i8   Colonial Studies
ter £ expands on a theme to which Foucault had planned to devote an entire volume; namely, the discourse on masturbating children and why it so concerned the bourgeoisie. I take up the discourse on masturbation with a different emphasis than Foucault's that in turn leads my discussion toward another end. The colonial variant of that discourse on children and their sexual desires was more about the cultural transgressions of women servants and native mothers than about children themselves, less about the pedagogy surrounding children's sexuality than the racialization of it. Chapter 6 engages Foucault and colonial studies on a subject which at once underwrites The History of Sexuality and is absent from it: namely, the production of desire. My interest is in the distributions of desire, an issue which Foucault's apparent dismissal of Freud's focus on sexual desire would seem to preclude. In the concluding chapter, I pose two sorts of questions: first, how The History of Sexuality and the lectures on race might be differentiy located within Foucault's broader projects, and second, how such locations inform new ways we might write "effective histories of the present" in colonial studies today.
throughout volume i of The Hislory of Sexuality without ever defining what he means by those terms. I use these terms as well but resist the impulse to fill in for Foucault or provide a fixed alternative definition on the argument that what constituted the "bourgeois self" and its "self affirmation" Was relational and tied to historically specific notions of gender, nation, and race, not class alone. This book may be seen as an effort to identify the changing parameters of a bourgeois self that were contingent on a racially, sexually, and morally distinct range of other human kinds. While this may be frustrating to the reader, it serves to underscore the mobile discourses of dominance in which bourgeois priorities were defined and defended and in which cultural and economic vulnerabilities were perceived.
II
PLACING RACE IN THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY
An inducement for students of colonialism to work out Foucault's genealogies on a broader imperial map should be spurred simply by their glaring absence. It is even more disturbing that such a crucial element of The History of Sexuality that does speak direcdy to the nineteenth-century imperial world has been so conspicuously ignored. This is Foucault's strategic linking of the history of sexuality to the construction of race. The omission is not that by students of colonialism alone. While references to racism appear in virtually every chapter, few of Foucault's interlocutors have considered them for comment or review.1 None of the three recent
i. Among the many well-argued reviews and articles that deal critically with volume i of The History of Sexualiiy but with no reference to its treatment of race see, for example, Eloise Buker, •'Hidden Desires and Missing Persons; A Feminist Deconstruction of Sexuality," Western Political Quarterly 43 (1990): 8l 1-32; Manthia Diawara, "Reading Africa through Foucault; Mudimbe's Reaffirmation of the Subject," Odober cc (1990): 79-92; Lucette Finas, "Michel Foucault: Les Rapport de pouvoir passent á ľintérieur des corps," La Quinzaine Littérature 247 (1977); 4-6; AÍ-thar Hussain, "Foucault's History of Sexuality," M/F c (1981): 169-91; Edith Kurzweil, "Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality as Interpreted by Feminists and Marxists," Social Research J34 (Winter 1986): 647-63; Bernard-Henry Levy, "Non au sexe roi," interview with Foucault, Nouvel Observnteur 644 (1977); Biddy Martin, "Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault," New German Critique 27 (Fall 1987): 3-30; Alec McHoul, "The Getting of Sexuality: Foucault, Garfinkel and the Analysis ofSexual Discourse," Theory, Culture and Society 3.2 (1986): 65-79; Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987); Claire O'Farrell, Foucault: Historian or Philospher (London: Macmillan, 1989); Robert Padgug, "Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History," Passion and Power Sexuality in History, eds. Kathy Peiss and Christina Simmons with Robert Padgug (Philadelphia; Temple UP, 1989); Carol A. Pollis, "The Apparatus of Sexuality: Reflections on Foucault's Contributions to the Study of Sex in History," Adversaria 23.3 (1987): 401-14; Roy Porter, "Is Foucault Useful for Understanding Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Sexuality?" Contention 1 (1991): 6t—82; Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of
20   Placing Race
biographies of Foucault even index the subject of "racism."2 From a wide range of interviews, book reviews and explications du texte, by philosophers, anthropologists, historians, journalists, and literary critics of varied critical persuasions, few address Foucault's attention to the "instrumentality" of sexuality in the making of race.3 Even David Goldberg's recent study, Racist Culture, explicitly inspired by Foucault's analysis of discursive formations, never mentions Foucault's treatment ofthat subject.4 Given this resounding silence, one might rightfully be more suspect of my peculiar reading of Foucault than of these prevailing omissions. There are, however, I think some good reasons to pursue the question further.
The silence seems unwarranted on several counts; most strikingly because the final two sections of The History of Sexuality deal direcdy with the intersection of sexuality, degeneracy, and racism within the emergence of the "biopolitical" state. In a 1977 interview, a rare instance when Foucault was asked to address the issue of racism directly, he somewhat cynically responded:
Production vs. Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984); Uta Liebmann Schaub, "Foucault's Oriental Subtext," PMLA 104 (1989): 306-16; Victor Seidler, "Reason, Desire and Male Sexuality," The Cultural Construction of Sexuality, ed. Pat Caplan (London: Tavistock, 1987); Elinor Shaffer, "Book Review of The Hisiary of Sexuality, Vail" Signs (Summer 1980): 812-20; Pierre Sullivan, "Historie et sexualite; ä propos de ľoeuvre de Michel Foucault," Revue Francoise de Psychoanalyse c (1984): 1441-14S3; Jeflrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981). Also see the interviews collected in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. This list does not include those works I cite elsewhere. Alan Sheridan, Michel Foucault The Will to Truth (London: Tavistock, 1980) 191-93, David It. Shumway, Michel Faucault (Boston: Twayne, 1989) ici, and Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1983) 141 mention Foucault's discussion of racism in passing.
2. See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991); James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
3. Etienne Balibar, "Foucault and Marx," delivered in 1988 at a Conference on Foucault in Paris. As Balibar notes "the place occupied by the problem of racism [in Foucault's work] .. . was considerable" (58).
4. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Polities of Meaning (London: Blackwell, 1993). Also see Frank Dikötter's The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992) which, albeit far more influenced by Michael Banton's treatment of racial thinking, makes no reference to Foucault on race.
Placing Race   21
Yes, no one wants to talk about that last part. Even though the book is a short one, but I suspect people never got as far as this last chapter. All the same, it's the fundamental part of the book.5
Secondly, references to racism in The History of Sexuality are neither incidental nor perfunctory. They are carefully positioned, signposted if not elaborated, in parts 2,3,4, and 5. Nor should this be surprising. Volume 1 was, in its inception, a schematic overview of the six volumes Foucault had intended to write, with volume 6 (as advertised on the back cover of the first French edition) to be devoted to "Populations and Races."6 That project was put aside by 1977 when Foucault turned back to Hellenic conceptions of sexuality and cultivations of the self that contrast modern forms. Even as a plan de recherche, volume 1 offers compelling insights into how Foucault conjoined the rise of racism and technologies of sex. But there is stronger evidence still that the subject of racism was of more than passing concern to Foucault's larger project. The lectures he gave at the College de France in 1976, when that first volume was just completed, were explicitly devoted to the nature of racial discourses and their shifting political semantics.
Thus from either the vantage point of Foucault's project or contemporary studies of racism, the silence of his interlocutors is strange. Etienne Balibar is one of the few to note Foucault's central concern with racism as "the most revealing concrete effect" of a biopolitics that bore on the species and its reproduction. In Balibar's reading, racism was the "crucial phenomenon" that biopolitics set out to explain.7 John Rajchman similarly has remarked on Foucault's focus on the "scientific" notion of "degeneracy" as a category racially inflected through the technologies of sex.8 Others, however, such as Abdul JanMohamed, have invoked Foucault's
j. Quoted in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1977) 222.
6. The six volumes were to be titled: 1. La volonte du savoir (The will to knowledge) 2. La chair et le corps (The flesh and the body) 3. La craisade des enfants (The children's crusade), 4. La femme, la mere et ľhvstérique (The woman, the mother and the hysteric) j\ Les pervers (perverts) 6. Populations et races (populations and races).
7. Etienne Balibar, "Foucault et Marx: L'enjeu du nominalisme," Michel Foucault: Philosophe (Paris: Seuil, 1990), see esp. 58:66.
S.John Rajchman, Truth and Eros: Faucault, Laran, and the Question of Ethics (New York: Routíedge, 1991) 106-7.
22   Placing Race
analysis of bourgeois sexuality only to quickly dismiss it out of hand. JanMohamed's contention that Foucault's exclusive focus on the bourgeois forms of sexuality precludes an understanding of racialized sexuality seems to miss the very force of Foucault's argument. If the technologies of sexuality that shape bourgeois identity account for the rise of racism in its statist form, then it would seem that racialized sexuality is not outside this "class body" in the making, but, on the contrary, part and parcel of it.9
Without digressing at length into a social history of French intellectual pursuits of the 1970s, it still seems worth noting some of the contours of the political field in which Foucault's reflections could be heard at the time.'0 First of all, The History of Sexuality is not, of course, a book about racism. Its critique is directed against Marxist and Freudian analyses of society and its discontents and particularly against the repressive notion of power that he saw embraced in those accounts. More pointedly, it targeted Wilhelm Reich's and Herbert Marcuse's Freudian-Marxist celebration of sex as liberation from the repressive power of capitalism and its restrictive institutions. Foucault contested both of these interpretations. For him, on the contrary, power must be seen in its affirmative, knowledge-producing form, prompting a proliferation of discourses on sexuality and their effects, not their attenuation. It is the form of power generated by these discourses that shape his project; racism here is a consequence of them. In short, racism is not the subject of The History of Sexuality. Instead, it analyzes how a discourse of sexuality articulates and eventually incorporates a racist logic. This is the book's end-product. Racisms are not what Foucault analyzed; he looked rather to the ways in which a prior technology of sexuality provided a cultural susceptibility and discursive field for them.
