Colonial discourse, such as cinema, increases the possibility of the colonizing white men’s social identities, while it strips away black people’s social identity. White colonizers have the option of “going native” when donning brownface, such as in the case of Harry Feversham in The Four Feathers and both the historical and fictional Sir Lawrence. Both ventures were dangerous and Lawrence did not achieve certain goals he set out to achieve. Rendered in colonial cinema and imperial histories, Lawrence and Feversham’s stories highlighted the possibility that brownface and adventure were included in one’s service to the British empire. One of the posters for Lawrence of Arabia that darkened Lawrence’s face demonstrated the filmmaker’s consciousness of the use of brownface as a marketing tool for western audiences (appendix 1).
The historical Lawrence highlighted the practicality of wearing “native” robes, one of which was auctioned for six-figures in Britain, 2016.[1] He circumscribed his dress code to the desert, implicitly suggesting that any (British) man can adapt to colonial environs:
If I wore Meccan clothes, [the Arabs] would behave to me as though I were really one of the leaders; and I might slip in and out of Feisal’s tent without making a sensation which he had to explain away each time to strangers. I agreed at once, very gladly; for army uniform was abominable when camel-riding or when sitting on the ground; and the Arab things…were cleaner and more decent in the desert.[2]
The litmus test for brownface or truly going native usually was conversion to the “native” faith or intermarriage. Intermarriage was once allowed for British colonists in India. Later, in the nineteenth century, it was seen as a corrupting influence.[3] Nineteenth-century colonial discourse marked the turn toward white supremacy, with examples such as Louis Agassiz’s “scientific” theory of racial hierarchies. Cinema in the twentieth century also played a role in such white supremacist ideologies. While Adolf Friedrich, the Duke of Mecklenburg, referred to Congo as "the dark corner of the world" in the 1910s,[4] the association between Africa and darkness in colonial metropoles only became accentuated with the rise of film and other visual modes. Recent research has shown how photography was developed with light skin-color as the main reference, which rendered black faces less photogenic.[5] Anxieties of interracial intimacies were also explored in American films as well, such as The Birth of a Nation. The mulatto woman, who was also a mixed-race actress, exhibited uncontrollable lust, which contrasted the “pure” white female character who died. The slaves who perform for their white masters and guests in the film seem to enjoy bliss and innocence in their break. Yet one learns that even the “leisure” plantation songs were monitored by the slave masters for production or used as a method to disavow the pains of slavery.[6] Under the seeming nonsensical songs, historians have uncovered unsayable truths and the horrors of slavery.[7]
Slavery, the character Feversham and the historical Sir Lawrence may seem distant for some. A common rejoinder for discussions of slavery in America is “why can’t you get over it?”[8] Perhaps this type of defensive reactions prompted scholar Paul Gilroy to call for mourning of an empire.[9] He drew connections between British lasting imperial ambitions with “wigger” Rastafarians in Britain post-1970s. He also wrote on the white convert John Walker Lindh: "The idea of contamination by Blackness is an old script. It qualifies his image as a traitor with layers of psychological confusion."[10] Similarly, for literary scholar Sharmila Sen, the British colonizers’ use of brownface affected her even in the late twentieth century. She explored the consequences of male colonizers’ brownface for actual brown immigrants in her autobiography Not Quite Not White. She realized that the white man’s social identity expands when he masquerades as an Indian or Arab “native” in colonies. His fluency in “native culture” demonstrates how he is never totally corruptible despite his ease in other roles and masks. Yet for Sen, the social roles she can inhabit are thus further limited. In America, she finds herself playing the brown person in a white person’s understanding of a brown person.
In contrast to the white colonizer in the Four Feathers film, the Mahdist soldiers or the black slave/servants of masters of the Anglo-Egyptian side rarely have substantive lines. Arab characters may speak in Lawrence of Arabia, perhaps for their relative status on the colonial racial hierarchy.[11] Perhaps precisely because of this accepted hierarchy, slavery continued under other names in Sudan decades after the Anglo-Egyptian conquest and calls for abolition. Inspector general of Sudan at the time, C. A. Willis, owned slaves and did not see abolition as a viable solution.[12] The British thus did not change the predominantly agricultural economy and thought that total abolition would lead to economic collapse, vagrancy, and prostitution.[13] While the exotic lands provided a space for white men to explore their hetero- or homosexuality,[14] slavery continued in the name of colonial social order.
