each of these contexts, it called into question the very criteria by which Europeanness could be identified, how citizenship would be accorded and nationality assigned. In the Inches, the problem of "European pauperism," debated and scrutinized in government commissions throughout the late second half of the nineteenth century, was about indigent whites and their mixed-blood progeny, mixed-blood European men and their native wives whose life styles indicated not always a failed effort to live up to the standards of bourgeois civility but sometimes an outright rejection of them.28
But subaltern and economically marginal whites were not the only challenge to the taxonomie colonial state. The equation of middle-class dispositions and European membership were threatened by creole Europeans as well, not by those impoverished but as strongly by the well-heeled and well-to-do. Thus, it was this group of respectable "city fathers" of creole origin who petitioned the Dutch authorities in 1848 for the establishment of equivalent schools of higher education in the Indies and protested policies requiring their sons be sent for training to Holland to meet civil service entry requirements. It was their children who conversed more easily in Malay than Dutch, whose fatherland was more the Indies than the
28. This point is detailed in Chapter s °f Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: U of California P, forthcoming).
io8   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
Netherlands, who were feared to see themselves as "world citizens," not faithful partisans of continued Dutch rule.29
It is striking, for example, that in the 1850s Indo-Europeans born in the Indies were barred from posts in the civil service that would put them in direct contact with the native population at precisely the time when new administrative attention was focused on the inadequate training in native languages displayed by the Indies' colonial civil servants. At issue was obviously not whether civil servants knew local languages, but how those languages were learned and used and whether that knowledge was appropriately classified and controlled. While enormous funds were dispensed on teaching Javanese at the Delft Academy in Holland to students with a proper "Dutch rearing," those inlandsche kinder«! who already new Javanese or Malay but lacked the proprieties and cultural knowledge that a Dutch rearing provided, were categorically barred. What was being taught to future officers in the colonial civil service at Delft was not only language but a more general set of disciplines that included distancing postures of comportment and imperious forms of address to inferiors that were crucial to appropriate language use.30 Given the emphasis placed on "character" and conduct, the sustained attention of the colonial state to the importance of home environments is not surprising. The increasing attention given to a moral "upbringing" (opraeding) as a prerequisite for the proper use of a formal education (onderwijs) turned on a basic assumption: that it was in the domestic domain, not the public sphere, where essential dispositions of manliness, bourgeois morality, and racial attribute could be dangerously undone or securely made.
While we could read these debates on the "so-called inlandsche kinderen" and the philanthropic moralizing impulses directed toward them as discourses prompted by threats to white prestige, these discourses spoke to other concerns as well. The "civilizing mission" of the nineteenth century was a bourgeois impulse directed not only at the colonized as often as-
29. On the fact that a "European upbringing" was considered "necessary to cultivate love for the fatherland and to strengthen the ties binding the colony to the motherland" see Algemeen Rijksarchief, Kol. 1848 geheim, no. 493, and the additional reports cited therein where this discourse on subversion, national security and upbringing is explicidy expressed.
30. See Fasseur who, while not taking note of this paradox, does provide evidence of the rationales for barring "inlandse kinderen" and the simultaneous emphasis placed on native language acquisition in the Indies colonial civil service (De Indologen 112-129).
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   109
sumed, but at recalcitrant and ambiguous participants in imperial culture at home and abroad.31 But these bourgeois initiatives were as strongly directed at "reform of themselves."32 As a new generation of Dutch social historians now argue, the "civilizing offensive" was not only about the "poor and their needs, but the rich and their motives."33 In Indies perspective, the validity of these observations is well borne out. To abide by burgerlijk values was crucial to the racial rhetoric of rule, but that rhetoric often diverged from the messier realities of culturally hybrid urban wards where persons of varied class origin, in a range of domestic and sexual arrangements lived side by side—where the moral highground of middle-class prescripts was seen under threat in how the "European village population" (Europeesche kampongbevolldng) lived—on colonial ground.34 As we shall see in the next chapter, the charged discourse on the sexual precocity of Indies youths was not only a discourse about native contaminations but about the education of bourgeois desire, about alienations of affection in the homes of the most stolid burgerlijk colonial families themselves. As Nancy Armstrong has so convincingly argued for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain, "programs for cultivating the heart . . . constituted a new and more effective method of policing" those who were to embody "the triumph of middle-class culture."35
Taking our cue from Armstrong's contention that British conduct books and novels during this period antedated the bourgeois way of life they represented, we might read the colonial guides to European survival in the tropics in a similar light: as prescriptive texts of how a burgerlijk colonial life style was suppose to look, not a posteriori affirmations or distillations of what colonial ventures had secured and already become. These were not reflections of a commonly shared knowledge, but creative sites of a new kind of knowledge that tied personal conduct to racial survival, child neglect to racial degeneracy, the ill-management of servants to disastrous
31. Hans Rigart, "Moraliseringoffensief in Nederland in de periodě 1850-1880," Vijí Eeuwen von Gezinsleven ed. H. Peeters, et al. (Nijmegen: SUN, 1986) 194-208.
32. Stuurman, 1993 360.
33. Alt de Regt, Arbeidersgezinnen en beschavtngsarbeiil |Workingclass families and the civilizing mission) (Boom: Amsterdam, 1984) iji.
34. On the living conditions ofvillage-based Europeans as compared to the housing of the poor in Amsterdam see H.C.H. Gunning, "Het Woningvraagstuk," Koloniále Studien 2 (1918): 109-126. ZS- Nancy Armstrong, Desire anil Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (London: Oxford, 1987) 15.
no   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
consequences for the character of rule. They register how much a lack of self-discipline was a risk to the body politic. But, most importandy, in prescribing the medical and moral care of adult and children's bodies, the requirements for a gezellig (cozy) and well-protected European home, and the attributes of a "modern white mother" whose native servants were kept in check, they tied bourgeois domesticity to European identities and thus racial orderings to bourgeois rule.
Recasting Foucault's frame, this micro-management of domestic life might be seen less as an affirmation of bourgeois hegemony than as a contested and transgressive site of it. For if one definition of the nineteenth-century middle class in Europe was its "servant-holding status," in the Indies (as in Europe) it was precisely those who served the needs of the middenstand who were viewed as subversive contagions in those carefully managed colonial homes. It is only as historians have turned to these other domains of imperial culture where the meanings of "whiteness" were far less veiled that the "vigor" of European bodies shows itself as precariously secured through these racialized prescriptions and practices.
Our blindspots in colonial studies derive from certain assumptions, Foucault's from others. His story of what sexuality meant to the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie refuses an account that explains the management of sexuality in any class relational terms, i.e. as a strategy to harness the energies of the working class. For Foucault, the technologies of sex were first designed to affirm the bourgeois self. He writes:
The primary concern was not the repression of the sex of the classes to be exploited, but rather the body, vigor, longevity, progeniture, and descent of the classes that 'ruled'. This was the purpose for which the deployement of sexuality was first established, as a new distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers; it has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another; a defense, a protection, a strengthening, and an exhaltation that were eventually extended to others—at the cost of different transformations—as a means of social control and political subjugation . . . What was formed was a political ordering of life, not through an enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self... it provided itself with a body to be cared for, protected, cultivated, and preserved from the many dangers and contacts, to be isolated from others so that it would retain its differential
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   m
value; and this, by equipping itself with—among other resources—a technology of sex. [my emphasis] (HS: 123)
Here sexuality is about middle-class affirmations, not working-class exploitation; the term "enslavement" is used only in its metaphorical sense. Foucault's economy of sex produces power, truths, and pleasures. It contrasts the sort of repressive model of sex implied in an analysis of political economy where the energies expended on sex are viewed as detractions from the energies expended on work and where labor power is exchanged. But in substituting an economy of sex for an economy of labor does Foucault let the discourse of bourgeois sexuality stand in for the sociology of it? Even if we were to accept his bourgeois emphasis, we cannot help but notice the awkward syntax that absents key actors from his account. For even within his frame, these bourgeois bodies were never in fact isolated, but defined by intimate relationships and daily contacts of a special kind.