Foucault's somewhat oblique treatment of the issue of racism may account for its lack of resonance. But then he was not the only one who failed to enlist the French intellectual left to take on these issues—nor is
9. Abdul R. JanMohamed, "Sexuality on/of the Racial Border, Foucault, Wright and the Articulation of 'Racialized Sexuality,'" Discourses of Sexuality, ed. Domna Stanton (Ann Arbon U of Michigan P, 1992) 94-116.
10. For the most recent effort to map out the intellectual and political field in which Foucault's work was situated see Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses cantemporains (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). While Eribon marks 1970 and. 1976 as two key moments when Foucault's project changed course, he makes no reference to the 1976 College de France lectures on race and Foucault's tum away from that subject in subsequent years.
Placing Race   23
it clear that such a task would have been his intent." Although opposed to the wars in Indochina and Algeria, there is no indication that Foucault sought to situate his analysis of racism with respect to these political interventions.12 He belonged to a generation whose political energies had been massively mobilized against the French government's efforts to keep Algeria under its tutelage. Many loudly supported France's colonized populations in the Algerian war.13 While Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre were among those who explicitly addressed colonial racism, they did not prompt a general theoretical engagement with racism nor a confrontation with the racial underpinnings of French society itself.14 The concept of class and the sorts of social transformations to which capitalism gave rise remained foundational in critical social and political theory; race and racial theory was not.
But one could easily argue that such an effort to situate Foucault's knowledge and his reception are at best speculative, perhaps irrelevant. We might do better to look, not at the politics of intellectuals, but at the muted presence—some might argue, the absence—of a politics of race in Europe in the 1970s. Could Foucault have written an effective history of racism (as he had done for prisons, madness, and sexuality) in a political environment in which racial identity was accorded no positive force nor race a strategic space? In contrast to the United States, where the civil rights movement
n. Mark Lilla, in a review of Eribon's and Miller's biographies of Foucault, criticizes both for missing the crucial point that "Foucault was never a political leaden he was what the French call a suiviste." See "A Taste for Pain: Michel Foucault and the Outer Reaches of Human Experience," Times Literarj' Supplement 26 March 1993:3-4.
12. On Foucault's opposition to French interventions in Indochina and the Algerian war. Miller makes passing reference. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993) 57.136.
13. Clearly the French left was not unambiguously anticolonial during the Algerian war—the left version of the civilizing mission was hard to overcame. On the different sorts of political engagements and positions taken on by French intellectuals during the Indochinese and Algerian wars see Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1977) and J.-P. Rioux and J.-F. Sirinelli, eds., La Guerre d'AIgerie et les ímellectuels francais (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1991). Note that while intellectuals of the right who fought for a "French Algeria" identified their position with 19th century racist thinkers such as Renan and Vacher LaPouge, the left's defense of an independent Algeria was framed as an assault on imperialism more than on racism perse.                                                            >
14. Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonise (Paris: Payot, 1957); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963); Jean-Paul Sartre, La Critique de la Raison Dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, i960).
24   Placing Race
prompted a generation of scholars to resituate racism as inherent to the in-clusionary myths and exclusionary practices of democracy and freedom,15 histories of European racism took a very different course. Such histories remained bracketed in specific stories: as a subtheme in the history of totalitarianism as in the influential work of Hannah Arendt, as a politically anesthetized, ahistorical field of "race relations" as in Britain, and perhaps most notably as a history of the horror of recent Nazi memory (as in Leon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth)—a cordoned off history of archaic origins, a history to dispose of a narrative of the past.16
A radical rethinking of racism as inherent in the deep structure of Europe's contemporary social order has only emerged with the political force of "new racism" in the 1980s and in dialogue with the multiple constituencies voicing opposition. The "immigration problem" of England, Germany, Holland, and France, most vicious in the LePenist fears about its defiling of French cultural identity, has brought racist violence and a virulent discourse on racial contamination, "rootless" foreigners, and internal aliens back home.17 But in this analysis too, Foucault is granted no part. Even the more recent wave of German scholarship that resituates Nazism as part of the " 'normal' achievement of respectable science" accords him no place. As Geoff Eley notes, Foucault could easily have been its "patron saint," but he is not.18
Leaving the psychodynamics of Foucault's choice of subject to his biographers, one might still argue that the absence of any reference to his work on race may in part derive from his own abrupt shifts in trajectory. While his forays in his 1976 lectures into "the origins of state racism" were both bold and counter-intuitive, they were shordived. After a sabbatical
íc. For the best example of an effort to tie the history of racism to ihe rise of democracy in the US. see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, .American Freedom: The Qnieal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 197s").
16. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Tololitorianism (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1948). On the depoliticization of the "race relations" literature in Britain see Robert Miles, "Marxism Versus the 'Sociology of Race Relations'?" Ethnic ana1 Racial Studies 7.2 (1984): 217-37. For the originary approach of Leon Poliakov see The Aryan Myth (London: Heineman, 1974).
17. See, most notably, Pierre-Andre Taguieff, La force du préjufjŕ: esiai sur le rarisme ct ses doubles (Paris: La Decouverte, 1988); and "The National Front in France," New Political Science 16-17 (Fall/Winter 1989): 29-70. Also see Tore Björgo and Rob Witte, eds., Racist Violence in Europe (London: St. Martin's Press, 1993).
18. GeofT Eley, "Scholarship Serving the Nazi State I; Studying the East," Ethnic and Racial Studies 12.4 (1989): 576.
Placing Race   15
in 1977, his 1977-78 course at the College de France surprised associates, students, and friends.19 The transformation he had explored in 1976 from a "discourse on the war of races" to "state racism" never appears again, and the genealogy of racism was not pursued further. By 1978, "governmen-tality" took its place entirely, leading Foucault back to sex in the governing and care of the self. As one of Foucault's associates told James Miller, "the [1978] course did not go as planned."20 This may have been a period of "crisis" for Foucault, as some have claimed, following the "quiet" reception of volume 1 by some, and its more scathing dismissal by others, the latter reflected in extremis by Baudrillard's 1977 piece, Forget Foucault.21 What we do know is that there was a radical shift in the historical period on which he worked, a different weighting of his analytic focus, marked by a clean erasure of the question of racism from his project.
The suggestion of one of Foucault's close associates that he was possibly "deadlocked" on thinking about race may be on the mark.22 The discrepancy between The History of Sexuality and the lectures on racism is striking. While the former alludes to linkages between racism and technologies of sexuality (that were to be pursued in later volumes), in the lectures biopower, not sexuality, frames his argument. The explicit link between racism and the bourgeois order is no longer there. The lectures take off from another vantage point entirely. They trace the "polyvalent mobility" of a discourse of races through a number of minor and major figures in European historiography. On the other hand, Foucault centrally positions the discourses of race in a way he had never done before. The specificity of the late nineteenth-century racism alluded to in The History of Sexuality is no longer assumed but engaged direcdy.
Even if we could account for the reception of this part of his work two decades ago, it does not explain the silence now. Today, when critiques of the essentialist underpinnings of racial and sexual identities are so well incorporated into intellectual and political agendas, few have drawn direcdy from him. I return to the lectures in the following chapter. Here I invoke them to make a specific point; namely, that the attribution to Foucault of a concern with racism is not merely a presentist reading of his work.
19. Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault 299.
20. Miller 299.
21. See Macey, Lives af Michel Foucault. 358 on the "quiet welcome," and Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext, 1977).
22. Personal communication, January 1994.
26   Placing Race
Racism is a complex, if elusive subtext of it. Before turning to the lectures in chapter 3,1 outline how Foucault saw the relationship between racism and discourses of sexuality in The History of Sexuality and suggest some of the dissonances that emerge when the economics of colonial racism is joined with his account.
Discourses of Sexuality and Racism in The History of Sexuality
Foucault's engagement with issues of racism is not easy to untangle. While references to racism appear sparingly throughout volume i, the fact of modern racism is fundamental to its project. Racism is first mentioned in a discussion of the earliest technologies of sex that arose in the eighteenth century around the political economy of population, regulating the modes of sexual conduct by which populations could be expanded and controlled. It was, "these new measures that would become the anchorage points for the different varieties of racism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries" (HS:26). In describing the rupture between a medicine of sex and the biology of reproduction in the nineteenth century, Foucault describes how the scientific arbitrators of sex authorized the "hygienic necessity" of cleansing and invigorating the social body in forms that "justified the racisms of the state, which at the time were on the horizon" (HS:£4). Note that here racism is a potential waiting to be born, not yet on the terra firma that produced the rigid racial taxonomies of the late nineteenth century.
In colonial perspective, we could easily offer a different chronology with other prefigurings, of which Foucault was clearly aware. Colonial technologies of rule bear witness to earlier, explicit racially-based policies once in widespread use. Discriminations based on color divided black slaves from indentured poor whites in the American south in the early 1600s just as religion and color served to delineate status in the Dutch East Indies a half century later.21 By 1680, those of "mixed-blood" were systematically
23. Ernest van den Boogaart, "Colour Prejudice and the Yardstick of Civility: th£ Initial Dutch Confrontation with Black Africans, 1590-1635," Racism and Colonialism, ed. Robert Ross (Leiden: Martinus NijhofT 1982). Boogaart's effort to distinguish "color prejudice" of the early seventeenth century from the racism of a later period belies how early both color and religion were the joint criteria on which access to office and residence was based. For the Dutch East Indies see Willem Mastenbroek, De Historische Omwikkeling van de Staatsrechlelijke Indeeling der Bevolking van Nederlandsch-Indie (Wageningen: Veenman, 1934) 35. On the force of racism in eighteenth-century
Placing Race   27
denied entry to the upper echelons of the Indies bureaucratic service.24 When Spain is brought back within the "European" picture, the "undisguised contempt" for criollos and "half-breeds" that peninsular Spaniards and metropolitan authorities displayed is evident even earlier.25
Students of U.S., French, British, and Dutch colonial history have debated whether these were emergent racisms of a different order, not yet as firmly biologized as in the nineteenth century. Some argue that racism was systematically embraced by the seventeenth century, others hold that it had not yet emerged in its consolidated, pure somatic form.26 In either case, there is good evidence that discourses of race did not have to await mid-nineteenth-century science for their verification. Distinctions of color joined with those of religion and culture to distinguish the rulers from the ruled, invoked in varied measures in the governing strategies of colonial states. In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, race becomes the organizing grammar of an imperial order in which modernity, the civilizing mission and the "measure of man" were framed. And with it, "culture" was harnessed to do more specific political work; not only to mark difference, but to rationalize the hierarchies of privilege and profit, to consolidate the labor regimes of expanding capitalism, to provide the psychological scaffolding for the exploitative structures of colonial rule.
