White Mythology Research Articles

Hansonella: The Morphology of a Modern Folk Tale

In this essay I’m interested in the retroactive invention of Hansonella, a fairy-tale heroine created to assimilate the Australian nation’s racist excess. I suggest here, that the fairy story — an essentially conservative and mythologising narrative — provided the retroactive means for the Australian nation to internalise and narrativise the emergence of a populist far-right party in Australia in the1990’s. Intense antipathy to indigenous Australians and non-Anglo migrants has been integral to Australia’s culture and history, but in white mythology, Australia is a culture of an enhanced generosity and goodness. Elsewhere I have called this fantasy structure the Australian Good, and argued that the fantasy of Australia as a good and neighbourly nation repeats and frames a disparate set of cultural practices, discourses and historical epochs. The underbelly of this fantasy of the good nation has been the dispossession of indigenous Australians, The White Australia Policy, the assimilation practices of the twentieth century, a pronounced antipathy towards the feminine and the intellectual, and the continued cultural policing of traits that carry the stain of difference.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity

Racialized modernity: An analytics of white mythologies

This article is located in parentheses between two quotations from Derrida's reflections on white mythologies, defined here as the ‘rhetoric of modernity’. It re-conceptualizes race by interrogating its elision in contemporary social and political thought where discussions of modernity routinely ignore colonial and racial formations. It discusses a commentary by Jurgen Habermas on Hegel's discourse of modernity, which is used heuristically to illustrate the systematic elisions of race in contemporary theoretical discussions of modernity. Reading various juxtapositions between the two, it argues Habermas's erasure of distinctly colonial/racial themes in Hegel's concept of modernity, can be used to develop an analytics of racialized modernity, against white mythologies, which understands race beyond corporeality as signifying colonial distinctions between assemblages of ‘Europeanness’ and ‘non-Europeanness’. Building on developments in race/modernity studies it argues for the importance of conceptualizing race without any residual reliance on a biological referent to guarantee the object of critique.

Re Interpretations: Sun Ra's Egyptian Inscriptions

The life and work of the African American musician and poet Sun Ra represents something of a singular challenge to contemporary cultural theory. This is some measure due to the fact that Ra – origi...

L'Université sans profession (the University without profession): The Privilege of the Conflict of the Faculties

Jacques Derrida has institutionalized his belief that philosophy must be integral to the founding of any university. In 1982 he presented, with others, a report to the French government ‘to justify...

On White Mythologies: Detotalising the Legacy of Modernity

This article argues that modern discourse cannot be reduced to a totalising logic, but rather one of diremption between the universal and the particular. The postmodern emphasis on fragmentation camouflages the ambivalence within modernity, reducing the latter to totalisation based on an appropriation of the other within the same. By accusing modernity of perpetuating the binaries attributed to Hegelianism, Robert Young’s White Mythologies attenuates the fissures within the Hegelian description of the consolidation of self‐consciousness. These fissures are visible in Fichte’s and Schelling’s negotiations of Kantian dualisms. Hegelian idealism hovers between the Fichtean desire to affirm a transcendental, self‐positing ego that assimilates the other within itself, and Schelling’s aspiration to break with the Kantian dichotomy of sensible/intelligible realms, in the mode of a becoming that unites Spirit and Nature. Such fissures are patent in the contemporary postcolonial focus on a permanent mismatch between signifier and signified. By reproducing Hegelian ambivalence, Said, Bhabha and Spivak are heirs to the modern tradition. While Said transcends dichotomies by defending a dialectic of dependence and recognition where both sides participate as active agents in the prevalent state of affairs, Bhabha explores the concept of ‘time‐lag’ so as to interrupt modern linear temporality. Spivak, in turn, posits a catachrestic deconstructive politics of reading that seeks to reinscribe existing narrative values in a novel context. The legacy of Enlightenment thought is to be found in postcolonial deconstruction, which implies an agency capable of resisting Western humanism’s totalising impulse. As age of critique, Enlightenment represents the capacity of the individual to transcend contextual specificities by exercising independent judgement. Young’s allegation that the critic is unable to abstract himself from a dominant cultural totality is ultimately insensitive to the fact that any critique relies on the subject’s capacity to situate himself externally to his object of knowledge.