We are just beginning to explore some of the quotidian ways in which European bourgeois bodies were produced in practices, but these were never contingent on the will to self-affirmation alone. The cultivation of the European bourgeois self in the colonies, that "body to be cared for, protected, cultivated, and preserved from the many dangers and contacts ..." required other bodies that would perform those nurturing services, provide the leisure for such self-absorbed adrriinisterings and self-bolstering acts. It was a gendered body and a dependent one, on an intimate set of exploitative sexual and service relations between European men and native women, between European women and native men, shaped by the sexual politics of class and race. Those native women who served as concubines, servants, nursemaids and wives in European colonial households not only defined what distinguished bourgeois life: they threatened that "differential value" of adult and children's bourgeois bodies they were there to protect and affirm. Others did so as well. Young European women of modest rural means who served as governesses to European colonial children were part ofthat "large supporting cast of houseboys, grooms, gardeners, cooks, amahs, maids, [and] washerwomen" whose tendings invaded these well-guarded homes.35 This 'cast of characters' were not only there as ritual objects, symbolically affirming the hierarchies of Dutch au-
36. Anderson, Imagined Communities 137.
112   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
thority; through them Europeans could conjure a typology of natives that legitimated the structured subordinations of rule.
The self-affirmation of white, middle-class colonials thus embodied a set of fundamental tensions between a culture of whiteness that cordoned itself off from the native world and a set of domestic arrangements and class distinctions among Europeans that produced cultural hybridities and sympathies that repeatedly transgressed these distinctions. The family, as Foucault warns us, should not be seen as a haven from the sexualities of a dangerous outside world, but as the site of their production. Colonial authorities knew it only too well. They were obsessed with moral, sexual, and racial affronts to European identity in Indische households, but also in "full-blooded" Dutch homes. Housekeeping guides, medical manuals, and pedagogic journals produced in the nineteenth-century Indies and the Netherlands reiterated such dangers in many forms. Nor should it be surprising that this barrage of advice on contaminations intensifies as germ theory develops and biomedicine begins its triumphs.37
These prescriptive texts repeatedly urged that mixed-blood children in poor white households needed to be salvaged from the "damaging domestic milieu," severed from their native mothers and social environments. As late as the 1930s, the Indies civil service and police were congratulating themselves for "isolating" the daughters of European men and Javanese women from the "fatal, disastrous surroundings" and nefarious influences to which they were subject when "abandoned" to their mother's village homes-38 European children of the well-to-do were equally at risk of degeneration, of "metamorphosing into Javanese," if the proper habitus was not assured and certain social protocols were not met; if they played in the streets with Indo-European children, if they attended Indies schools that could not instill a proper Dutch "spirit," and most perniciously, if they enjoyed too much indulgence from their native nursemaids, and in general had too much intimacy with and knowledge of things Javanese. I
37. This is not to suggest that biomedicine, and germ theory in particular, were merely colonial ideologies, but rather to understand haw the technologies of colonial rule and the construction of certain kinds of scientific knowledge were, as Jean and John ComaroiT convincingly argue, "cut from the same cultural cloth." "Medicine, Colonialism and the Black Body," Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992) 2t6. Also see Paul Rabinow's perceptive discussion of the central roles that the "concept of milieu in biology and conditions de vie or modes de vie in geography" played at this time. French Modern (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) 126-167.
38. Mr. C. T. Bertling, "De zorg voor het adatlooze kind," Koloniale Siudien i£ (1931)-' 79°-844-
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   113
have explored these quotidian technologies of self-affirmation elsewhere and turn in more detail to the specific discourse on native nursemaids in the following chapter.39 Here, however, there are several distinctive features in this making of a bourgeois habitus in the colonies that I want to underscore.
First of all, Foucault assumes a middle-class culture sure of what it needed to defend and sure of how to do it. It is not clear this was the case in Europe or in the U.S.; in the colonies it was certainly not.*10 These strategies of identity-making and self-affirmation were unstable and in flux. European identities in the colonies were affirmed by a cultural repertoire of competencies and sexual prescriptions that altered with the strategies for profit and the stability of rule. Thus, concubinage was still seen to uphold a European middle-class standard in the 1880s, but seen to undermine it two decades later.41 Adoptions of Javanese dress by European-bom Dutch colonials were only permissible at leisure, as other more hardfast cultural distinctions between European and native were drawn. Early nineteenth century warnings against the performance of manual labor for whites in the tropics were reassessed by its end, when the Indies-born Nether-landers became associated with indulgent and ostentatious life-styles, contrasting the work ethic prescribed for the self-disciplined European-born Dutch. In short, while the vocabulary of European moral superiority was constant, that was neither true of the criteria used to measure that superiority nor of the specific sub-population of "Europeans" deemed morally worthy of inclusion in that select category.
Moreover, the logic that made being echte Dutch contingent on being middle-class frequendy came up against the changing demands of the
39. See my "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia," Comparative Studies in Society and Hisiory 34.2 (1992): £14-ii, and "A Sentimental Education . . ." in Fantasizing the Feminine. L Sears, ed. Durham: Duke UP. I99Í-
40. On the emergent bourgeoisie's efforts to "impose order on the chaos that surrounded them" in the U.S. see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford. 198c) esp. 86-87. Also see Dorinda Outram's discussion of Alan Cobban and Francois Furel's similar characterizations of the French revolutionary period and its aftermath as a "competition for legitimacy among various sections of the French middle class through the appropriation of a validating political discourse and its embodiment" in The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Üass and Poliiieal Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989) 29.
41. See my "Camal Knowledge and Imperial Power" (1991) for a discussion of the different timings of this shift in British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.
H4   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
Indies' economy. As new demands for skilled technical labor emerged in the nineteenth century, the inlandsche kinderen were promoted as suitable candidates to fill such positions in naval shipyards, arms ateliers, and the expanding plantation industry. Various proposals designed to provide "scientific" as well as "practical" training to the Indies' European underclass were quickly defeated: others were never tried. Efforts, as early as 1835, to train Indies-born children of European descent to become "an industrious burgerstand" met with little success, prompting officials twenty years later to question whether they should be "made into a self-supporting burgerlijk class or a skilled working class differentiated from the natives."42 By 1874 some authorities considered the notion of creating an independent midden-stand a "total fiasco" on the argument that the inlandsche kinderen lacked both the "inclination" and the "suitability" for manual work of any kind, even skilled artisanal labor. In a revised vision, the state's task was reconceived as one that would turn them not into "imitation" or "defective Europeans" but into "perfected natives."43
At the heart of these debates were competing visions of what constituted a European "critical mass," and whether the "quality" and "character" of European residents was less important than the sheer quantity of them; whether the rash passions of subaltern soldiers and other lower-class men could reflect the nineteenth-century image of the "stolid and dispassionate" (bezagigd) Dutch nation and not undermine the moral tenets of Dutch rule.44 Thus it was not only the mixed-blood inlandsche kinderen whose moral and intellectual attributes were under attack. Some observers in fact claimed that those workers imported directly from Holland were so utterly dissipated, so lacking in "vitality" (ievenskracht) and zest for work (werklust) that the notion of making them into a burgerklasse was absurd.45 Others claimed that the problem in the Indies was of a different order. As J. van de Waal put it in 1916:
42. Algemeen Rijksarchief. Considerations and advice of the directors of the naval establishment and factory in Soerabaja, 24 November 1858.
43. Algemeen Rijksarchief, KV 28 Maart 1874, 47. Also see Het Pauperisms onder de European«! in NcJerlandsch-Indie Decide GedeeltcKleine Lnndbotiw (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1901).
44. On a similar note Hugh Ridley makes the point that a racial difference in British India was predicated on the notion that "sentiment" was "a European experience" while "sheer passion" was Indian (Images of Imperial Rule (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983] 74).
4Í- Algemeen Rijskarchief, Verbaal 9 July i860,13,24 November 1958.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves    115
The descendants of Europeans who are "unfit" for European nationality because of a lack of intellectual development and a high moral conscience and who were brought up in pure native, and largely immoral, surroundings form a troubling part of society in the Indies that does not show itself] as in Europe, in reckless anarchism or dissolute bestiality but that works in secret, nearly invisibly as a corroding cancer gnawing at the sexual strength (steunkracht) of our society.46
Note here that this "biopolitical" discourse targets internal dangers and excesses within the Dutch polity, weak biological links within its ranks and not external, native contaminations.