While racial hierarchies can be read as colonial ideologies, material consequences were always accompanying these processes. Slave labor served as a trade-in for West Africa’s consumption of goods from the British Empire and gradual integration into the world economy. The British later entered East Africa and attempted to organize a different economy in their abolitionist vision. In the late eighteenth century, Zanzibar as a port witnessed an increased demand for slavery in British colonies. It is important to note that the Arabic geographical term “Bilad-al-Sudan” means the land of the black. Furthermore, “Zanzibar” is a compound of Zang (زنگ, "black") + bâr (بار, "coast").[15] “Zang” or “Zanj” is also an Arabic/Farsi colloquial term for slave.[16] Many Arabs captured slaves in Zanzibar, despite Islamic rulings against any method of enslavement other than captives of war.[17] The British soldiers’ enslavement and Feversham’s dramatic release of the “enslaved” population in Sudan served as the climax in the Four Feathers. Yet the euphoria of humanistic liberation is imbued with politics: Feversham’s subsequent installment of the Union Jack flag demonstrate the varied ways imperialism claims both humanism and hegemony. This depiction oddly foreshadowed the later critiques of human rights and imperialism in postcolonial non-Western countries.
Slavery is not only an economic institution; it also eradicated slaves’ former social relations. While there were some opportunities for social mobility in North Africa and South Asia,[18] in North America, slaves often lost their name and were forbidden to practice their original religion.[19] Marriage offered female slaves some upward mobility in South Asia within their lifetimes.[20] In contrast, marriage among slaves in North America was often facilitated for labor reproduction rather than a sustainable kinship network. Many American films on race similarly emphasize the ties between white and black characters, while underserving the social relations between people of color. Scholars Amira Jarmakani and Hsu-Ming Teo similarly studied the paradoxically large amount of Anglo-American romantic novels that depict white women falling in love with an Arab alpha-male, despite the racialization and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims in the news media.[21] Jarmakani argued that the novels fit the trend of American culture disavowing the connection between race and sexuality. Hartman similarly observed that the perceived “promiscuous” sexuality of black female slaves was used in courts as a way to absolve the white master of rape.[22]
Comfortingly, there are more English novels now that explore romance among Muslims that disavow the white gaze as well as shows that embrace transnational blackness, or what cultural theorist and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor called “Négritude.”[23] A new Hulu production Ramy will similarly explore the mistrials of a young Muslim man in America. Still, these are small exceptions in face of longstanding cinematic traditions of colonialism. More often than not, the Chinaman remains confined within the cook character portrayed in the film King Kong. He volunteered to save “Missy” but was dismissed on the grounds of his “inferior” masculinity.
In conclusion, this paper has shown how the social roles of white men are particularly variegated under the auspices of colonial conquest. He can be white as a lily or brown as Lawrence-in-robes, depending on his fancies and finances. In contrast, people of colonized backgrounds find it difficult to venture beyond their designated boxes of race or “culture.” Even when men of color may find more room now to explore their idiosyncrasies, such as the South Asian male character in The Big Sick, women of color still have relatively limited roles.[24] This phenomenon is intimately connected to the legacies of slavery and colonialism that indoctrinates certain logics of heterosexuality and racial boundaries. Historian Deborah Gray White discovered that in nearly a century after slaves were freed, not a single Southern white man was convicted of sexual assault against a black woman.[25] Black women continue to be sexualized and are often deemed as passive in violent sexual encounters.[26] While Gilroy is hopeful that multiculturalism is the answer to such colonial legacies, the geographical and material consequences of slavery and British imperialism still live on in sites such as blackface festivals in Europe, in the music of African Americans, as well as agricultural production of Zanzibar and Sudan.
Professor’s feedback on paper: Diverse use of sources across discipline that say different things. Evident benefits from training at ***** Uni. Creative amalgamation.
Unclear in the parts about Zanzibar and Sudan.