Robert J.C. Young. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West.

Robert J.C. Young. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West.

White Mythology: From Linear to Virtual Value Chains in E-Business

This article examines the development of the concept of the value chain from the linear to the virtual conception of the chain, through the evolution of the literature from Michael Porter’s writings of the mid 1990s to the theorists of e-business and e-commerce in the later 1990s I argue that Porter’s account employs white metaphors and that writings on the virtual value chain both extend the white metaphors of Porter’s linear chain, and suggest a pronouncedly metaphysical system of thought — one which has correlates in areas of thought, including Renaissance Neo-Platonism, cybernetics and the discourse of cyberspace. I suggest that this offers a model of the advance of metaphor — of its usure, as described by Derrida in his White Mythology — and that this model can be synthesised with the views of Ricoeur about the evolution of metaphor towards symbolism. When we apply these ideas of Derrida and Ricoeur to the development of the White Metaphor of the linear chain towards a progressive symbolism, we can see a correlation between the complex causality inferred as a feature of the virtual chain and the cosmological affinities of Renaissance notions of causation.

LATIN AMERICA AND BEYOND

Leopoldo Zea was born in Mexico City in 1912 and is a unique survivor, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, of a generation that lived through the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–20. Regarding that event as a model for the nationalist and anticolonialist revolutions that were destined to occur elsewhere, Zea subsequently became a spokesman for the antiimperialism of the American subcontinent post-1945, choosing to interpret the situation of many Spanish American nations as essentially neocolonialist. Thereafter, he responded to the dual clarion-calls of the Cuban Revolution and francophone writing that began to circulate in Spanish America from the mid-sixties. Under the influence of the Cuban Revolution, Zea would give a tricontinental focus to his writing and inscribe the contemporary trajectory of the Americas within the wider narrative of decolonization that was unfolding in parts of Africa and Asia. Around the same time, Zea met a range of high-profile individuals including Léopold Sédar Senghor, Jawharlal Nehru, and Aimé Césaire, and initiated with them a dialogue that would revolve around issues of the Third World. However, it was the work of Fanon which stirred the deepest response in him: a volume of essays published in 1974 bears the multiple marks of Fanon’s universalism, his refashioned humanism, and the Martiniquan’s comparative perspective on decolonization in Africa and the Americas. It is also through the prism of Negritude that Zea reinterprets American indigenismo as a rejection of the racialist discourses of a Eurocentric white mythology to which he opposes the racial and cultural mestizaje of societies such as those of Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. The comparative perspective of his essay, ‘Negritud e indigenismo’ (‘Negritude and indigenismo’), is one amongst many pointers to the crucial role played by Leopoldo Zea in promoting a transcontinental dialogue between the peoples of Latin America and the rest of the world throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (review)