Europeanness was not only class-specific but gender coded. A European man could live with or marry an Asian woman without necessarily losing rank, but this was never true for a European woman who might make a similar choice to live or marry a non-European. Thus, in the legal debates on mixed-marriage in 1887, a European woman who married a native man was dismissively accorded native legal status on the grounds that her very choice of sexual and conjugal partner showed that she had "already sunk so deep socially and morally that it does not result in ruin... [but rather] serves to consolidate her situation."47 Foucault was undoubtedly right that the affirmation of the body was "one of the primordial forms of class consciousness," but bourgeois "class bodies" defined their "healthy sexuality" with a consciousness of civilities and social hygiene always measured in racial terms (HS: 126). Sexual promiscuity or restraint were not abstract characteristics attached to any persons who exhibited those behaviors, but as often post-hoc interpretations contingent on the racialized class and gender categories to which individuals were already assigned.48 Being a less well-to-do woman and of mixed descent coded a range of social relations as erotically driven, sensually charged, and sexually precocious by definition. Such assessments valorized that bourgeois health was pur sang and European, governed by a logic in which moderation showed self-mastery and "productive sexuality" denned what was morally acceptable and what would improve the race.
46. J. H. F. van de Waal, "Het Indoisme," De Reflector 39 (i9i6):gj3.
47. Taco Henny, Verslag van hei Verhandeide in de BijeenkDiniten der Nederfandsch-Indfsdie Juristen-Véreenigino (Batavia, 1887) 39.
48. In a process similar to that described by Ian Hacking in "The Looping Effects of Human Kinds," Foundation Fyssen Conference, Paris, 7-11 January 1993.
ii6   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
Questions about the shifting, visual signs of middle-class rearing were indices of what was invisible and harder to test—namely, what defined the essence of being European and whether Creole and mestizen affinities for things Javanese were a threat to it. Thus the Indies 1884 law that specified the requirements for acquiring European equivalent status listed "complete suitability for European society" and/or indisputable evidence that the concerned party was "brought up in European surroundings as a European."49 Although Dutch language use, attire, schooling, and church membership matched burgerlijk values to European status, that was rarely enough. As van de Waal observed children clothed in modest frocks and shoes when attending the government schools, enjoyed such a shortlived and insufficient education that these efforts at "Europeanism" were of litde avail; "native dishes as always were awaiting them" when they returned to their village homes.50 The powerful force of "environment" in this discourse slipped back and forth between two principle referents: the geography of the tropics and the architecture of sensibilities cultivated in the home. In constandy posing the question as to whether natives and inlandsche kinderen could be transformed, social reformers in metropole and colony could not help but ask the same question of themselves. But their answers were not the same. A basic disquieting asymmetry underwrote their racial grammar: for while an Indo child could not be shorn of its native sensibilities because of the "native blood that flowed in its veins," that logic—as we have seen and contra the stories colonial elites sometimes told themselves—did not work the other way around.
Bourgeois Insecurities, Racial Selves and the "Stolid" Dutch Nation
These colonial contexts make clear that bourgeois culture was in question on its social and geographic outposts, among those working out its changing standards. But there is also good evidence that it was not securely hegemonic even at its ostensible cote.51 Although Dutch historians
49. W. F. Prins, "De Bevolkingsgroepen in het Nederlandsch-Indische Recht," Koloniale Studien 17 (1933): 677-
50. Van de Waal 1918,953.
51 . For a succinct review of the debate on the hegemony vs. the "failure" oľthe British middle-class to "stamp its authority on the whole social order" see Janet WoUTand John Seed, eds., The Culture of Capitol: An, Power, and the 191h Century Middle-Class (New York: St. Martin's Press,
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves    117
have long held that Dutch national character was clarified and fixed in the Golden Age of the seventeenth century, recent scholarship casts increasing doubt on that claim. Even Simon Schama who otherwise insists that "the essential traits of Dutch nationhood" endured major shifts in its governing institutions," concedes that the Dutch "conventional self-image" in the early nineteenth century underwent fundamental change.52 With convincing argument, the Dutch historian Siep Stuurman notes that although the nineteenth century commonly has been referred to as the "century of the middle-class citizenry" (burgerij), that was only a partial truth.53 His study of nineteenth-century liberalism contends that the "burgers who at this time were not called the middle-classes for no reason" had to wage a "continuous and tenacious struggle to acquire a dominant position next to the old ruling elite."54 During the first half of the nineteenth century (from the French interregnum between 1795-1813 through the establishment of the Dutch monarchy and rise of constitutional democracy in 1848), there is litde indication that state institutions were in the bourgeoisie's control.55 By Stuurman's account, bourgeois hegemony in the Netherlands emerges at the end of the nineteenth century, not at its beginning. Liberalism was not the product of "a bourgeoisie that already dominated state
1988) esp. 1-44. My argument is not contingent upon proving the existence of bourgeois hegemony in the nineteenth century but, if anything, on its opposite—on its precarious ascendancy and its deployment of a biopolitical technology of power in which racial discourse played a pivotal role.
52. Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780-1B13 (New York: Vintage, 1977).
53. Stuurman 14. Dictionary definitions of the term burgerij differ markedly. In some its first meaning is "commoners," in others "citizenry," and in others the "middle-class." On the difier-ent uses of the term "burgerlijk" and its similarities and differences with the term "bourgeois" in Dutch historiography and national politics see Henk te Velde's "How High Did the Dutch Fly? Remarks on Stereotypes of Burger Mentality," Images o\ the Nation: Difletent Meanings of Dutchness, 1870-1940 eds. A. Galema, B. Henkes, and H. teVelde (Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1993) 59-80.
£4. Siep Stuurman, Wacht op onze daden: He! liberalisme en de vernieuwing van de Nederlandse Staat (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1992) 13-14.
55. In addition to those cited above see Lenders, De Burgers en de Volksschool: Culiurele en mentale och-tergronden van een onderwijshervorming, Nederland 1780-1850 (Den Haag: SUN, 1988) 3t. On the political struggles leading up to the establishment of the Dutch monarchy and the restoration of the House of Orange in 1813 see Simon Schama's magisterial account in Patriots and liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813 (New York: Random House, 1977). On the importance of the year 1813 to the subsequent development of a specifically Dutch form ofliberalism see C. H. E. de Wit, De strijd tussen .Aristocratie and Democratic in Nederland, 1780-1848 (Heerlen: Winants, 1965).
! i8   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
and society," but one whose power was in the making.56 In a related vein, the Dutch historian, Ali de Regt, argues that the mid-nineteenth century "civilizing offensive" that targeted the immoral living conditions of the working class as its object of reform was designed less to "uplift" the latter than to distinguish a burger class whose boundaries of privileges were not clearly drawn.57
These rethinkings of Dutch social history raise issues that go beyond domestic politics alone. If burjjerlijk identity was less self-evident than many Dutch historians have claimed, then the sustained efforts to denne who could belong to the burgerstand and who was really Dutch in the nineteenth-century Indies may take on a different valence. They may signal more than the reactions of a beleaguered colonial minority in a vast sea of colonized as often assumed, but rather a dynamic—even productive—tension between the making of Dutch bourgeois identity at home in the Netherlands and abroad.
Whether the Indies was central to the construction of nineteenth-century Dutch bourgeois culture is still difficult to affirm given the com-partmentalization of Dutch historiography. Ritter's observation in 1856 that "the Indies is nowhere less known than in the country to which it belongs" may no longer be true, but the discrete treatment of the social history of the Indies and the Netherlands remains true today.58 The question itself places these Indies-based debates about what it meant to be Dutch, burgerlijk, and sexually moral in a different light. These were sites where the moral authority of bourgeois values were played out, where the tension between desire and decorum, opulence and thrift were in uneasy display. The Indies discourse about Dutch bourgeois virtues infused the vocabulary of social reform and nationalist priorities with racial meaning.