France and its colonies see Pierre Pluchon (Nčnres et Juife au XVIIIe siěcle: Le radsme au siede des Lumiěres [Paris: Tallandier, 1984]).
24. C Fasseur, De Indologeii: Amblenaren voor de Oost, 1825-1950 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1993) 119.
25. See Anthony Pagden's "Identity Formation in Spanish America" (Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987), where he argues that, "within a few years of the conquest the mestizos, far from being the bearers of a new mixed culture, had become a despised breed, contemptuous of their own Indian origins and rejected by a white elite that had come to fear racial contamination too much to wish to acknowledge direct association with them" (71).
26. This debate has been most sharply defined in the U.S. over the relationship between racism and slavery in the seventeenth century. It has been treated in depth in other contexts and I will not review them here. See Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1968); George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the While Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Aiden Vaugh, "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in 17th Century Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97 (July 1989): 347-49; and David Roediger, Wanes of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1991) esp. 23-36. For a sample of the wide range of contributors to this debate from philosophy, history and comparative literature see Harold Pagliaro, ed., Racism in the Eighteenth Century (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP, 1973).
28    Placing Race
But even among historians who place the emergence of modern racism in the nineteenth century, this emergence is often dated earlier than does Foucault, around 1800—coterminous with an anxious and uncertain bourgeois order—not subsequent to it.27 Why, then, does Foucault embrace this particular version of the nineteenth-century history of race but categorically reject the standard story of nineteenth-century sexuality? The History of Sexuality hints at some reasons, but the lectures offer more guidance. Colonialism was clearly outside Foucault's analytic concern, to him a byproduct of Europe's internal and permanent state of war with itself, not formative of those conflicts. In lectures, he would state only that racism was elaborated with colonization, to allow and account for "la genocide colonisateur." Colonial genocide is then one manifestation of a much more protracted discourse on the war of races, an elaborative moment of it.
Foucault's focus on the second half of the nineteenth century has other motivations as well. His concern was with state racism, not its popular forms. Racism is a state affair, confirmed by a set of scientific discourses that bear witness to it (HS: 147). This latter may seem like a curious formulation, given the common rendering of Foucault's position that the state is not a privileged site for the discursive construction of power. But reading the lectures against The History of Sexuality provides a more subde insight. The state is not written off as a locus of power. Rather, Foucault locates how state institutions foster and draw on new independent disciplines of knowledge and in turn harness these micro-fields of power as they permeate the body politic at large.
Another issue informs his chronology, a point we can only vaguely discern from The History of Sexuality: the principal form of state racism which concerned Foucault was that of the Nazi state and its "Final Solution." As such, there is an implicit teleology to how he treats what racist discourse "does." It must account for a set of practices that allow a state to identify not primarily its external foes, but its enemies within. In both the lectures and volume one, the focus is on the internal dynamics of European states
27. See George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History af European Racism {Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978); Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (London: Tavistock, 1977); Collette Guillaumin, "Idea of Race"; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 23. Tom Holt places racism as a "creature of the ostensibly nonracist ideology that had undermined and destroyed slavery." Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Jahns Hopkins Press, 1991) xx.
Placing Race   29
and their disciplinary biopolitical strategies. Contiguous empires figure in Foucault's genealogy of racism in his lectures, but imperial expansion outside Europe does not. In short, the genealogy of racist discourse is sui generis to Europe: colonial genocide is subsumed, dependent, accounted for, and explained in absentia.
For Foucault, racism is embedded in early discourses on sexuality, but not yet in explicit form. In the making of a bourgeois "class" body in the eighteenth century, a new field of discourse emerged concerned with "body hygiene, the art of longevity, ways of having healthy children and of keeping them alive as long as possible" that "attest to the correlation of this concern with the body and sex to a type of 'racism'" (HS:i2£). But "racism" is still bracketed here with inverted commas. This was not, he warns us, the familiar racism of the blue-blood aristocracy, invested in a conservative status quo. On the contrary it was a "dynamic racism, a racism of expansion, even if it was still in a budding state, awaiting the second half of the nineteenth century to bear the fruits that we have tasted" (HS: 125). Two important issues emerge here. First, this is the only place in The History of Sexuality where Foucault alludes both to different historical moments of racism and to its different varieties. Up to this point, racism has been presented as a nineteenth-century invention. Here, however, he specifies an earlier racism that preceded its bourgeois form, one "manifested by the nobility" and organized for different ends. But note again, racism remains both internal to northern Europe and of elite derivation.28
This is not a unique story of racism's origin.29 Benedict Anderson offers an account that, at first glance, would seem very much the same. In Imagined Communities, he writes:
28. Foucault's only mention of "inquisitions" is in the context of the spread of the confessional in the Middle Ages (HS:j8). The sort of "state racism" that one might argue was entailed in the Spanish Inquisition and the policies of mass expulsion and extermination based on "purity of blood" is perhaps assumed, but unaddressed. On the Inquisition's part in accenting issues of race and a discourse on the "purity of blood" see Henry Kamen, Inquisition and Society in Spain in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Bloamington: Indiana UP, 198í) esp. 101-133. For support of the argument that the early Spanish history of racism was salient to the making of national identities in nineteenth-century northern Europe, see Michael Ragussis, "The Birth of a Nation in Victorian Culture: The Spanish Inquisition, the Converted Daughter, and the 'Secret Race"" Critical Inquiry 20 (Spring 1994): 477-508.
29. Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Class (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1951) for example, argued that imperialist policy was not at odds with the interests of the aristocracy, but "rested on it" (3i).
30   Placing Race
dreams of racism have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation; above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to 'blue' or 'white' blood and 'breeding' among aristocracies. No surprise ... that on the whole, racism and anti-Semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.30
While Anderson and Foucault concur on racism's aristocratic etymology, they difFer on two fundamental counts. For Anderson, racism derives from class. For Foucault, as we shall see in chapter 3, it is the other way around: a discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of races. Also, for Foucault, these racisms of the nobility and the bourgeoisie are distinct, discontinuous, and qualitatively different in kind. For Anderson, on the contrary, racism is not only continuous but serves the hybrid "upper class" political project of "official nationalism." These two racisms become one and the same, welded by a nineteenth-century "conception of empire" in which "colonial racism was a major element."31 By his account "late colonial empires even served to shore up domestic aristocratic bastions, since they appeared to confirm on a global, modern stage antique conceptions of power and privilege."32 In short, colonial racism was of "aristocratic or pseudo-aristocratic derivation," but not confined to those class interests. Colonial empires "permitted sizeable numbers of bourgeois and petty bourgeois to play aristocrat off center court: i.e. anywhere in the empire except at home"33 (my emphasis). We will have occasion to question Anderson's portrayal of European colonial communities as comprised of a "bourgeois aristocracy" in chapter 4. Here, I invoke him to underscore the basic point that notions of "a purity of blood" and the racisms that they expressed circulated through empire and back through Europe. They were never contained in Europe alone.
While Foucault's description of this "familiar" earlier aristocratic racism is at best vague, his account of its later "dynamic" variant has more specific referents. It is in the late nineteenth century that technologies of sex
30. Anderson, Imagined Communities 136.
31. Anderson 137.
32. Anderson 137.
33. Anderson 137.
Placing Race   31
are most fully mobilized around issues of race with the pseudo-scientific theory of degeneration at their core. He writes:
The series composed of perversion-heredity-degenerescence formed the solid nucleus of the new technologies of sex. ... Its application was widespread and its implantation went deep. Psychiatry, to be sure, but also jurisprudence, legal medicine, agencies of social control, the surveillance of dangerous or endangered children, all functioned for a long time on the basis of 'degenerescence' and the heredity-perversion system. An entire social practice, which took the exasperated but coherent form of a state-directed racism, furnished this technology of sex with a formidable power and far-reaching consequences. (HS:n8-ii9)
That "vast theoretical and legislative edifice" that was the theory of degeneracy secured the relationship between racism and sexuality. It conferred abnormality on individual bodies, casting certain deviations as both internal dangers to the body politic and as inheritable legacies that threatened the well-being of a race (PK:204).
There is nothing particularly innovative in this formulation. Sander Gilman, Daniel Pick, and Anna Davin, among others, have treated the discourse of degeneracy with more nuance and far more historical depth than Foucault.34 Pick argues that degeneracy was a "European disorder" that "above all [evoked] danger from internal transgressions rather than inter-racial 'pollution'."35 Crystallizing in eugenics, nineteenth-century degeneracy theory developed as a national and a class-specific project that converged with wider purity campaigns for improved natality and selective sterilization. While Pick rejects what he calls the more conventional portrayal of degeneracy as part of the racist construction of empire, for Foucault, empire never comes up. Only Nazism is mentioned as, "doubtless the most cunning and the most naive combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of disciplinary power" (HS: 149).
34, Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexualit)', Race, and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell, 1985) 191-216; Anna Davin, "Motherhood and Imperialism," History Workshop 8 (197B); Daniel Pick, The Faces of Degeneration:/! European Disorder, C.1848-C.1918 (New York: Cambridge, 1989). Cf.Dain Borges, " 'Puny, Ugly, Slothful and Inert': Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880-1940," Journal of Latin American Studies 2c (1993): 235-256 who looks at the discourse on degeneration as a "major vehicle of social criticism ... for Brazilian intellectuals" in this period.
35. Pick, Faces of Degeneration 39.
32   Placing Race
Pick differs with Foucault on a crucial point. The discourse of degeneracy was not an instrumental vehicle of bourgeois empowerment as for Foucault, but quite the opposite, an expression of "social anxiety," "internal disorder," and political fear; in short, a representation of "powerless-ness" within a "seemingly self-possessed imperious discourse."36 From a colonial perspective, this makes much more sense. As we will see in chapter 4, notions of degeneracy were directed at multiple targets and had wide applications.37 They not only targeted colonized populations as Pick assumes, but also the indigent, supposedly décivilisé, racially-hybrid members within the European community. Degeneracy characterized those who were seen to veer off bourgeois course in their choice of language, domestic arrangement, and cultural affiliation. Notions of degeneracy registered dissension among Europeans and basic uncertainties about who would be granted that privileged status.38 Thus, in the Dutch Indies, "degenerate" was an adjective that invariably preceded those labelled as poor and white. It could be invoked to protect the schools of "full-blooded" Dutch children from their poor Indo-European compatriots, as well as from those children who were "purely" Javanese. Similarly, the notion of degeneracy appears repeatedly in the 1898 Indies legal code on mixed-marriages to justify why European women who choose native men as their husbands should not be entitled to Dutch citizenship. The point is this was not a "European" disorder or a specifically colonial one, but a "mobile" discourse of empire that designated eligibility for citizenship, class membership, and gendered assignments to race.
Biopower, Sexuality and Race
While the references cited above suggest a progressive story of racism emerging out of earlier technologies of sex, Foucault's story, not surprisingly, is far more complicated. It is in the book's final chapter where the welding of racism to "biopower" confers on racism its most viru-
36. Pick 237.
37. This was, of course, true in Europe and the U.S. as well, where a discourse of degeneracy was used by feminist and left wing birth control advocates such as Emma Goldman as well as those adamandy against them. See Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: U of California P, igBj) go and Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Bight: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman, 1976).
38. Pick, Faces of Degeneration 39.
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lent form. It is not biopower per se that produces racism, but rather the "calculated management of life" consolidated in the nineteenth century bringing together the two "poles" of biopower that emerged separately two centuries earlier (HS: 140). One pole centers on the disciplining of the individual, on the "anatomo-politics of the human body"; the second centers on a set of "regulatory controls" over the life of the species in a "biopoliücs of the population" (HS:i39).39
What marks nineteenth-century biopower as unique then is not its focus on the individual body and the species alone, although this is the feature that most commentators have rightly pointed out.40 It also joins two distinct technologies of power operating at different levels; one addresses the disciplining of individual bodies, the other addresses the "global" regulation of the biological processes of human beings.41 It is this "technology of power centered on life" that produces a normalizing society and a new form of racism inscribed within it. Foucault would explore these connections in more detail in his 1976 lectures, but this concern with normality is already prefigured in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, in Discipline and Punish, earlier still in Madness and Civilization, and The Birth of the Clinic, as well.42
39. In Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (London: Polity Press, 1991), Megan Vaughan explores "the limitations of a Foucauldian account of biopower," arguing that colonial medical discourse and practice differed substantially from that described by Foucault because it conceptualized Africans "first and foremost, as members of groups and it was diese groups, rather than individuals who were said to possess distinctive psychologies and bodies. In contrast to the developments described by Foucault, in colonial Africa group classification was a far more important construction than individualization" (11), In this otherwise rich study on colonial power, medicine and African subjectivity, Vaughan misses just this point that nineteenth-century biopower represented a shift toward the regulation of the social body, toward the normalization of collective identities, and away, from individualizing disciplinary regimes. Vaughan dismisses Foucault's account precisely because she understands biopower to be a form of individualization rather than collective regulation.
40. See, for example, Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucauli 140.
41. Michel Foucault, Temps Modernes 45.
42. Colin Gordon makes a similar observation:
Whether out of a polemical appetite for indications of unstable oscillation and damaging retreat, or through an inclination to apply the (often misunderstood) Foucauldian thematic of discontinuity to Foucault's own thought, or simply out of the need for a striking story-line, the evidences of a strong continuity from Histoire de la folie through to the end of Foucault's output have generally been paid too little critical attention."
See Colin Gordon, "Histatre tie la folie: An Unknown Book ofMichel Foucault," History ofihe Social
Sciences 3.1 (1990}: c.
34   Placing Race
In Discipline and Punish, he identifies 1840, when the children's rural reformatory was established at Mettray, as the start of a "new era" in the "normalization of power." It was a key moment when what he calls the "carceral archipelago" of the nineteenth century produced a "slow, continuous, imperceptible gradation" that allowed the "social enemy" to be defined at once by irregularities, departures from the norm, anomaly and criminal deviations (DP:2o,8-g). In the French language edition of Madness and Civilization, he already has set out "to write a history of boundaries ... by which a culture rejects something that it will designate for itself as Exterior."43 In each of these projects, Foucault first explores the "normalization of power." By the time he writes The History of Sexuality and the lectures on racism, his focus has shifted to a wider concern with the power of normalization.44 And with this shift, the underpinnings of his approach to modern racism are close at hand. This creation of the "internal enemy" and of "the dangerous individual," both framed within a "theory of social defense," will be fundamental, as we shall see in the following chapter, to how Foucault will explain the racisms of modern states.45 As George Mosse, among others, has noted, the distinction between normality and abnormality, between bourgeois respectability and sexual deviance, and between moral degeneracy and eugenic cleansing were the elements of a discourse that made unconventional sex a national threat and thus put a premium on managed sexuality for the health of a state.46 Foucault writes, "Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species. It was employed as a standard for the disciplines and as a basis of regulation (HS:i46)." Through this new biopolitic "management of life,"
43. Folie et Déroison: Historie de la Folie a ľäge classique (Paris: Plön, 1961). The French quote reads: "On pourrak faire une histoire des limiies,—de ces gestes obscurs, nécessairement oubliés děs qu'accomplis, par lesquels une culture rejette quelque chose qui sera pour eile l'Exterieur," III.
44. In agreement with Miller's biography of Foucault, Mark Lilla notes: ". . . it was the idea of social boundaries and their trangression, not homoeroticism as such, that dominated (Fou-cault's] mature oudoolc" "A Taste of Pain," Times Literary Supplement 26 March 1993: 3. Also see John Rajchman's discussion (Truth and Eras, 105-106) ofFoucault's reflections on the "technology of exclusion."
45. On this creation of "the dangerous individual" as an enemy of society within a "theory of social defense" see his seldom referenced but fascinating piece, "About the Concept of the 'Dangerous Individual' in 19th century Legal Psychiatry," International Journal of Low an J Psychiatry I (1978): 1-18.
46. George Mosse, Nationalism and Sarualiiy (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 198í) esp. 10-22.
Placing Race   35
sex not only stamped individuality; it emerged as "the theme of political operations" and as an "index of a society's strength, revealing of both its political energy and biological vigor" (HS: 146).
Thus surveillance of sexuality and insistence on racial supremacy are played out at several levels that, in the wake of feminist history, are now familiar. The sexualization of children "was accomplished in the form of a campaign for the health of the race" (HS: 146), while the medicalization of women's bodies was carried out "in the name of the responsibility they owed to the health of their children, the solidity of the family institution and the safeguarding of society" (HS: 147). In Foucault's abridged rendering of these processes in volume 1, the two crucial elements of gender and empire are missing from his account. But it is imperial-wide discourses that linked children's health programs to racial survival, tied increased campaigns for domestic hygiene to colonial expansion, made child-rearing an imperial and class duty, and cast white women as the bearers of a more racist imperial order and the custodians of their desire-driven, immoral men.47
If the connections among sexuality, race, and biopower outlined above seem only loosely articulated it is because in Foucault's story they remain so. He links racism and the technologies of sexuality direcdy to biopower, without linking racism and sexuality explicidy to each other. Their relationship is mediated through what he would later call, "a sort of statisation of the biological," a biopolitical state in which sex was an instrumental "target" and racism an effect. What is implicit, however, is important. If "a normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life" (HS: 144), then, as we shall see from his lectures, modern racism is the historical outcome of a normalizing society. It is no coincidence that his College de France lectures given in 1974-7C were devoted to Ies anormaux (abnormals) and to racism and the biopolitical state the following year. Both dealt with the burden of normality and its biological technologies and with how these "relations of subjugation can produce
47. See Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood" for one of the earliest and still best, accounts of an imperial "biohistory" that does not use the term. Also see Nancy Hunt, "Le bébé en brousse': European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breastfeeding in the Belgian Congo," The International Journal of African Historical Studies 21.3 (1988): 401-432; my "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power"; and Carol Summers. "Intimate Colonialism: The Imperial Production of Reproduction in Uganda, 1907-1925," Signs 16.4 (1991): 787-807.
3~6   Placing Race
subjects," defined by their varied transgressions as "internal enemies" of society and state.48
Deployments of Alliance, Deployments of Sexuality and Race
Distinctions between the technologies of bodily discipline and mass regulation are not the only distinctions Foucault explores. Two other fundamental oppositions mark the rise of biopower in modern European history. One is the distinction between a deployment or device ("dispositif") of alliance and a deployment of sexuality.49 The other is the distinction between a "symbolics of blood" and an "analytics of sexuality," each initially grounded in distinct regimes of power. How do these contrasting terms relate? What do they have to do with racism, and what kind of colonial sense can we make of them?