Reviewed by: Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction Patrick F. McDevitt Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. By Robert J. C. Young. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Robert J.C. Young has made a major contribution to the field of postcolonial studies with this lucid, wide-ranging and compelling synthesis. Expanding on themes first visited in his Colonial Desires and White Mythologies, Young has given readers an insightful analysis of the ways in which anti-colonial struggles inspired and shaped new forms of knowledge that, for Young, constituted a “counter-modernity” to western modernity. In addition to the standard fare for an introduction of this type (e.g., Said, Spivak, Bhabha, subalternism, hybridity, etc.), Young draws on a broad spectrum of thinkers, including Las Casas, Bentham, Marx, Mao, Connolly, James, Césaire, Fanon, Gandhi and others, to detail a genealogy of anticolonial thought and practice which forms the roots of postcolonialism. The book’s two greatest strengths are its attention to the historical development of postcolonial theory in relation to imperialism and anti-colonialism, and the relative absence of jargon. Avoiding the common pitfall of over-quotation found in many introductions to post-structural and/or postcolonial theory, Young paraphrases widely and effectively without slipping into the academic argot that often obscures more than it illuminates for the non-initiated. Whereas some authors, for example Leela Gandhi in her Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction or Pauline Rosenau in her Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences, primarily quote difficult passages from other sources and leave them unclarified, Young effectively explains complex theories in plain, academic language. This would seem to remove a major stumbling block for students and non-specialists alike. However, this is not meant to imply that Young’s is a book for introductory undergraduate courses; it is probably not. Nonetheless, it certainly would appear to have great potential as a text for upper-level courses or a graduate seminar, especially in disciplines like history in which many students may be wary of ‘theory.’ Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction is fascinatingly theorized, it just is done in a way that is accessible. Young, a professor of English and critical theory at Wadham College, Oxford, does not confine his analysis to literary studies, as other similar introductions often do (Moore-Gilbert, McLeod, for example). Nor is postcolonialism portrayed primarily as an academic dispute between traditionalists and an avant-garde or between Marxists and poststructuralists. This book firmly places the development of postcolonial theory within the history of colonialism, imperialism and most importantly, the anti-colonial movements in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. From the beginning, where he carefully defines and analyzes the terms colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism, Young successfully avoids the reductive trap of creating an overly broad field of study. Postcolonialism, in Young’s estimation, never descends into a catchall phrase for the latest academic fashions in the study of imperialism and anti-imperialism. Specifically, postcolonialism (or “tricontinentalism” as Young would prefer) is used to designate the analysis of the historical and contemporary effects on both western and “tricontinental” (i.e., Asian, African and Latin American) cultures of western colonialism and imperialism and particularly the connection between the past and the present world. After defining his terms, Young examines the development of both resistance to imperial and colonial domination and the intellectual tradition that informs the academic discipline of postcolonialism. In both discussions, Young’s attention to historicity is particularly refreshing and instructive. He resists the temptation to homogenize all oppression into one phenomenon and is careful to distinguish between different types of colonialisms, French and British for example, and between different types of domination within one national tradition. Nonetheless, throughout the book, much is made of the interconnectedness and intellectual cross-fertilizations of people and institutions from around the world in a common goal of liberation. Young is also especially attuned to the nuances and subtleties of the postcolonial project and repeatedly stresses the ways in which easy dichotomies and simplistic reductions between the west and the non-west or between imperialists and anti-imperialists confuse as much as they explain. For Young, postcolonialism and anti-colonialism were both products of a revolutionary fusion of the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, which grew out...

Metaphor and Philosophy: an Encounter with Derrida

This paper presents a critical analysis of the central argument of Derrida's paper ‘White Mythology’. The crucial claims are that the concept of metaphor presupposes philosophy, that philosophy presupposes the concept of metaphor, and that philosophy cannot accommodate the concept of metaphor. I offer support for the first two claims, explaining the general kind of view of philosophy and of metaphor which they require, but I argue that even if we grant the first two claims, the concept of metaphor only presents a difficulty for a particular conception of philosophy, rather that philosophy as such.