[1] Cooper, Charlie. 2016. "Lawrence Of Arabia’s Robes And Dagger Are Set To Be Saved For The Nation". The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/te-lawrence-of-arabia-robes-dagger-saved-temporary-export-bar-buyer-a7012031.html.
[2] Lawrence, T. E. 2016. Seven Pillars Of Wisdom. Lanham: Dancing Unicorn Books.
[3] Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Carnal Knowledge And Imperial Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[4] Friedrich, Adolf. 1913. From The Congo To The Niger And The Nile, An Account Of The German Central African Expedition Of 1910-1911. London: Duckworth & Co.
[5] Caswell, Estelle. 2015. "Color film was built for white people. Here's what it did to dark skin." Vox. https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias.
[6] Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes Of Subjection. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 36. “For those forced to step it up lively, the festivity of the trade and the pageantry of the coffle were intended to shroud the violence of the market and deny the sorrow of those sold and their families... Th terms of this disavowal are something like: No, the slave is not in pain. Pain isn't really pain for the enslaved, because of their limited sentience, tendency to forget, and easily consolable grief. As a consequence of this operation, the initial revulsion and horror induced by the sight of shackled and manacled bodies gives way to reassurances about black pleasure.”
[7] Ibid. 35.
[8] Morgan, Danielle. 2017. "Stop Telling Me To Get Over Slavery...". Aljazeera.Com. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/08/stop-telling-slavery-170817061717353.html.
[9] Gilroy, Paul. 2003. "Race Is Ordinary: Britain's Post-Colonial Melancholia". Philosophia Africana 6 (1): 31-45. doi:10.5840/philafricana20036113.
[10] Ibid. 42.
[11] For example, Arabs were often seen as the natural masters of black slaves by the British colonial authorities in Sudan.
[12] Sikainga, A. 2014. Slaves into Workers. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press
[13] Ibid. 37.
[14] Massad, Joseph. Desiring Arabs. 2007. University of Chicago Press.
[15] Burton, Richard Francis. 2010 [1860]. The Lake Regions Of Central Africa. New York: Cosimo. 38.
[16] Sheriff, Abdul. 2018. "The Zanj Rebellion And The Transition From Plantation To Military Slavery". Comparative Studies Of South Asia, Africa And The Middle East 38 (2): 246-260. doi:10.1215/1089201x-6982029.
[17] Suzuki, Hideaki. 2017. Slave Trade Profiteers In The Western Indian Ocean. Palgrave Macmillan.
[18] Chatterjee, Indrani. 2018. "Afro-Asian Capital And Its Dissolution". Comparative Studies Of South Asia, Africa And The Middle East 38 (2): 310-329. doi:10.1215/1089201x-6982073.
Sikainga, A. 2014. Slaves into Workers. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 120.
[19] Hartman, Saidiya V. 2007. Lose Your Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[20] Chatterjee, Indrani, and Richard Maxwell Eaton. 2007. Slavery And South Asian History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 10.
[21] Jarmakani, Amira. 2015. An Imperialist Love Story. New York: NYU Press.
Teo, Hsu-Ming. 2012. Desert Passions. Austin: University of Texas Press.
[22] Hartman, Saidiya V. 1997. Scenes Of Subjection. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 85.
[23] Abdullah-Poulos, Layla. 2018. "The Stable Muslim Love Triangle – Triangular Desire in African American Muslim Romance Fiction." Journal of Popular Romance Studies vol. 8.
Porter, Lavelle. 2018. "Teddy Told The Truth: Atlanta And The Pain Of Black Music". The Over-Educated Negro. https://lavelleporter.com/2018/05/15/teddy-told-the-truth/.
[24] Siddiquee, Imran. 2017. “Why Are Brown Men So Infatuated with White Women Onscreen?” Buzzfeednews.Com. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/imransiddiquee/why-are-brown-men-so-infatuated-with-white-women-onscreen.
[25] White, Deborah Gray. 1999. Ar’n’t I a Woman? W. W. Norton & Company.
[26] León, Felice. 2019. The Grapevine. "Why Do We Silence Black Girls and Women Who are Survivors of Sexual Violence?" https://thegrapevine.theroot.com/why-do-we-silence-black-girls-and-women-who-are-survivo-1831687459.
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