In skeletal form, his argument runs something like this. Prior to the end of the eighteenth century, the regulation of social life was mediated through a "deployment of alliance;" in which control over sexual practices centered on matrimonial relations (HS:37) and on legal and religious codes of conduct that distinguished between the lawful and illicit sexual practices. This system, centered on "legitimate alliance" (HS:38), was "attuned to a homeostasis of the social body" (HS:i07), to the sexual behavior of the conjugal couple, and to "maintain[ing| the laws that govern" those relations (HS: 106). Foucault writes, "This deployment of alliance, with the mechanisms of constraint that ensured its existence and the complex knowledge it often required, lost some of its importance as economic processes and political structures could no longer rely on it as an adequate instrument or sufficient support" (HS:io6). This failure to maintain elite control within an alliance-based system of power is not fleshed out, nor does Foucault seem to consider that such an explication is required. He only hints at those "economic processes and political structures" in which the decline of absolutism and monarchy and the rise of liberalism
48. Michel Foucault, Resume des cours: 1970-1982 (Paris: Julliard, 1984): 85.
49. "Dispositif" is a loaded theoretical concept for Foucault that is notoriously difficult to translate. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow prefer to translate it as "deployment," Gilles Deleuze as "[social) apparatus," Alan Sheridan chooses "machinery." I prefer "deployment," "device," and "apparatus" and use them interchangeably. See Gilles Deleuze's "What is a dispositif?" (in Michel FducouIľ Philospher. Timothy Armstrong, ed. [New York: Roudedge, 1992] 159-168), the mast lucid explanation I know ofthat captures the complexity of meaning and movement in the term.
Placing Race   37
undermined the social hierarchies based on lines of descent and called for new ways of naturalizing the inequities on which an emergent bourgeois order was based. Whereas for Foucault, racism has not yet appeared in its modern form, this is precisely that moment when others have sought its emergence. CoUette Guillaumin, for example, argues that the rise of individualism and the decline of monarchy prompted new theories about how "individuals might be linked together by their natural character." ^ In replacing alliance as an organizing principle of society, these theories of new naturalized collectivities would prompt the production of new disciplines giving truth-value to the belief that these were organic collectivities with distinct somatic and psychological traits. John Rex, Edmund Morgan, and, more recendy, David Goldberg have made similar arguments that economic liberalism, commitments to "freedom," and modernity have produced structured inequities and distinctions of difference on which nineteenth-century racism was based.51
Foucault neither explores these issues, nor really accounts for them. Instead, he pursues another sort of argument. With the "discursive explosion" around sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he identifies a split between the laws of matrimony and the rules of sexuality when each began "to be recorded on two separate registers" (HS:4o). The social apparatus of alliance and that of sexuality are contrasted term by term; the former being a maintenance system, the latter "engender[ing] continual extension of areas and forms of control"; the former concerned with reproduction, the latter with penetrating and annexing individual bodies in ever more comprehensive and intrusive ways (HS:io6).
50. Guillaumin, "Idea of Race" 30.
ci. Rex argues that with the decline of a legal system that upheld inequalities and specific sanctions to back it, racist beliefs took hold . . . "that the doctrine of equality of economic opportunity [of economic liberalism} and that of racial superiority and inferiority are complements of one another." "The Theory of Race Relations—a Weberian Approach," Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980) 131. David Goldberg skillfully draws on the earlier insights of Zgyman Bauman, Etienne Balibar and others to analyze race as "one of the central conceptual inventions of modernity." As he states it, the "liberal paradox" is that as "modernity commits itself progressively to idealized principles of liberty, equality and fraternity ... there is a multiplication of racial identities and the sets of exclusions they prompt and rationalize, enable and sustain." Also see Harry Bracken ("Essence, Accident and Race" Herma-thena 116 [Winter 1973] 81-96) who argues that empiricism and "the rise of manipulative models of man" emerging with Locke in the late seventeenth century made it more possible to think about different species of humans and to conceive of them in racist terms.
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The model here seems disturbingly conventional. Is Foucault a modernization theorist in disguise? Has he constructed a model of modernity that is all too familiar: a premodem system of power predicated on legal codes, "on a system of marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions" (HS:io6)? In it, the privileges and "symbolics of blood" are replaced by a system of power that regulates through normalization rather than legal codes, that enlists the individual to monitor itself, that turns away from the sexuality of the conjugal couple to those peripheral sexualities where "abnormality" can be scrutinized, pluralized, and controlled. But such a developmentalist reading misses his point. The deployment of sexuality is "superimposed," it does not "supplant" the deployment of alliance, but is constructed out of the latter, imbuing it with a new tactic of power. The family is the site of this convergence, not a structure of alliance that restrains sexuality, as the conventional account would have it, but that which provides its most crucial support (HS:io8).
One could read Foucault as a master at the art of crafting bold dichotomies that he recants as quickly as he sets them up. He notes a "shift" or "transition" from a deployment of alliance to one of sexuality and then quickly debunks the assumption that there were ever any such clear breaks. He writes that the "symbolics of blood" and the "analytics of sexuality" developed out of "two distinct regimes of power" (HS: 14g) .though he earlier disclaims the notion that these were "the organizing principle^] of two cultural forms" (HS: 148). These read as contradictions, however, only if we assume that Foucault construed history in terms of such clean breaks. While a notion ofepistemic rupture does frame the Order of Things, The History of Sexuality seems to operate under different analytic emphasis.52 At issue here is not rupture, but the tension between rupture and recuperation.53 Thus, just as a reader may think that the thematics of blood disappears with the analytics of sexuality, Foucault reveals the symbolics
C2. There seems more affinity with The Archaeology of Knowledge where he states his willingness to "accept the groupings that history suggests only to subject them at once to interrogation; to break them up and then to see whether they can be legitimately reformed" (AK:26). There he explores how existing themes are reanimated, asking whether it is "possible, with a particular set of concepts, to play different games?" (^37-38).
Í3- See Jonathan Goldberg, who notes that the apparatus of sexuality contains within it a "strange continuity with the old supposedly outmoded regimes of alliance." Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modem Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992) 16.
Placing Race   39
of blood as a living discourse that "lent its weight" to a power exercised through the deployment of sexuality (HS:i4g). Foucault did not reject the identification of continuities, but only those "false" ones, as one of his less sympathetic readers, Jürgen Habermas, has righüy noted.54 Appreciating Foucault's sustained concern with this tension will be critical when we turn to his treatment of racism in the lectures.
Foucault traces a distinct discourse of sexuality appearing in the early eighteenth century and a "completely new technology of sex" by its end (HS: 116). This new technology expanded along the three axes of pedagogy, medicine, and demography that "made sex not only a secular concern but a concern of the state as well. ... sex became a matter that required the social body as a whole, and virtually all of its individuals to place themselves under surveillance." When "sex became a police matter" (HS:Z4), the administrative concerns of the state became riveted not on a "people, but on a 'population* as an economic and political problem." It is that moment when governments began to enumerate "legitimate and illegitimate births," frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation... the effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions" (HS:2^). This "policing of sex" was not a matter of enforcing a "taboo" so much as it was an apparatus for the "ordered maximization of collective and individual forces" (HS:24-2S)-
In colonial perspective, we can recognize some of this pattern, but some parts of the formulation are questionable, and the eighteenth century dating seems in some places too early, in others too late. For one thing, it is not clear that this shift from a "people" to a "population" makes metahistorical sense. What is striking about colonial projects is that both the notions of a "population" and a "people" often were being crafted by administrators cum ethnographers at the same time.55 As populations were being enumerated, classified, and fixed, "peoples" were being regrouped and reconfigured according to somatic, cultural, and psychological criteria that would make such administrative interventions necessary and credible. The heightened British interest in cataloguing the "peoples of India" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was part of what Bernard Cohn has described as, a "vast documentation project" that created forms of
54- Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1990) 2C1.
ej. I thank Val Daniel for pushing me to clarify this connection.
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ethnological knowledge in the service of colonial control.56 The concept of a "population" did not substitute for a "people": both conceptions represent state-building and nation-building projects in which a racial grammar tying certain physical attributes to specific hidden dispositions played a crucial role.
Secondly, sex becomes an "issue" between the administrative apparatus and European colonists nearly one hundred years earlier. Granted these are not discourses of sexuality with comparable breadth and intensity to those in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were repeatedly linked to the potentialities of colonial setdement and to the production of populations that would be made loyal to emerging colonial states. But it was not "sex" that "required the social body as a whole and virtually all of its individuals to place themselves under surveillance" (HS:ii6); it was specific individuals and those in authority who identified sex as a domain of control.
In the case of the Indies, the Dutch East India Company's management of sexual arrangements condoned certain kinds of liaisons and not others. The Indies' early Dutch rulers debated long and hard over the best means to cultivate a Dutch setder population on Java, and issues of sexual management were high on their agenda. As early as 1612, the East Indies' first governor general refused to allow Dutch women to emigrate because of their scandalous sexual promiscuity "to the shame of our nation."57 By 1642, there was already a women's prison in Batavia to confine those married and unmarried European women "whose scandalous lives were debauching the [European] young men and children of honorable homes." ^ Managed sex was on the state agenda, but it would be disingenuous to assume this to be the sort of surveillance Foucault had in mind. Still, the management of non-conjugal sex was implicated in a discourse on "the defense of society" much earlier than he suggests, not as a coherent and comprehensive regime of biopower, but with many of its incipient ele-
£6. See Bernard Cohn, "Past in the Present: As Museum of Mankind," vln Anthropologin among the Hisiarions and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford, 1987), "The Peoples of India: From the Picturesque to the Museum of Mankind," n.d., and "The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia," in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Oilier Essays.