Biblical Mythology in Andre Brink's Anti-Apartheid Crusade

Biblical Mythology in André Brink’s Anti-Apartheid Crusade Isidore Diala (bio) Abdul R. JanMohamed has argued that the transformation of racial difference into moral and even metaphysical difference is at the heart of the economy of the central trope of imperialist practice, the manichean allegory. Tracing the phenomenologial origins of this metonymic transformation ultimately to the “neutral” perception of physical difference, he amply demonstrates how the allegorical extensions of this transformation dominate every facet of imperialist mentality (61). With reference to South Africa, Susan VanZanten Gallagher has methodically indicated how the writing of Ralph Standish (1612), which represents the black as a subhuman and mythical other, is representative of a long tradition of colonial writing, spanning the works of John Jordain (1608), Hondius (1652), Kolb (1719), Mentzel (1785), Barrow (1801), and Philip (1828), all aimed at the justification of European colonization. In a recent inquiry into the white’s reflexive perception of the black migrant worker, Michael Wade reveals its culmination in a “distressing arrest in the development of White perception” (21) and explains this as the result of the impossibility of the white South African to see the black objectively. Wade’s historical focus is mainly the years spanning the industrialization of South Africa, after the discovery of diamonds in the northwestern Cape in 1860. But his findings are typical: the roots of the whites’ perception of the black are fully in economics. In the documents of the white imagination, the novel, poetry, drama, the newspaper, and other forms in which whites engage themselves effectively in a dialogue (speaking only less effectively to others), Wade notes: The giant image of the migrant worker looms inscrutable, impenetrable; shafts of perception, energised by the urgency of the Whites’ deepest insecurities and fears, bounce off the matte black of his skin. Little can be learned about the migrant worker himself from these accounts; but much may be garnered towards an understanding of the group that has dominated the private sector of the South African economy since the discovery of diamonds more than a century and a quarter ago. (1) This essay proposes to consider André Brink’s frequent depiction of characteristic Afrikaner reduction of the Bible to a white mythology that complements the materiality of apartheid. Read in the self-regarding gaze of Afrikaner consciousness severely hampered and narrowed by its morbid obsession with its tribulations and even threats of extinction in a heathen land, the Bible is distorted to a justification of a racist ideology. Like historiography and cartography, theology too has become a species of mythmaking, annexed into the formidable machinery specifically created to empower the Afrikaner Establishment through the presentation of an authorized version of reality. [End Page 80] Brink has noted that in its anxiety and desperation to create for itself a self-validating image, apartheid had to annex realms of human value other than the overtly political: For apartheid to be sanctioned as the definitive characteristic of the Afrikaner Establishment, it had to reach far beyond the domain of politics: it was not simply a political policy ‘adopted’ as a response to the racial situation in the country but had to be accepted as an extension of an entire value system, embracing all the territories of social experience, economics, philosophy, morality and above all religion. The Church itself had to provide the ultimate justification for the ideology. (Mapmakers 18–19) If the “Christianization” of apartheid and the appropriation of religion was to the Afrikaner Establishment the ultimate temptation, the reason is quite obvious: the projection of Afrikaner imperialism onto the revealed word of God as divine ordinance, in Afrikaner consciousness, gave apartheid the final legitimacy. Thus, the Dutch Reformed Church was transformed to the abettor of the National Party, providing it with theological support for the segregation of the races. In his representative awareness of the politics of reading the Bible, Archbishop Desmond Tutu refutes the claims to universality that Western theology for long arrogated to itself, and endorses the validity of rival theologies arising from the specific terms and conditions of life in Third World countries. Among these, he recognizes Liberation Theology developed in Latin America, and Black Theology developed in the USA and Southern...

Biblical Mythology in Andr� Brink's Anti-Apartheid Crusade

cated how the writing of Ralph Standish (1612), which represents the black as a subhuman and mythical other, is representative of a long tradition of colonial writing, spanning the works of John Jordain (1608), Hondius (1652), Kolb (1719), Mentzel (1785), Barrow (1801), and Philip (1828), all aimed at the justification of European colonization. In a recent inquiry into the white's reflexive of the black migrant worker, Michael Wade reveals its culmination in a distressing arrest in the development of White perception (21) and explains this as the result of the impossibility of the white South African to see the black objectively. Wade's historical focus is mainly the years spanning the industrialization of South Africa, after the discovery of diamonds in the northwestern Cape in 1860. But his findings are typical: the roots ofthe whites' of the black are fully in economics. In the documents of the white imagination, the novel, poetry, drama, the newspaper, and other forms in which whites engage themselves effectively in a dialogue (speaking only less effectively to others), Wade notes: The giant image of the migrant worker looms inscrutable, impenetrable; shafts of perception, energised by the urgency of the Whites' deepest insecurities and fears, bounce off the matte black of his skin. Little can be learned about the migrant worker himself from these accounts; but much may be garnered towards an under? standing of the group that has dominated the private sector of the South African economy since the discovery of diamonds more than a century and a quarter ago. (1) This essay proposes to consider Andre Brink's frequent depiction of characteristic Afrikaner reduction of the Bible to a white mythology that complements the materiality of apartheid. Read in the self-regarding gaze of Afrikaner consciousness severely hampered and narrowed by its morbid obsession with its tribulations and even threats of extinction in a heathen land, the Bible is distorted to a justification ofa racist ideology. Like historiography and cartography, theology too has become a species of mythmaking, annexed into the formidable machinery specifically created to empower the Afrikaner Establishment through the presentation of an authorized version of reality.

