Racial fetishism

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In academic discourse, racial fetishism is a postcolonialist term found in the writings of authors such as Homi Bhabha, Anne McClintock and Kobena Mercer. The term combines elements of the Freudian psychoanalytic fetish and the Marxist commodity fetish, and is used in the context of British and French colonialism and imperialism and their aftereffects. The term has as its origins Frantz Fanon's epidermal schema and Edward Said's Orientalism.

Homi Bhabha^[1] defined the idea of a racial fetish in contrast to the idea of the Freudian sexual fetish which he describes a denial of difference, where the male sees the female as a castrated male, seeing missing parts rather than a different anatomy. Similar to Freud's idea of a fetish, Bhabha defines racial fetish to be a fixation on other races being not different, but lesser or "mutilated" versions of the white male.

[edit] See also

• Commodity fetish
• Asian fetish
• Ethnic studies
• Orientalism
• Postcolonialism

[edit] References

1. ↑ Bhabha, Homi K. (June 1983). "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourses of Colonialism". Screen 24 (6): 18 – 36.
2. ↑ McClintock, Anne (1995). Imperial Leather. Race Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York:: Routledge.
3. ↑ Mercer, Kobena (1993). “Reading Racial Fetishism: the Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe”, Emily Apter and William Pietz: Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
4. ↑ Fanon, Frantz (1967). transl. Charles Lam Markmann: Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.