Í7. See C. R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600-1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965) and Jean Taylor, The Social World of Batavia (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983).
58. Mr. J. A. van der Chijs, Nederlandsche-Indisch Plakaatboek, 1602-1811, Part 1,1602-1642 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 18%) 461-65.
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ments. Sexual arrangements of company officials, subaltern military, and free burghers was monitored, if not successfully regulated early on.
Dutch anxieties over the sexual proclivities of European subjects were paralleled in North America as well. What George Fredrickson has called the "first clear-cut example of statutory racial discrimination" in the Virginia law of 1662 fined "interracial fornicators," followed by a ban on all forms of interracial marriage in 169i.59 While these injunctions were clearly legal and concerned with the conjugal couple—features that Foucault attributes to the apparatus of alliance—they also linked individual desires to social reproduction in ways that he dates for Europe a century later.
Rabinow and Dreyfus note that Foucault linked individual sexualiües and the security of the social body as nineteenth-century inventions when "appeals to the very fate of the race and the nation seemed to turn in large part on its sexual practices."60 But the "fate of the race and the nation" were also tied in colonial discourses to individual sexual practices in Africa, Asia, and the Americas at an earlier date. Maryland legislators had already made such connections in 1664 when they focused on the sexual inclinations of white women who bedded with "non-white" men as targets of concern, accusing them, as in the Indies, of causing a "disgrace not only to the English but also of many other Christian nations."61 Male sexual anxiety focused on more than suitable Christian marriage partners for European women and on the transmission of property, but on the unmanaged desires of women themselves. Thus, the Maryland law of 1681 regulating interracial unions justified its injunctions by the fact that white women were giving in to their "lascivious and lustful desires" with "negroes and slaves."62 In both the Dutch and British accounts, the sexual choices of white women were at issue; they are desired objects, but unruly desiring subjects as well. While the notion of a "Christian nation" in the
59. Fredrickson, White Supremacy 101.
60. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault 141.
61. Fredrickson, White Supremacy 101,103.
62. Fredrickson 104. Clearly the notion of race in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonies did not bear the same explanatory weight as it does in the nineteenth century. In the former, race is folded into Christian hierarchies of civility, a piece ofa larger narrative in which the economics of slavery played a crucial role. By the nineteenth century, race organizes the grammar of difference. Christianity is no longer a defining feature, but subsumed as a form of distinction that varied with specific strategies of imperial control.
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seventeenth century and the bourgeois nation of the nineteenth century were clearly not the same, in both contexts unmanaged sexuality was considered a threat to these different social bodies. The pointed control over women's sexuality, as well as over the "natural inclinations" of men, was a shared effect.63
Foucault's story may eclipse the extent to which colonial regimes anticipated the policing of sexuality in modern Europe. Nevertheless, the distinctions he draws between deployments of alliance and sexuality make some sense when applied to the colonial society of the Dutch East Indies. Jean Taylor's fine-grained study of the changes in the colonial culture of the Indies between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries makes a similar argument, if to a different end.64 She describes how colonial authority in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was secured through a pervasive system of political and familial alliance.65 This "deployment of alliance," to use Foucault's terms, allowed Dutch men access to privilege and profits through a calculated series of marriage links to Asian and Creole women. She writes:
The glue that held this society together was the family system. Under the VOC [Dutch East Indies company] political and economic structure, promotions were largely controlled by patronage in which family relationship played a key part... At the heart of the Indies clan were women, locally born and raised, who brought men into relationships of patron and protege as father-in-law, son-in-law, and brothers-in-law. Such alliances could be far-reaching when high death rates and remarriage meant that spouses circulated. And since, under Dutch law, women could be named sole inheritor of a man's property, widows were sought after for the fortune they brought to a marriage ... The VOC's Asian empire ... used marriage to cement alliances.66
63. Again, this is not to suggest that they were the same. In the latter, the bourgeoisie's engagement with a discourse of universality and progress opened up possibilities that social boundaries might be loosened in ways that heightened anxiety about that very question.
64. Taylor, The Social World of Baiavia.
6j. Also see Julia Adams, "The Familial State: Elite Family Practices and State-Making in the Early Modern Netherlands," Theory and Society (Summer 1994): i0.c-.n9; and F. S. Gaastra, "The Independent Fiscaals orthe VOC, 1689-1719," All of One Company: the VOC in Biographical Perspective (Utrecht: Hes. 1986) 92-107 who argues that by the end of the seventeenth century family ties among the VOC's higher servants were "growing closer and closer" (96). 66. Taylor, Social Warld of Batavia 71-72.
Placing Race   43
This legally secured system of alliance was a power structure of limited reign. Dutch metropolitan authorities saw these strong mestizo and Creole connections, produced out of interracial unions, threatening the metropolitan hold on colonial authority and sought specific cultural measures to remedy the situation. By the mid-nineteenth century, "assaults on mestizo culture" were expressed in concerted efforts to make the colony more clearly of a "Dutch character" in a number of domains.67 Most notable were attempts to enforce spoken Dutch in newly established private schools for European children. But these met with little success. With even the strongest advocates of enlightenment ideals still securing their connections and wealth through mestiza marriages, the elite in the Dutch stronghold of Batavia remained as removed from the burgerlijk order of the Netherlands as ever.68
This was to change radically in the early nineteenth century when a streamlined Dutch administration took over from the collapsed VOC after a brief British interregnum.69 The bureaucratic engine of the colony was set on a new course with much more stringent guidelines established for entry into the colonial service. "Foreigners" as well as "undesirable persons drawn from impoverished families" no longer had a place.70 A "sound" education in the Netherlands was required. This implied not only a fluency in Dutch, but the elimination of those who might form a " 'pernicious middle-race' between Europeans and natives," lacking the morality of cultivated Europeans.71 If "inappropriate" Europeans were mildly suspect, the large population of "Creoles," "colored," and the mixed population of so-called "inlandsche kinderen" were placed under administrative spodight as never before.72 By 1838 all inlandsche kinderen were banned from posts that might bring them in direct contact with Javanese.73 Although explicit discrimination against Indo-Europeans was to be abolished from the Indies civil service requirements in the following decades,
67. Taylor78-ii3.
68. Taylor 90,93. On the term burgerUjk see fn. jo, chp. 4.
69. See C. Fasseur, De Indolojjen: /Imbtenoren voor tie Oost, 182J-19S0 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1993).
70. Fasseur 41.
71. Fasseur 43-44.
72. See also C. Fasseur, "De 'adeldom' van de huid: De role van de Indische Nederlander in hel Nederlands-Indisch bestuur," Sparen van een Indische Verleden (1600-1942), ed. Wim Willem (Leiden: Rijkuniverseiteit, 1992) 14.
73. Fasseur, De Indologen 17.
44   Placing Race
it did not disappear.74 It was merely substituted with a criteria of "quality" that explicitly sought recruits from the Dutch "beschaafde stand" (the "cultivated classes") which served the same purpose: Indo-Europeans were efFectively barred.72 With this mandate, a more visible European-oriented, Dutch middle class was recruited and encouraged to make its presence felt. Revised managements of sexuality thus followed from efforts to secure a Dutch national identity and Creole compliance with a metropolitan-controlled colonial project.
As the Dutch colonial bureaucracy grew, an expanding class of civil servants, born and educated in Holland, took over as the new scientific, administrative, and cultural arbitrators on hygiene, education, morality, and sex. This transformation not only instilled a more explicitly bourgeois morality. It also made the formalization of racial categories contingent on the management of sex, but more direcdy on a legal system that was sharply attuned to the conditions in which "mixed-blood" children were born: out of prostitution, concubinage, and marriage. It refused children bom in concubinary relations between European men and native women rights to European status without acknowledgment by their fathers, thereby allowing or compelling men to relinquish responsibility for them. The "social apparatus of alliance" did not disappear as issues of sexual morality and bourgeois convention came to define who was eligible for European status and who was not. It rather resurfaced in a new form as European-born wives, and white endogamy came to define the new style of a modern colony that would efface its mestizo connections and culturally hybrid roots.
From a Foucauldian perspective, there are three striking features of this shift. The first is how quickly the power structure based on mestizo alliance broke down, as prestige and coveted administrative posts were increasingly accessible only to the European educated and the European-born.76 The second is that the emergence in the nineteenth-century Indies
74.'Fasseur, "De 'adeldom' van de huid," 19.
75. Fasseur, "De 'adeldom' van de huid": 21, Fasseur, De Indologen: 76.
76. This is not to suggest that kinship alliances did not continue to play an important part in how offices were procured and assigned, only that other powerful criteria Deselection, namely wealth, education and standardized exams now intervened. If we trace the family des in the Indies nineteenth-century civil service, it is clear that nepotism continued to play a crucial role in the distribution of office. Robert van Niel argues that alliances among Indies families in the 18305 and 1840s actually "became more extensive and more intimately tied to various
Placing Race   45
of an intensified discourse on bourgeois respectability and sexual morality carried with it a new interest in the domestic milieu and scrutiny of the privatized habitus in which European bourgeois values could be cultivated and children raised. The third is that this assertion of European, rather than mestizo, supremacy was underscored by a more explicit discourse and set of policies that tied the self-disciplining of individual colonial Europeans to the survival of all Europeans in the tropics and thus to the biopolitics of racial rule. In short, the assertion of a bourgeois order and the membership criteria for which "full-blooded" Netherlander pressed was never distinct from the changing definition of who was European. Cultural competencies and sexual practices signaled the lines of descent that secured racial identities and partitioned individuals among them.