'White Mythology' Revisited: Derrida and His Critics on Reason and Rhetoric

Previous articleNext article No Access'White Mythology' Revisited: Derrida and His Critics on Reason and RhetoricBernard HarrisonBernard Harrison Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 25, Number 3Spring, 1999 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448932 Views: 69Total views on this site Citations: 5Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1999 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Alice Crary Literature and Ethics, (Jun 2021): 1–8.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee225.pub2Neil Cocks ‘“Oh, that’s Francisco’s private joke” […]’: Atlas Shrugged, the Gold Standard, and Utopia, (Sep 2020): 207–235.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53073-0_10April Elisabeth Pierce Towards a new romanticism, Thesis Eleven 123, no.11 (Aug 2014): 17–40.https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513614544192Sally Riad, Deborah Jones Invoking Black Athena and its debates, Journal of Management History 19, no.33 (Jun 2013): 394–415.https://doi.org/10.1108/JMH-10-2011-0033Alice Crary Literature and Ethics, (Feb 2013).https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee225

Rescuing the Person from the Symbol: "Peace Now" and the Ironies of Modern Myth

Rescuing the Person from the Symbol: “Peace Now” and the Ironies of Modern Myth* Michael Feige (bio) Introduction On 20 February 1983 a hand grenade was hurled into a “Peace Now” demonstration in Jerusalem, killing one and injuring eight. The slain victim was Emil Grunzweig. The Israeli peace camp was on the verge of gaining a martyr. All the components for the creation of a politically useful myth were present: a movement activist, who as an immigrant, a kibbutz member and an army officer epitomized Israeli values, had been killed by the traditional enemies of the peace camp while demonstrating his devotion to the ideas of peace, democracy and civility. Peace Now, being a movement dedicated to fighting the policies of the ruling right-wing Likud government, was presented with the opportunity of exploiting the symbolic benefits of victim status. Nonetheless, the Peace Now leadership manifested a deep reluctance to construct a myth out of Grunzweig’s life and death. Both publicly and privately they distanced themselves from the idea of hagiographic commemoration and deliberately refrained from using their associate’s memory for political purposes. In other words, this is a rather remarkable case of non-commemoration, anti-mythmaking and conscious collective forgetfulness on the part of a political movement. [End Page 141] The reasons for Peace Now’s apparently counter-intuitive and counterproductive—one may even say politically suicidal—course of action have much to do with the intricate relations between myth and modernity, which have been addressed by the most prominent thinkers on these issues. Mythical beliefs were regarded as characterizing the irrational, emotional, “dark” side of human nature, and it was believed that they were destined to disappear with the enlightened age of modernity. The German thinker Ernst Cassirer suggested a systematic binary opposition between mythos and logos, with an evolutionary process leading from one to the other. 1 In the field of collective memory there is much discussion on the transformation in historical consciousness that has accompanied, and even defined, the modern age. 2 French historian Pierre Nora has followed Maurice Halbwachs in making a clear distinction between “memory” and “history,” claiming that “memory” implies viewing the past as an integral part of the present, with the same principles that shaped the past also being at work in the present. History, on the other hand, implies a clear and final boundary between past and present, when the past becomes, to use David Lowenthal’s spatial metaphor, “a foreign country.” History objectifies the past and strips it of the enchantment needed to manufacture mythological tales. 3 Claims that myth is not compatible with modernity have to confront the overwhelming evidence that myth does in fact appear, and even flourishes, in the modern age. It may be perceived as “modern political myth,” based loosely on historical evidence, but its continuing existence merits consideration. 4 The phenomenon has been most pronounced in totalitarian regimes, where leaders were elevated to mythical status and promoted grand ideologies based on elaborate mythologies. 5 Myth, however, can be found in democratic regimes as well, as exemplified in works on the commemoration of American presidents. 6 Modernity and the nation-state in themselves are constituted on grand mythological narratives, or rather, in David Apter’s term, on mytho/logics. Modernity itself has been portrayed as a “white mythology,” possessing attributes similar to those it claimed to have ousted. 7 Sheldon Wolins has dramatically expressed the change—not the disappearance—of myth in the modern world, arguing that “instead of eliminating the dark vision of world destruction which haunted all myths of primeval chaos, the power [End Page 142] of science and technology has, of course, darkened it further and left it unrelieved by eschatological hopes. Man has become his own myth.” 8 Researchers today focus on two issues that have some affinities with the questions regarding the theoretical possibility of modern myth. One concerns a “problematic past” that cannot be ignored, yet does not fit easily into an identity-enhancing narrative. Since Halbwachs’s first classic formulations, students of the field are well aware that all representations of the past are in a sense problematic. The process of constructing myth out of historical evidence...