This is not to suggest that these debates about "moral milieu" had their originary moment in colonial settings. Numerous studies of the late eigh-
56. Stuurman, Wacht op onze Jaden 14.
Í7. Ali de Regt 246-247. Others have interpreted the "burneriijlf civilizing offensive" as the direct
expression of a "deep angst" about paupers, a disciplining gesture in which the valorization of
"virtue" (deugdzame) would denotate the forces of popular discontent. See Hans Righart, "Moral-
iseringsofľensief in Nederland in de perióde 1850-1880," Vij'f Eeuwen gezinsleven, eds. H. Peeters, et.
al. (Nijmegen: SUN, 1986) 205. and Bernard Kruithof, "De deugdzame natie: het burgerlijk be-
schavingsoffensief van de Maatschappij tot Nut van 't Algemeen tussen 1784 en i860," Symposion
H/1 (1980): 22-37.
58. W. L Ritter, De Europeoncn in Nederlandsche Inde (Leyden: SythofT, 1856) 17.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   119
teenth century show that new directives for education and the domestic environment of children represented pointed attacks by a burgerlijke middenklasse on the social hierarchies of France and the Netherlands' an-cien regimes, that such reforms were part of the identity formation of the middle class itself.59 The Dutch campaign for popular education was framed as a reform of an "orderless" morally corrupt society, where "ignorance, immorality, and savagery" were the enemies of the natural order. Reform rested on the instillment of "personal self-discipline" as well as collective moral control.60
But the nineteenth-century discourse, in which these internal enemies were identified and targeted, circulated in a racially inflected imperial field. Metropolitan debates over the critical importance of well-guided mothercare (moederzorg) for the alleviation of poverty, in the Indies fixated on whether mixed-blood and Creole women specifically could provide the sort of moedenorg that would obviate assistance from the state (staats-zorg). Similarly, European debates about whether men should be held responsible for their illegitimate children, in the Indies took on an explicitly racialized form: there, the question was whether European men should be charged with the care of their mixed-blood offspring and whether this would lead to an unhealthy expansion of a population of "fabricated Europeans."61 Such parallel debates situate the moral contortions of Dutch colonials as part of the inherent contradictions within the liberal rhetoric of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, rather than as marginal embellishments of it.
We have ample evidence that representations of racial ambiguity served to define the parameters of Dutch colonial communities in important ways. Racialized others of mixed-blood and Creole origin and the suspect sexual moralities, ostentatious life-styles, and cultural hybrid affiliations attributed to them were productive of a discourse on who was appropriate to rule. But this traffic in charged representations may have reflected deeper concerns still; not only the vulnerabilities of Dutch hegemony in the colonies, but uncertainties about what constituted the inclusionary
£9. See Jan Lenders, De Burger en de Volkischool: Culiurelc en mentale Qcthergrandern van een ondcnvijsfier-vorming, Nederland 1780-18J0 (Nijmegen: SUN, 1988) 21, £2.
60. Lenders 63.
61. Cf. Selma Sevenhuijsen's nuanced discussion of the contradictions around the discourse on paternal responsibility and women's rights in the Netherlands (De orde van hel vaderschap [Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer IISG, 1987]).
120   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
distinctions of bourgeois culture in the Netherlands where the very term "burgerlijk" could ambiguously refer to that which was at once exclusively middle class and that which was much more inclusively identified with the "civic," the "civil," the "citizen."62
Curiously, that tangled field that encompasses the cultivation of bourgeois bodies and the cultivation of homo Europeaus is one that few Dutch social historians have sought to entertain. While Stuurman and others have rightly noted how the Protestant nineteenth century burgerij rewrote the past in their own image, using the myth of a calvinist nation of "civilized morals" (beschaafde zeden) to program the future, their attention has focused more on the warped accounts of domestic social history than on the systematic and sustained omission of the East Indies from it.
Take the case of nineteenth-century Dutch liberalism and the history of social reform. The coincidence of dates that mark the burgerlijk "civilizing mission" in the Netherlands and the Indies is striking. By virtually all accounts, 1848 marked the emergence of a liberal-parliamentary state, identified with philanthropic bourgeois interventions to uplift the home environments of the domestic working class.63 In the very same year, racial dualism in the Dutch East Indies was "legally anchored" in explicit terms.64 One could argue that there is nothing incompatible about this. As Stuurman notes, although Dutch "liberals" spoke for the nation and the people, no pretense of universal representation was really implied: the "democratic element" of the mid-nineteenth century was confined to the virtuous and industrious middle class alone.65 Citizenship (burgerrecht) categorically excluded "all women, minors, madpersons, beggars, prisoners, the dishonored . . . and all persons who did not have full use of their
62. For an effort to explore the contingency between colonial racism and its metropolitan variant in a later period, see Willem Wertheim's "Netherlands Indies Colonial Racism and Dutch Home Racism" in Jan Breman, ed. Imperial Monkey Business: Racial Supremacy in Social Danvinist Theory and Colonial Practice (Amsterdam: VU UP, 1990) 71-88.
63. Ali de Regt, "Arbeiders, burgers and boeren: gezinsfeven in de negentiende eeuw," Familie, HuweJijk en Cezin in West-Europa, ed. Ton Swaan (Boom: Open Universiteit, 1993) 193-218. Also see Frances Gouda's well-documented comparative study of ihe nineteenth-century discourses on poverty, pauperism, and state-sponsored welfare in the Netherlands and France (Poverty and Political Cultuie [Lanham, MD.: Rowen and Litdefield, 199s]).
64. C. Fasseur, "Cornerstone and Stumbling Block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia," The Laie Colonial State in Indonesia: Political antl Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies, 1880-1942, ed. Robert Cribb (Leiden: KTTLV, 1994) 31-56.
65. Stuurman 134.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves    121
freedom, their minds, or their possessions."66 While those excluded trom citizenship in the Netherlands made up the population that was the object of state intervention, in the Indies race structured the parameters of dependence and excluded many of those same categories not only from citizenship, but even from assistance and/or the opportunity to benefit from social reform.
Simultaneous with the enormous expansion of juvenile reformatories, orphanages, and agrarian colonies that targeted Holland's urban poor were a concomitant set of similar Indies institutions that repeatedly faltered on whether their potential recipients should include the illegitimate children of mixed-blood origin. Even those supporters of expanded European orphanages in the Indies never forgot to distinguish the mixed-blood children of lower-class Dutch soldiers from the orphans of deceased civilians who had, in their lifetime been well-to-do. Similarly the debates over poor relief, widows pensions, and improved medical care were implemented in ways that not only excluded those classed as "native," but those Europeans of suspect origin, either because they were deemed culturally "nativized" and-lived in a fashion that required no such benefits or because some were seen as natives in disguise—only "fictive" Europeans. State reforms to set up public schools for "all Europeans and their legal equivalents" in the mid-nineteenth century, prompdy designated special schools (armen-scholen, literally schools for the poor) for the children of subaltern whites, for those abandoned to the streets, for those destitute and of "mixed" origin.67 Even some of the practitioners of these policies were sometimes the same. Johannes van de Bosch who founded the Maatschappij van Weldadi-gheid (Benevolent Society) in the Netherlands in 1818, was the same van de Bosch who, as the Indies' Governor-General some years later, introduced the oppressive cultivation system on Java that liberals in Holland were
66. Quoted in Stuurman 120.
67. See Izaak Johannes Brugmans, Cescheidenis von het Onderwijs in Nederlandsch-Indie (Groningen: J.B. Wolters, 1938), who nates that in 1875 many ofthe children attending an armenschool in Soerbaja ("even of parents who were pure European") came to school in a "neglected state, shabbily clothed, timid, speaking and understanding nothing but Malay even at the age of eleven or twelve" (269).
Note that the term "mixed" is virtually always racially inflected but discursively labelled in national terms. I have rarely seen it used to refer, for example, to children of "mixed" French and Dutch origin. It is most commonly used only for children of "mixed" racial descent, African fathers and Asian mothers, European and Chinese, etc.
122   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
soon to attack. It was also he who argued that the inlandsche kinderen were the colonial state's responsibility and its alone.68
The Froebel kindergarten movement that swept through Germany, England, Holland, and France in the mid-nineteenth century, that quintessential laboratory of liberal experiment, in the Indies was heralded not only as hothouse for nurturing Dutch middle-class sensibilities of morality, self-discipline, and thrift, but as a strategic method of removing [European] children from the immoral clutches of native nursemaids, native playmates and most importantly native mothers.69 One might be tempted to argue that reformist gestures in the colonies produced these exclusionary, racialized reactions from a more conservative constituency. But this was not the case. These were proposals crafted by the most ardent social reformers whose visions were racially specific, highly class conscious, and exclusionary by definition.