While this truncated account appears to be consonant with Foucault's general argument, it is dissonant in other ways. Colonial regimes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were never based on systems of alliance alone. Concubinary relations were a mainstay of colonizing setde-ment policy in sixteenth-century Mexico and as early as the seventeenth century elsewhere.77 In the Indies, these relationships between subaltern European men and Asian women were not only sanctioned by the state, but encouraged by it. Local women were enlisted to provide the services that allowed civil servants and planters to maintain a European standard of living and "acclimatized" to the tropics at little cost. In Malaysia, Indochina, and parts of French- and British-ruled Africa, concubinage was the dominant domestic arrangement through the early twentieth century among subaltern Europeans, as well as many of the elite.78
Students of colonial history might think to interpret these illicit sexual practices as evidence of a regulative system that went awry, but this may be missing the point. This administrative economy of sex condoned arrangements that were neither conjugal, legal, nor necessarily reproductive of a ruling class. While well-placed families may have been solidifying then-
aspects of government or private cultivations and assorted exporting arrangements." Java under the Cultivation System (Leiden: KITLV, 1992) 101.
77. See Asuncion Lavin "Sexuality in Colonial Mexico," Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989) ^7.
78. See John Butcher, The British in Malaya, 1880-1914 (Kuala Lumpur Oxford UP, 1979); Taylor, Social World of Batavia; George Fredrickson, White Supremacy 114, and my "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power."
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prestige and power through marriage alliances, other forms of managed sexuality were proliferating. The sexual "disorders" of colonial society— venereal disease, prostitution, concubinage, illegitimate children, and a "wandering population of mixed-blood bastards" to which these illicit arrangements had allegedly given rise were sometimes subversions of the prevailing order of society—but as often expressions of it.79 These were target problems, productive of a discourse that justified more invasive institutional control both of natives and of certain classes of Europeans. The point is that these deployments of alliance and sexuality were both part of the colonial order of things; at one moment competing, at other moments convergent venues through which distinctly gendered forms of racial and class power were ordered and displayed.
By the mid-nineteenth century, metissage ("racial mixing")—construed as the consequence of extra-marital alliances—was a focal point of political, legal, and social debate, conceived as a dangerous source of subversion, a threat to white prestige, the result of European degeneration and moral decay. Children—abandoned, illegitimate and of mixed-blood— had become the sign and embodiment of what needed fixing in this colonial society, giving force to the urgency for a more clearly defined bourgeois order based on white endogamy, attentive parenting, Dutch-language training, and surveillance of servants that might shore it up. These discourses on sexuality, as Foucault might have argued, were charged with instrumentality. They racialized the dangers of sex, by underscoring that illicit sex gave rise to bastard children, sexually precocious Indies youths, to daughters and sons of mixed unions predisposed to becoming prostitutes and patricides when they grew up. They needed to be watched with vigilant attention and to be subjected to state controls. Proposals to extend school hours in the Indies for the daughters of the Indo-European ("mixed-blood") poor were expliciüy instituted not to improve their education, but to remove them from the immoral influence of their native kin and their mothers' native lovers.
These were not discourses designed to find a solution, as participants in these debates repeatedly professed. Instead, these concerns over racial and cultural hybridity fueled the administrative and practical fears of a heterogeneous European community that its boundaries needed policing in ever more intimate ways. Who was "dangerous" was as much those
79. See my "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power."
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legally defined as European—that noxious "middle-race" inside the borders of this amorphous European community—as those clearly external to it.00 These discourses provided liberal reformers with a constant reminder that colonialism was about not only incorporation, but also distinctions between the echte Dutch and those assimilated natives of "fabricated" European status, between citizens and subjects, between colonized and colonizer, and not least between different classes of Europeans.
Colonial law was no marginal player in these constructions of difference, as Foucault's account would suggest.81 What Verena Martinez-Alier has noted for nineteenth-century Cuba holds for the Indies: legal codes and not norms alone determined a person's racial status "when his physical appearance was not an unambiguous guide."82 Paradoxically, racial taxonomies in the Dutch East Indies were predicated on notions of fixity that were legally enforced, but these legal codes in turn depended on the identification of sexual and psychological essences that were ill-fixed and ill-defined. Similar to Spanish law, "the difference between being 'held to be white' and being 'truly white' was not one of physical colour."83 In the Indies, the legal regulation of interracial marriage and the discourse that conferred specific sexual characteristics to social categories of persons did similar work. Together they structured and shaped inclusions in the category of European and its changing criteria of exclusions.
The Dutch case does not discredit Foucault's claims as much as it transforms them. It does suggest several issues to consider further. First, the tension between deployments of alliance and sexuality as distinct organizing principles of power may configure differently when the issue of racism is centrally posed. JanMohamed has righdy noted that racialized sexuality in U.S. slavery was not beyond the law, but constituted by it; by the legal designation of slaves as property and their children as the property of others.84
80. Fasseur, De Indologen 43.
81. In a carefully argued "counterexample" to Foucault's analysis of the relationship between discipline and law, see Laura Engelstein's "Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviel Russia," American HislorJcal Review 98.2 (April 1993): 338-363.
82. Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineleenth-Cemury Cuba; A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (London: Cambridge UP, 1974) 73.
83. Martinez-Alier7i.
84. Abdul JanMohamed specifically argues that "racialized sexuality replicates more features of the deployment of alliance than of bourgeois sexuality" ... in that it is "tied not only to the
48   Placing Race
Second, in such colonial contexts as the Indies, discourses on libidi-nal desires were invariably shaped by how those desires were seen in relationship to their reproductive consequences. The truth claims about "peoples" were jointly contingent on the quantity and quality of their sexual energy and on how much, how rapidly, with whom, and under what conditions they could successfully reproduce. It was not just sexuality in which the truth was lodged, but in how productive that sexuality was.as Part of the problem is one that Doris Sommer notes—Foucault's virtual neglect of the "most obvious deployment of bourgeois sexuality, the legitimate conjugal variety without which there could be no perverse difference."86 As we shall see in chapters 5" and 6, certain forms of racial-ized desire were animated in ways that buttressed bourgeois marriages, sanctioning the colonial state's intervention in the sexual and marital arrangements among different classes of "Europeans."
In addition, Foucault's equation of social "homeostasis" with deployments of alliance and kinship makes little ethnographic or historical sense. jean Taylor's account evinces dynamic local interpretations of kin ties that were far from homeostatic. What is striking when we review the colonial policies of the Netherlands Indies, French Indochina, and parts of Latin America is how much selective affirmations of kinship could cut through the boundaries of privilege and race.
One of the more compelling examples of this sort of creative manipulation of kinship that scrambled racial categories was a phenomenon that both French and Dutch colonial authorities identified as "fraudulent recognitions." These were cases in which children of "mixed-blood" or even of "purely native origin" were acknowledged by European men who were supposedly not their natural fathers. These claims to paternity, in which a European man of modest or impoverished means would allegedly be paid a fee by a native woman to recognize her child, could redefine who "by descent" was European and who was not.87 European status was a valuable
transmission and circulation of material wealth but to its very production" ("Sexuality on/of the Racial Border" 113).
8j. See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991), 34, who makes this point so well:
86. Sommer 33-34.
87. See J. F. Kohlbrugge, "Prosütutie in Nederlandsche-Indie," Indisch Genooischap, 19 February 1901: 26-28; (n.a.); "Ons Pauperisme," Mededeelinnen derVcrecniflíng "SoeriaSoemirot" 2 (1892). Fora
Placing Race   49
commodity. Moreover, these were racial reorderings outside the state's control. In French Indochina, Madagascar, and the Indies in the late nineteenth century, the perceived danger of such false paternity claims was that they "both exposed the [European] element to being submerged by a flood of naturalized natives and introduced into their midst a questionable population."88 The prevailing fear among colonial officials that fictive paternity could produce fictive Europeans suggests that some claims to alliance and descent subverted rather than substantiated racial taxonomies.
Race, Sexuality, and the Blood of the Bourgeoisie
It seems quite clear that the intimate hierarchies of colonialism prevailing in the slave, indentured, and wage labor regimes of Europe's "age of empire" would have produced a very different dynamic between alliance and sexuality than Foucault oudined for Europe. Nor undoubtedly would he have disagreed. His treatment of racism is focused on other issues and other sites; namely, on the shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a "symbolics of blood" to an "analytics of sexuality." In societies in which systems of alliance, descent, and death were dominant, blood was a "reali(y with a symbolic function" (HS: 147). In modern society on the other hand, the mechanisms of power are located elsewhere, "addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity to be used" (HS:i47). It is not the symbols of death that are charged, but sexuality as an "object and target" (HS: 147). Lest we assume that a "substitution of sex for blood was by itself responsible for the transformation that marked the threshold of our modernity" Foucault refuses any such claim (HS: 148). The new procedures of power "caused" our societies to shift from one to the other, but not without "overlappings, interactions, and echoes" (HS:i48). A preoccupation with blood for nearly two centuries "haunted the administration of sexuality," and nowhere more clearly than with the rise of racism (HS: 149). In one particularly clear passage, Foucault writes:
more detailed discussion of this "fraudulent recognitions" see my "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers...."