Even such critically persuasive historians as Stuurman, who argues that "liberal-burgerlijke culture" was in the making in the nineteenth-century Netherlands, makes only passing reference to the Indies context where the exclusionary principles of liberalism were in such sharp relief. Ali de Regt's observation that the civilizing offensive in the Netherlands was never aimed at embourgeoisment resonates in the Indies in virtually every field of social reform. Plans to set up artisanal and industrial schools for impoverished whites and those of mixed-origin foundered on whether such a population could and should be shaped into an "industrious bur-gerstand" or not.70 In debunking the myth of the "stolid" Dutch nation as the culture of a "self-sufficient middle-class," Stuurman prompts us to ask just those questions that Dutch historians have not sought to pose, questions
68. See Frances Gouda, Poverty and Political Culture, 199í, iif-nö.
69. See Ann Tylor Allen, "Gardens of Children: Gardens of God: Kindergartens and Daycare Centers in 19th century Germany," Journal af Social History 19 {1986): 433-450 and Michael Shapiro, Child's Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey (University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1983). In the Indies, the first nursery school set up in Batavia in 1850 was designed to keep children from the ages of two to seven "out of the harmful environment of native servants" (Brugmans 276). See my "A Sentimental Education: European Children and Native Servants in the Netherlands Indies," Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia ed. Laurie J. Sears (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), where I discuss the Dutch colonial administration's interest in European nurseries at much more length.
70. Algemene Onderwijs Verslag 1846-1849,j£, quoted in Brugmans, Gescheidenis von het Ondemijs in Nederlandsch-Indie 87.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   123
about the relationship between bourgeois projects and imperial ventures that are being asked by students of colonialism for Germany, the U.S., Britain, and France.71 While this relationship was certainly tighter and more explicit in some places than in others, we cannot begin to contrast them unless we sort out whether national variations of emphasis and absence in historiography reflect national variations in lived history as well.
Discourses of Race/Languages of Class
One might argue that racialized notions of the bourgeois self were idiosyncratic to the colonies and applicable there alone. But a repertoire of racial and imperial metaphors were deployed to clarify class distinctions in Europe at a very early date. While social historians generally have assumed that racial logics drew on the ready-made cultural disparagements honed to distinguish between middle-class virtues and the immorality of the poor, as well as between the "undeserving" and the "respectable" poor among themselves, it may well be that such social etymologies make just as much sense reversed. The racial lexicon of empire and the sexualized images of it, in some cases, may have provided for a European language of class as often as the other way around. In a study of race and politics in Jamaica and Britain, Tom Holt cautiously notes that "this language of class [may have] provided a vocabulary for thinking about race, or vice-versa. It hardly matters; what is important is the symmetry of the discourse... ,"72 For my reading of Foucault, however, these racial etymologies of the language of class matter very much. They place the making of racial discourse, and a discourse on slavery in particular, as formative in the making of
71. Stuurman 23,25.1 have in mind a growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship that includes the recent work of Catherine Hall (in her collected essays entitled White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and Hisiory). See the contributions of Lora Wildenthal and Susan Thorne in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, forthcoming. A new generation with dissertations on these subjects include Laura Bear on Anglo-Indians, railways and modernity, Elizabeth Beuttner on British children and colonial South Asia, John Stiles on culture and citizenship in France and Martinique, and Laurent Dubois on questions of race and citizenship in the Antilles during the French Revolution. See Chris Schmidt-Nowara, "Hispano-Antillean Antislavery: Race, Labor and Nation in Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1886," diss., U of Michigan, 199J. All the above are, or have been, doctoral students in history and/or anthropology at the U of Michigan.
72. Tom Holt, The Problem of Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1992) 308.
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a middle-class identity rather than as a late nineteenth-century addition to it.
Certainly, Foucault's contention that the language of class grew out of the discourse of races would support such a claim. From Montaigne to Mayhew to Balzac, in Britain, the Netherlands, and France, imperial images of the colonized native American, African, and Asian as eroticized savage or barbarian saturated the discourses of class. In an intriguing analysis similar to Foucault's, Hayden White argues that the "race fetishism" surrounding the eighteenth-century notion of the "noble savage" was "soon transformed . . . into another, and more virulent form: the fetishism of class."73 But, unlike for Foucault, the template is not only an earlier racial discourse directed at internal enemies within Europe, but one prompted by imperial expansion. White writes:
Like the "wild men" of the New World, the "dangerous classes" of the Old World define the limitations of the general notion of "humanity" which informed and justified the Europeans' spoliation of any human group standing in the way of their expansion, and their need to destroy that which they could not consume.74
The opening chapter of Eugene Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen, entitled "A country of savages," is emblematic of the confused ways in which these social categories were seen to converge. Quoting a mid-nineteenth-century Parisian traveller in rural Burgundy who opines that "you don't need to go to America to see savages," Weber argues that the theme of the French peasant as the "hardly civilized," rural savage "of another race" was axiomatic in a discourse that "sometimes compared them unfavorably with other colonized peoples in North Africa and the New World."75 Nor do we have to wait for the nineteenth century to find those convergences between class and racial disparagements sharply drawn. The abbé Sieyes, that late-eighteenth-century Frenchman so renowned for his egali-
73. See Hayden White's analysis of the entanglements of class and racial categories in "The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish," The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978) 183-196. Drawing on Louis Chevalier's Laboring Gusses and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the first Half of the Nineteenth Century, he, like Faucauli, finds the nineteenth-century language of class rooted in an earlier discourse of race and also in the hourgeoisie's efforts to undermine "the nobility's claim to a special human status" (194).
74. White, "The Noble Savage" 193.
75. Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1976) 3,6,7.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves    I2£
tarian treatise that redefined the French nation in terms of its Third Estate, produced other visions of a just society that reveal profound contradictions in his argument.76 Although Sieyes professed an identity between participation in work and citizenship, in a prerevolutionary note he invoked the notion of a hierarchy of races, and a definition of citizens that would exclude the real producers and include only the "heads of production" who "would be the whites." Sieyes' language of class and nation drew on a racial lexicon as well.
Edmund Morgan notes for seventeenth-century Britain that the poor were "the vile and brutish part of mankind ... in the eyes of unpoor Englishmen, [they] bore many of the marks of an alien race."77 Certainly this was true of British images of the Irish, who as early as the seventeenth century saw the Irish as "racially distinct."78 Strong parallels were made between the immoral lives of the British underclass, Irish peasants, and "primitive Africans" by the eighteenth century, crescendoing in the early nineteenth century when the "influx of Irish amounted to an urban invasion."79 Punch ran articles in mid-nineteenth century suggesting that the Irish were "the missing link between the gorilla and the Negro."B0
Thus, for the nineteenth century the case is stronger still. Reformers such as Mayhew pursued their projects with a moral authority that rested on comparing the moral degradation of the British urban poor, with "many savage tribes" (i8^i :43). Such colonial historians as Victor Kiernan were well aware of the connection:
In innumerable ways his [the European gendeman's] attitude to his own 'lower orders' was identical with that of Europe to the lesser breeds.' Discontented native in the colonies, labour agitator in the mills, were the same serpent in alternate disguise. Much of the talk about the barbarism or darkness of the outer world, which it was
76. See William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes und 'What is the Third Estate'?
(Durham: Duke UP, 1994)-
77. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: Norton, 197í) 325-326.
78. Richard Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1976)41.
79. See Lebow and Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1979) IS-
80. Quoted in Lebow, White Britain 40.
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Europe's mission to rout, was a transmuted fear of the masses at home.81
Jean and John Comarofľnote that efforts to shore up British bourgeois domesticity drew on resonant parallels between the "dangerous classes" at home and abroad, a "coupling [of] the pauper and the primitive in a common destiny," in ways that implicated African domesticity in the making of modern English society.82 Susan Thorne, in a study of missionary imperialism, argues that racial metaphors were pervasive in the religious discourse that shaped the language of class in early industrial England.63 Edward Said synthesizes another strand of that story by looking at the canonical texts of British fiction in which colonial landscapes provided the backdrop against which British middle-class culture was set in relief. Catherine Hall explores the pervasive presence of a racialized Other in the repertoire of visual, verbal, and written images that set off the distinctions of bourgeois sensibilities and the virtues of the bourgeois home.84 As Eric Hobsbawm once put it, "the bourgeois was, if not a different species, then at least the member of a superior race, a higher stage in human evolution, distinct from the lower orders who remained in the historical or cultural equivalent of childhood or adolescence. From master to master-race was thus only a short-step."85
There is something strikingly similar in most of these accounts; namely, that the invocation of race is interpreted as a rhetorical political strategy. Race serves as a charged metaphor with allegorical weight. It emphasizes the deep differences between working class and bourgeois culture, naturalizing the inherent strengths or weaknesses that these collectivities allegedly shared. In short, as Elaine Showalter notes, "metaphors of race were ... used to describe class relationships."86 But is metaphor and alle-
81. V. G. Kiemah, The Lords of Human Kind (1969; New York: Columbia, 1986): 316.
82. Jean and John CamarofT, "Home-Made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South Africa/Miriam Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Hansen (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP. 1992) 37-74-
83. Susan Thome. "The Conversion of England and the Converserion of the World Inseparable: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class, 1750-18^0," Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, forthcoming.
84. See Catherine Hall, While. Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London: Polity Press, 1988) esp. chapter 9,20^-53.
B.c. Hobsbawm, .Age of Capital 247-248.
86. Elaine Showalter. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de Siede (London: Penguin, 1990) 5.
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gory all that this relationship is about? I think not. For it assumes first of all that "class" and "race" occupied distinct spaces in the folk social taxonomies of Europe, that they were discursively and practically discrete social categories. We might question whether this was the case, particularly for the eighteenth century when notions of "race" and "class" had both looser and richer meanings and when the hardened distinctions inherited from the nineteenth century were not yet so clearly drawn.87
The point is an important one because if these were indeed not only "symmetrical discourses" as Tom Holt has argued but at once overlapping and interchangeable ones, then some notion of race must figure much more organically in the making of bourgeois distinctions than we have assumed.88 Such an argument would not rest on the assumption that the social categories of "race" and "class" were always substitutable or that the meanings of "race" in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries were the same. Nor would Foucault's reverse genealogy in which the language of class always emerges out of an earlier discourse of race necessarily be the case. On the contrary, both "race" and "class" in their early usage marked a more fluid environmentally conditioned Lamarckian set of somatic differences, differences in ways of being and living, differences in psychological and moral essence—differences in human kind. When Douglas Lorimer argues that "English racism ... rested upon established attitudes toward distinctions of class," and that mid-Victorians "perceived race relations abroad in the light of class relations at home," his own evidence belies a more fluid semantic field.89 For he also writes that the white London poor were considered "a race" apart, that servants were also not a "distinct class but... a separate race."90 Those features that confirmed the Irish as a separate race—"chronic self-indulgence, indolence and laxity of purpose" were invoked to distinguish the urban and rural laboring classes throughout Europe, both mixed-bloods and subaltern whites throughout the colonies. It captured in one sustained image internal threats to the health and well-being of a social body where those deemed a threat lacked an ethics of "how to live" and thus the ability to govern themselves. When
87. On the changing meanings of "class" see Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Croom Helm, 1976) £i-i8.
88. On the "imerchangeability" of class and racial discrimination see Hugh Ridley, Imarjes af Imperial Rule (London: St. Martin's Press, 1983) 140.
Eg. Douglas Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1978) 93. 90. Lorimer 105.
128   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
Mayhew wrote that "hearth and rootedness," those "sacred symbols to all civilized races" (Mayhew 1851:43), were lacking in London's poor, he was not only claiming that the unmanaged mobility of society's subalterns was a threat to colonial and metropolitan authority. He was identifying what was distinctively part of the bourgeoisie's conception of itself: one that embraced property ownership, rootedness, and an orderly family life as attributes that at once distinguished the middle class and explained why they were inherently and socially superior.
While Foucault may be right that the discourse of races was immanent in the language of class, I would still question his limited tracing of its varied meanings. If racial discourse is polyvalent, as he would argue, it also has multiple etymologies as I have suggested in chapters 2 and 3. In its varied nineteenth-century forms, it came loaded with a barrage of colonial representations of savagery, licentiousness, and basic truths about human nature that joined early visions of the "others" of empire with the "others" within Europe itself
Nowhere is this colonial imprint clearer than in how bourgeois bodies were evinced to be sexually distinctive and in how their self-cultivation was conceived. Sharon Tiffany and Kathleen Adams argue that the sexual model of the promiscuous working-class woman in nineteenth-century, industrializing England construed her as a "primitive relic of an earlier evolutionary period," a myth of the "wild woman" who stood in contrast to "the moral model of... middle-class sexual restraint and civility."9I Sander Gilman similarly shows how the iconography of prostitutes in nineteenth-century France was modeled on the "lascivous sexuality" and exaggerated genital physiogomy of Hottentot women of South Africa, on depictions that naturalized and explained the pathological, unrestrained, atavistic, and diseased bodies of both.93 In both cases, bourgeois bodies were both race and class-specific, based on distinctions of quality and human kind.
Of course, they were also heavily gendered. If there is any discourse that joins the triumph of rational bourgeois man in colony and metropole,
91. Tiffany and Adams, The Wild Woman 12-17.
92. Sander Gilman, "Black Bodies, White Bodies," Race, Writing and Difference, ed. Henry L. Gates, Jr. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986). For a discussion of empire as one of the domains in which European middle-class "conflicts of reason and emotion, of desire and duty, and of competition and harmony could be resolved" see Joanna de Groot's " 'Sex' and 'Race': the Construction of Language and Image in the Nineteenth Century," Sexuality and Subordination, ed. Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (London: Routledge, 1989) 108.
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it was that which collapsed non-Europeans and women into an undifferentiated field, one in which passion and not reason reigned.33 Empire provided the fertile terrain on which bourgeois notions of manliness and virility could be honed and put to patriotic test. Passion was unseemly, but compassion was as well. As Hugh Ridley has argued, it was in the colonies that "indifference to suffering was a sign of national strength, an essential condition of manhood," proving as the French colonial novelist Henry Daguerches writes, "the strength of my blood and the strength of my race."94
But colonial conditions also highlighted conflicting interpretations of manliness and its vulnerabilities. If George Hardy's warning in 1926 that "a man remains a man as long as he remains under the watchful gaze of a woman of his race" was held to be a truth, then an enormous number of European men would have had little claim to a secure European manhood at all.95 In the Indies, more than half of the European male population were cohabiting out of wedlock with native women in the late nineteenth century. Among subaltern soldiers, concubinage was the "necessary evil" that would ward off venereal disease and, more importantly, homosexuality within the lower ranks.96
93. See Jean and John Comaroff's identification of this shackling of women and non-Europeans to their sexual natures in Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) esp. 105-108, For an excellent more general discussion see Nancy Leys Stepan's "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," The Atiaiomy of Racism, ed. David Goldberg (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990).
94. Ridley, Images of Imperial Rule 142.
95. George Hardy quoted in C. Chivas-Baron, La Femme Francoise aux colonies (Paris: Larose, 1929) 103.
96. See Hanneke Ming, "Barracks-Concubinage in the Indies, 1887-1920," Indonesia 3c (1983): 65-93. The absent presence of the dangers of homosexuality in these debates is striking. What is more, in the Dutch archives, the threat of homosexual desire among stolid Dutch agents of empire, of the colonial middenstand, is rarely if ever mentioned. When homosexuality is broached, it is always in the form of a deflected discourse, one about sodomizing Chinese plantation coolies, about degenerate subaltern European soldiers, never about respectable Dutch men.
My silence on this issue and the prominent place I give to heterosexuality reflects my long-term and failed efforts to identify any sources that do more than assume or obliquely allude to this "evil," thereby making the other "lesser" evils of concubinage and prostitution acceptable. Hyam seems to have come up with many more accusations if not explicit accounts. As such, my colonial treatment of Foucault's fourth "strategic unity," constituting the "perverse adult" is only minimally explored. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester U of Manchester P, 1990).