88. Raoul Abor, Des Reconnaissance Frtmduleuses d'Enfanis Natureis en Indochine (Hanoi: Imprimerie Tonkinoise, 1917) 41.
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Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, the themat-ics of blood was sometimes called on to lend its entire historical weight toward revitalizing the type of political power that was exercised through the devices of sexuality. Racism took shape at this point (racism in its modern, "biologizing" statist form): it was then that a whole politics of setdement (peuplement), family, marriage, education, social hierarchization, and property, accompanied by a long series of permanent interventions at the level of the body, conduct, health, and everyday life, received their color and their justification from the mythical concern with protecting the purity of the blood and ensuring the triumph of the race. (HS:i4g)
Indisputably, this was the case. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century discourses on miscegenation combined notions of tainted, flawed, and pure blood with those of degeneration and racial purity in coundess ways.89 Although French and Dutch liberal reformers often insisted that cultural "suitability" and not race was the basis on which access to colonial educational opportunities and welfare entitlements rest, designation of those Europeans who were "full-blooded" and "pur sang" was repeatedly invoked to identify how the lines between the deserving and undeserving poor were to be drawn. Thus Dutch and French colonial commentators shared the notion that mixed-blood children, no matter what their educational achievements, might always revert to their native affiliations because of the "blood that flowed in their veins." A study on child delinquency (published in the same year that removal of "the racial criteria" from the Dutch East Indies constitution was being hotly debated) notes that "by far the greatest percentage of European children who perpetrated crimes were born in the Indies, children therefore with more or less native blood," thereby absolving "pure-blooded" Europeans from any association with crime.90 Similarly, Virginia Dominguez's study of racial classification in Creole Louisiana powerfully illustrates how assumptions about the "properties of blood" determined racial identity and class
89. See, for example, J. MCoetzee, "Blood. Flaw, Taint, Degeneration: The Case of Sarah Gertrude Millin," English Studies in Africa 23.1 (1980): 41-58; Michael D. Biddis, Thereof the Mosses (London: Penguin, 1977).
90. A. de Braconier, fönderaiminaliiek en de verzarginn van misdadig aangelegde en verwaarloosde minderjarigen in Nedeilandsch-Indie (Baam: Hollandia, 1918) 11.
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membership from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century.91 The U.S. legal system of racial classification is still derived from the "one-drop" theory, a stipulation that a child with a single great-grandparent of African-American descent, is black.92
What is problematic in Foucault's argument is not his description of the reappearance of a "symbolics of blood" in the nineteenth century and its continued salience today, but rather the selective (northern) Europe-bound genealogy he draws for it. The myth of blood that pervades nineteenth-century racism may be traced, as Foucault does, from an aristocratic preoccupation with legitimacy, pure blood, and descent, but not through it alone. It was equally dependent on an imperial politics of exclusion that was worked out earlier and reworked later on colonial ground.93 Boxer holds that the sixteenth-century Portuguese notion of "contaminated races" that pervaded colonial policy did more than distinquish the aristocracy from the poor and Christians from heathens; it was a color prejudice that underwrote the social hierarchies of Portuguese rule.94 Deborah Root contends that the sixteenth-century Spanish state concern with "purity of blood" and the association of Moriscos with infection, vermin, and disease, were already part of the forging of a "cleansed" Spanish identity "that referred both to national unity and to the overseas empire."95 Verena Stoicke argues that in colonial Latin America the notion of "purity of blood acquired new force as it lost any religious connotation, becoming
91. Virginia Dominquez, While by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1986) 89.
92. See James David on the "one-drop rule" in Who is Black? One Nation's Definition (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1991) 4-6 and an excellent piece on the persistence ofthat rule in debates over revisions being prepared Tor the 2000 U.S. census (Lawrence Wright, "One Drop of Blood" The New Yorker (July 2c, 1994): 46-55".)
93. Verena Martinez-Alier in Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth Century Cuba notes that "the concept of purity of blood, which had become largely discredited in Spain by the end of the eighteenth century... experienced a revival in Cuba" (1974:7.5). Others have argued that official investigations of purity of blood in Spain itself lasted through the middle of the nineteenth century. See Charles Amieľs "La 'Pureté de sang' en Espagne" Etudes inler-ethw'ques 6 (1983): 27-4Í on this point and on "the conjunction of religious, biological and classist racisms" that the Spanish state embraced (41).
94. C. R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire (New York: Alfred Knopf. 1969) 215-41.
95. See Deborah Root, "Speaking Christian: Orthodoxy and Difference in Sixteenth-Century Spain," Representations 23 (1988): 118-134.
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a clearly racial notion" by the beginning of the eighteenth century.961 draw attention to these colonial contexts not to suggest that these racisms are the same, but to underscore the fact that the racial lexicons of the nineteenth century have complex colonial etymologies through which these aristocratic discourses on "purity of blood" were replayed and transformed.
When we turn to the nineteenth century anxieties around Eurasians, Indos, and mestizos, the colonial entailments of these discourses become clear. These were not only groups seen as "mixed" by blood. They were the "enemy within," those who might transgress the "interior frontiers" of the nation-state, who were the same but not quite, potentially more brazen in making their claims to an equality of rights with "true" Europeans, but always suspect patriots of colonial rule. Science and medicine may have fueled the re-emergence of the beliefs in blood, but so did nationalist discourse in which a folk theory of contamination based on cultural contagions, not biological taintings, distinguished true members of the body politic from those who were not. These folk theories of race were derived from how empire was experienced in Europe. They were disseminated through an imperial logic in which cultural hybridities were seen as subversive and subversion was contagious. In that imperial frame, native sensibilities and affiliations were the invisible bonds that could position those of "mixed-blood" as "world citizens" at the vanguard of revolt against those "full-blooded" Europeans who claimed the right to rule.97
Foucault's account may allow for such an understanding, but it does not provide one. He looked at "blood" as a body fluid, expressive of vitality, kinship and contamination, not at its part in defining the imperial body and its interior borders. For him, nineteenth-century racism was not about the symbolics of blood per se, but about how the meanings of blood worked through the technologies of sex in a power "organized around the management of life" (HS: 147). Race is a theme of the text, but not the subject of analysis: "Through health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a symbol, it was an object and a target." His
96. Verena Stoicke, "Conquered Women," Report on the Americas XXTV..C (1991): ij. Also see Magnus Morner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1967), who notes that a "royal decree of iBoj declared that persons of "pure blood" had to ask permission of the viceroy or the audiencia in order to marry 'elements of Negro and Mulatto origin'" (39).
97. W. Horst, "Opvoeding en onderwijs van kinderen van Europeanen en Indo-Europeanen in Indie," De Indische Gids II (1900): 989.
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focus is on the bourgeois body, an individual body menaced by heredity, a social body bent on affirming itself. As he tells us, it is more than a clever play of words to say that "the bourgeoisie's 'blood' was its sex" (HS:i24). Within this equation, "sex" would come to define the distinction of the bourgeoisie, as blood had for the nobility; it would legitimate its moral highground, its claims to supremacy, and the healthy vigor of bourgeois rule. If the "special character" of the aristocratic body was hidden in the truth of its blood and not its wealth, then the uniqueness of the bourgeois body was to be lodged in the "truth" of its sex. Foucault writes: "This class must be seen ... as being occupied, from the mid-eighteenth century on, with creating its own sexuality and forming a specific body based on it, a 'class' body with its health, hygiene, descent, and race ..." (HS: 124).
How does race figure in this equation, in this "transition from sanguinity to sexuality"? Foucault suggests that "the new concept of race tended to obliterate the aristocratic particularities of blood, retaining only the controllable effects of sex . . . (148). Within this new biopolitical regime, modern racism emerges out of the technologies of sex. For Foucault, race is a theme through which sexuality is discussed, modern racism follows from it. In his Europe-bound account, racism is a consequence of that "class body" in the making, but viewed in colonial perspective bourgeois bodies were constituted as racially and relaüonally coded from the outset. If race already makes up a part ofthat "grid of intelligibility" through which the bourgeoisie came to define themselves, then we need to locate its coordinates in a grid carved through the geographic distributions of 'unfreedoms' that imperial labor systems enforced. These were colonial regimes prior to and coterminous with Europe's liberal bourgeois order. As many have argued, the colonies have provided the allegorical and practical terrain against which European notions of liberty and its conceits about equality were forged.
Thus, from the vantage point of the 1990s, colonial historians may be drawn to Foucault's insights, but perplexed by the omissions and ultimately left cold. Can we understand these discourses of sexuality and race that fold into one another in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe outside the wide sweep of empire in which biopolitics was registered and racial taxonomies were based? Is empire precluded by The History of Sexuality or subsumed by it? More pointedly, how central was race to this "class body" in the making? Was racism part of the formation of a modern, sexu-alized, bourgeois subject or a later elaboration of it? I take up these issues
Í4-   Placing Race
in chapter 4. Before doing so, I want to look closely at Foucault's 1976 College de France lectures. There, certain elements of The History of Sexuality come into sharper focus, while other silences remain pronounced. Fou-cault anticipated many of the challenges I have raised here in ways that render our queries more pressing and more relevant both to his project and to our pursuit of the colonial genealogies of racism more generally.
Ill
TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF RACISMS:
THE 1976 LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE
The reading I offered of Foucault's thinking on racism in the preceding chapter could be construed as a reasonable one, based on his schematic treatment of the subject in The History of Sexuality. But Foucault's effort to account for the fact of racism was not, as we know, confined to that volume alone. The College de France lectures, given in the winter of 1976 when volume 1 was in press, evince a more direct engagement, an effort to situate the discourse of race within a deeper genealogy, with attention to its changing form. What is significant for us, and what tiesrthe lectures closely to The History of Sexuality, is Foucault^concluding argument that the emergence of biopower inscribed modern racism in the mechanisms of the normalizing state. If that was the central argument of the lectures, the task here would be relatively straightforward. But it is not.
Despite the fact that five of the eleven lectures center on the changing discourse of race from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, Foucault is emphatic that racism is neither his subject nor his primary concern. As he put it in the lecture of February 2nd
For me, at this moment, it is not a question of writing a history of racism in the general or traditional sense of the term. I do not want to write a history of what in the Occident could be the consciousness of the appearance of a race, nor the history of the rituals and mechanisms by which one could exclude, disqualify, and physically destroy a race. The problem that I want to pose is another and does not concern either racism nor in the first instance the problem of races. It was, and for me still is, a matter of showing how in the West, a certain