I30   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
Hardy's warning underscores that good reason and "character"—that common euphemism for class breeding—were not all that imperial security was about. It required managed passions, self-discipline over unruly drives and the education of sentiment and desire as well. As Tom Holt argues, the liberal democratic presumption that all men shared certain inherent traits and values also assumed that "the boon of freedom—the right to govern oneself—should be granted only to those who had assimilated certain internal controls. For liberals and conservatives alike, work-discipline was both the source and the test of [it]."97 In the case of those descendants of Europeans labelled mlandsche kinderen, this axiom was precisely what classified them as "children of the Indies," not Europeans. They allegedly lacked the "inclination" to skilled work, the "suitability" for it, the self-discipline, sexual morals, and economic independence that would count them among a citizenry fit to rule. But whether it was their "class location" or racial attributes that were maligned is difficult to tell, for here was a scrambled social category that made the distinctions between racial and class discriminations blurred and problematic.
To see the struggle of classes as economic and "the natural fight of races" as biological (as Hannah Arendt and others do) may be not only misleading and ahistoric but anachronistic. For if Foucault's biohistory of the discourses of race and class is correct, that both emerged out of an earlier binary conception of the social body as part of the defense of society against itself, out of a shared vision of a deeper biologized "internal enemy" within, then racism emerges not as the ideological reaction of those threatened by the universalistic principles of the modern liberal state, but as a foundational fiction within it. This is precisely where recent studies of liberalism and nationalism have taken us. We could look specifically to those who have attempted to explain the racialized "interior frontiers" that nationalisms create, not as excesses of a nationalism out of hand, but as social divisions crucial to the exclusionary principles of nation-states.
Sexuality, Race, and the Bourgeois Politics of Exclusion
Empire figured in the bourgeois politics of liberalism and nationalism in ways we have only begun to explore. Uday Mehta makes the strong
97. Holt, Problem of Freedom 308.
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves    131
case that eighteenth-century liberalism, that quintessential inclusionary philosophy of the European bourgeoisie, had written into it a politics of exclusion based on race. The most basic universalistic notions of "human nature" and "individual liberty," elaborated by Locke and Mill, rested on combined notions of breeding and the learning of "naturalized" habits that set off those who exhibited such a "nature" and could exercise such liberty from the racially inferior—and in their cases—South Asian colonized world.98 David Goldberg makes a similar argument, more generally:
the primary principles of our moral tradition—virtue, sin, autonomy, and equality, utility and rights—are delimited in various ways by the concept of race .. . liberalism's commitment to principles of universality is practically sustained only by the reinvented and rationalized exclusions of racial particularity."99
Edmund Morgan has argued that racism was "an essential ingredient of a republican ideology" devoted to equality and liberty and that racism in colonial Virginia was crucial to disciplining the poor.100 Etienne Balibar makes the stronger claim, not only that universalistic principles were used to "cover and implement racist policies," but reminds us how many historians and philosophers have argued that the very concept of universahsm was gendered—as Carole Pateman has shown—and racially inflected.101
If liberalism was implicitly exclusionary, most nineteenth-century nationalisms were explicitly so by definition. Throughout Europe, the nationalizing of education designated radically different learning strategies and environments for the middle-classes versus the "undeserving poor." Dutch liberal proposals for an extension of the franchise specified the exclusion of "all men who had been on poor relief at any time during the three years prior to elections."102 Citizenship in a national polity, as feminist historians have demonstrated, made the rights of women and children solely dependent on their sexual and conjugal contracts with men. Women were seen as crucial to civil society not as participatory citizens in the public sphere, but as those who would insure that marriage, sexual morality,
98.  Uday Mehta, "Uberal Strategies of Exclusion," Politics anil Societ)' 184 (1990): 427-54.
99. Goldberg, Racist Culture 39.
100. Morgan, American Slavay, American Freedom 386.
101. Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas 195.
102. Siep Stuurman, "John Bright and Samuel van Houten: Radical Liberalism and the Working Classes in Britain and the Netherlands, 1860-1880," History of European Ideas II (1989): 595-.
ij2   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
and family provided the natural foundations for civil life.103 Many have argued that women's rights were restricted by the argument that motherhood was a "national service."m It was also a heavily racialized one; as much as a rhetoric of a master race in peril forced middle-class women in Britain to accept limits put on their civil rights, this same rhetoric of racial superiority served British women in India, American women in the Philippines, and Dutch women in the Indies, all of whom sought new ways to clarify their selfhood and assert their independence.105
While these discourses around citizenship and national identity were centered on the constituents of European polities, the very principles of national belonging implicated race in many of these distinctions. The charged debate in the late nineteenth century on nationality and citizenship rights for women prompted by the emigration of thousands of women overseas devolved into one about their needed protection against "white slavery" on the argument that European women would never "willingly submit to sexual commerce with foreign, racially varied men."106 Dutch de-
103. Pateman, The Sexual Contract 177.
104. See the articles in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Pail-tics and the Origins of Welfare States (London: Routledge, 1993) and in Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds., Maternity and Gender Polícia: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare Slates i8Bos-i9£os (London: Rouüedge, 1991). Two important pieces not included in the above are Susan Pedersen, "Gender, Welfare, and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War," American Historical Review 954 (1990): 983-1006, loofi and Nancy Fräser and Linda Gordon's "Key Words of the Welfare State," Signs 19 (1994): 3Q9~36-
I0£. See Rosemary George. "Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home," Cultural Critique (Winter 1993-94): 9í~i27 and Vicente Rafael's careful attention to the "phantasmagoria of domesticity" for American women in the Philippines and at "home" ("Colonial Domesticity: White Women and United States Rule in the Philippines," unpublished manuscript). For the Indies see Frances Gouda, "The Gendered Rhetoric of Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism," Indonesia (1992). Far a telling tale of the ways in which British women in England deployed campaigns for indigenous women's rights to their own ends see Susan Pederson "National bodies, Unspeakable Acts: The Sexual Politics ofColonial Policymaking,"JoutnaI of Modern History 9C4 (1990): 983-1006. 106. This issue of white slavery comes up in a wide-range of colonial contexts. See Donna J. Guy, " 'White Slavery,' Citizenship and Nationality in Argentina," Nationalisms and Sexualities, eds. Andrew Parker. Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yaeger (New York: Roudedge) 203, and Cecile Swaisland, Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration af Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 1820-1939 (Oxford: The U of Natal P, 1993) esp. 24-25. An earlier racial inflection on the need for national and cross-national regulations of prostitution focused on the fact that in the late nineteenth century the alleged traffic in women was organized by New York and Johannesburg-based Jewish men. See van Onselen. "Prostitutes and Proletarians, 18S6-
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bates over the citizenship rights of European women in mixed-marriages in the Indies were less concerned with the civil status of women than with another consequence: the conferral of Dutch citizenship on their native husbands and mixed-blood sons. It was the clarity of racial membership, among other things, that jurists and policymakers had in mind.
In this age of empire, the question of who would be a "subject" and who a "citizen" converged on the sexual politics of race. Whether a child was born out of prostitution, concubinage, cohabitation, or marriage and whether that child was acknowledged by a European father partially sealed his or her fate. It is not coincidental that the same colonial lawyers who wrote the Indies mixed-marriage laws were those with a strong voice in the changing Dutch nationality laws of the same period. French and Dutch authorities strongly debated whether metis and Indos displayed inherent dispositions that were more native than European and whether education could deeply transform them.
Concerns for such ambiguously positioned interstitial groups in the national body preoccupied colonial authorities, but also resonated from colony to core. In a study of French antisemitism, Stephen Wilson argues that late nineteenth-century nationalist (and antisemitic) rhetoric in France was "modelled" on the violent cultural racism against Jews who straddled the colonial divide in French Algeria decades earlier.107 The naturalization of Algerian Jews under the Cremieux decree of 1870 that preceded the Dreyfus affair heightened anxieties in the metropole that Jews were an internal enemy, morally, and sexually distinct from those who were of "pure French blood."10B This is not to argue that European antisemitism derived from colonial tensions across the board, but rather that the dangers of cultural and racial hybridity were deeply embedded in popular and scientific discourses whose cast of characters could include subversive Indo-Europeans at one moment and perverse Jews at another.
Discourses of sexuality, racial thinking, and rhetorics of nationalism have several things in common. All hinge on visual markers of distinc-
1914," Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand. Volume i: New Babylon (New York: Longman, 1982) 109-11,137,138.
107. Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time oľ the Dreyfus Affair (London: Associated University Presses, 1982) see esp. chapters 9 and 12.
108. Elizabeth Friedman, Colonialism and After An Algerian Jewish Community (South Hadley, MA.: Bergin and Garvey, 1988) 25.
134   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
tion that profess to—but only poorly Index—the internal traits, psychological dispositions, and moral essence on which these theories of difference and social membership are based. The strength and weakness of such social taxonomies is that they are malleable, their criteria opaque and ill-defined.109 Balibar touches on those anxieties when he notes, "that the 'false' are too visible, will never guarantee that the true are visible enough."110 The German philosopher Fichte saw eighteenth-century German society as based on "invisible ties," a moral attitude, and "interior frontiers" that bounded both the nation and the constitution of individual subjects within it.'11 In the nineteenth century, nationalist discourses about who was echte Dutch or "truly French" were replete with such ambiguous evaluations of breeding, cultivation, and moral essence. In the Dutch East Indies, it was no longer jus soli (right by birth) and jus sanguinis (right by descent) that could provide the criteria of nationality, but rather what the colonial lawyer Nederburgh defined in 1898, echoing Fichte, as shared "morals, culture, and perceptions, feelings that unite us without one being able to say what they are." m
This quest to define moral predicates and invisible essences tied the bourgeois discourses of sexuality, racism, and certain kinds of nationalism in fundamental ways. Each hinged on the state's moral authority to defend the social body against degeneration and abnormality. As George Mosse has argued for nineteenth-century Germany, nationalism was animated by notions of bourgeois respectability and a "moral terror" that rigidly defined what was deviant sex and what was not.113 Nationalist discourse staked out those sexual practices that were nation-building and
iog. As Michael Banton notes Tor the case of nineteenth-century racial typologies: "ihe notion
or type was a convenient one because it was not tied to any particular classificatory level in
zoology, so thai it was easy to refer to the physical types characteristic of particular nations, to
'types of cranial conformation,' or to say that a skull 'approximates to the Negro type' without
having to establish just what that type was" (The Idea of Race 31).
no. Etienne Balibar, "The Paradoxes of Universality," anatomy of Racism, ed. David Goldberg
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990) 285.
11.1. Quoted in Etienne Balibar, "Fichte and the Internal Borden On addresses to the German Nation,"
Masses, Classes, Ideas 61-87.
112. J. A. Nederburgh, Wet en Adai (Batavia: KlofT, 1898) 87-88.
113. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (Madison: U of Wisconsin P. 198c).
Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves   135
race-affirming, marking "unproductive eroticism, as Doris Sommer has so well shown, "not only [as] immoral, [but as] unpatriotic." m
In such a frame, the discourse of middle-class respectability was double-billed, playing several roles. Bourgeois women in colony and metropole were cast as the custodians of morality, of their vulnerable men, and of national character. Parenting, and motherhood specifically, was a class obligation and a duty of empire.115 In short, the cultivations of bourgeois sensibilities were inextricable from the nationalist and racial underpinnings of them. Whether Foucault assumed these links or underestimated their importance is unclear. In volume 1, he simply referred to the "Hitlerite politics of sex" as an "insignificant practice" [HS:i5oj. But Nazism's politics of sex and reproduction were not insignificant by any stretch of the imagination. Feminist historians have shown how significant cults of manliness, motherhood, homoeroticism, and misogyny were to the racial politics of Nazi rule.1'6 In Foucault's lectures, where one might expect such connections to be elaborated, they are not. It is normalization that drives racism. The proliferation of sexualities and racisms that Nazi nationalism underwrote is not part ofthat account.
Feminist critics have long criticized Foucault's concern with sexuality and not gender, his lack of attention to differential access to power eclipsed by a focus on diffused power relations throughout the social body at large.117 But the problem may be broader still. By not engaging the significance of the nineteenth-century discourses of nation and empire and the gender-specific nature of them, the cultivation of the bourgeois self and its sexual deployments remain rooted in Europe and inside the bourgeois
114. Doris Sommer, "Irresistible Romance: the Foundational Fictions of Latin America," Nation
and Narration ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990) 87.
ii£. Anna Davin, "Motherhood and Imperialism," History Workshop j (1978): 9-57.
116. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality; Klaus Theleweit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989); Claudia Koontz, Mothers in the Fatherland (New York: St. Martin's P, 1987).
117. See, for example, Biddy Martin, "Feminism, Criticism and Foucauli," New German Critique 27 (Fall 1987): 3-30; Judith Newton, "History as Usual: Feminism and the New Historicism," Cultural Critique (Spring 1988): 87-121. Other efforts to explore the productive tension between Foucault and feminism include Caroline Ramazanoglu, ed., Up against Foucault (London: Rout-ledge, 1993) and for a less inspired effort Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (London: Routledge, 1991) and Lois McNay, Foucault Feminism (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992). None of the above deal directly with Foucault's historical arguments or engage his formulation of those "four strategic unities" in which women are absent but figure so strongly.
I3É   Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves
nation, rather than constitutive of it. Foucault may have alluded to the met-onymic quality of the bourgeois body for the nation, but left us to show that its cultivation and unique sexuality was nourished by a wider colonial world of Manichean distinctions: by Irish, "Mediterranean," Jewish, and non-European Others who provided the referential contrasts for it.
By marginalizing the link between nationalism and desire in both his genealogy of racism and his history of sexuality, Foucault eclipses a key discursive site where subjugated bodies were made and subjects formed. The technologies of sexuality that concerned Foucault were productive of power in specific ways that targeted disciplined sentiment as much as normalized sexuality in the governing of oneself. The knot that bound subversion to perversion could only be undone if people themselves believed in the sexual codes of the moralizing state, if personal affect and sentiments could be harnessed to national projects and priorities for racial regeneration.118 Doing so was no easy task. It first required identifying where disaffections were produced, where children's 'instincts' were schooled, how early, and by whom. It required distinguishing those contaminations of the social environment from those reproduced in the intimate confines of bourgeois homes. Itis this subject to which we turn in the next chapter.
118. Two dazzling works an this subject include Lauren Berlant's discussion of the "harnessing of affect to political life through the production ofa national fantasy" in The^naiomj' of □ National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life (Chicago: Chicago UP, 199t} 5-, and Doris Summer's masterful analysis of how bourgeois goals of nationhood coordinated "sense and sensibility, productivity and passion" in Latin American novels in Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin vlmerica (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991) 14. Also see my "A Sentimental Education" in Fantasizing the Feminine, 1996.
V
DOMESTIC SUBVERSIONS AND CHILDREN'S SEXUALITY
[It] was not the child of the people, the future worker who had to be taught the disciplines of the body, but rather the schoolboy, the child sunounded by domestic servants, tutors, and governesses, who was in danger of compromising not so much his physical strength as his intellectual capacity, his moral fiber, and the obligation to preserve a healthy line of descent for his family and his social class. (HS: 121)
The emergence in the eighteenth century of a discourse on children's sexuality and the power relations generated by it plays a central part in Foucault's biohistory, joining several of his projects in ways that have only been partially explored. He calls upon it to instantiate his rejection of the repressive hypothesis, to repudiate both Marx and Freud, and to specify those mechanisms and techniques of power that operate in productive, intimate, and capillary form. Despite this emphasis, Foucault's treatment of the "pedagogization of children's sexuality," like volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, is schematic and telegraphic. But, like that volume, it invites us to do something more. Specifically, it is from the vantage point of race-making and nation-making that his interest in this discourse on children's sexual precocities dovetails with our own. If this was one of the principal discursive sites where bourgeois culture defined and defended its interests, in colonial perspective it was also one of the key sites in which racial transgressions were evident and national identities formed. It was a discourse in which the distribution and education of desire was lodged in that "tiny, sexually saturated, familial space" (HS:47). This space contained and revamped intrafamilial relations, as Foucault argued. But it also did something more. It was here that those with other class and cultural