Work and Text in the Later Writings of Roland Barthes

Summary This paper investigates the use to which the categories of “work” and “Text” are put in the later writings of Roland Barthes. The paper proceeds to argue that despite Barthes's vehement repudiation of the foreclosing effects of a theoretical oeuvre, his later publications, including, inter alia, S/Z (1970), Empire of Signs (1970), The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) and a number of anthologised essays, are linked by their overriding preoccupation with the central distinction between “work” and “Text”. The paper then turns to an analysis of the metaphors selfconsciously employed by Barthes as a means of undermining the metaphysical imperatives of language in his elaboration of the Theory of the Text. Having outlined this extensive rhetorical system, however, the paper employs a close reading of Derrida's “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (1982) in order to demonstrate the complex dynamic in which Barthes's use of metaphor in the Theory of the Text is implicated: far from functioning simply as a means of circumventing the imperatives of metaphysical discourse, Barthes's use of metaphor involves both the entrenchment and subversion of logocentric meaning; in Barthes's own terms, the features of the so‐called Barthesian work return even in the self‐proclaimed site of Textuality. The Barthesian rhetorics of metaphor thus straddles the discursive possibilities of both meaning and nonmeaning, work and Text alike. The paper then proceeds to argue that this aporia is fundamental to the shift from work to Text advocated and indeed “performed” across Barthes's later writings; through demonstrating how the epistemological slide from the former to the latter is frequently executed through Barthes's playful collapse of the work/Text distinction itself; here again, work returns to the site of Textuality even as the play of Textuality disrupts the monologism of the Barthesian work. In this way, the argument differs substantially from Barbara Johnson's deconstruction of Barthes's S/Z in “The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac” (1980), arguing that the collapse of the work/Text divide does not function as a point of departure for a deconstructive critique of Barthes so much as a self‐conscious and skilfully employed strategy for the enactment of the Barthesian transition from work to Text.

Deconstruction, postmodernism and philosophy of science: Some Epistemo‐critical bearings

This essay argues a case for viewing Derrida's work in the context of recent French epistemology and philosophy of science; more specifically, the critical‐rationalist approach exemplified by thinkers such as Bachelard and Canguilhem. I trace this line of descent principally through Derrida's essay ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’. My conclusions are (1) that we get Derrida wrong if we read him as a fargone antirealist for whom there is nothing ‘outside the text'; (2) that he provides some powerful counter‐arguments to this and other items of current postmodern wisdom; (3) that deconstruction is more aptly viewed as continuing the epistemo‐critical approach developed by thinkers like Bachelard; and (4) that it also holds important lessons for philosophy of science in the mainstream Anglo‐ American ‘analytic’ tradition.

T. S. Eliot and the ideology of Four quartets

1. Ash-Wednesday and the transition to the late candour 2. Provisional delusions: crisis among the mandarins 3. The society of the mandarin verse play 4. Representing Four Quartets: the canonizers at work 5. Four Quartets: the poem proper i. Burnt children ii. Rehearsing renunciation iii. Escape from history 6. White mythology: the comedy of manners in Natopolis Notes Index.

Fox Talbot and the ‘white mythology’ of photography

Abstract The ‘white mythology’ of photography is concerned with the epistemological status of photography.1 It is concerned with policing that status, overseeing it, fencing it in, framing it, riding herd on the interpretations of photographs, and ruling out of serious consideration certain photographic practices. The ‘white mythology’ of photography has occurred within the writings about photography for most of its history. Indeed, since (as we shall see) it began in I839 and versions of the ‘white mythology’ are still being written, it has some claim to be co-extensive with the life of photography as a practice— or rather, as a number of related practices. The ‘white mythology’ of photography is therefore a commonplace, and its main assertions can be summarized briefly as follows:

White Mythologies and Anemic Geographies: A Review

Robert Young's book White Mythologies raises some critical questions of importance to geography, Amongst these are the significant links between the critique of Western historicism and the increasing use of spatial names and metaphors in arguments about cultural politics. Young's sweeping criticisms of Marxism are powerful, but they loose sight of the value of work which attends to politico-economic processes while problematising the limits of marxism's meta-narrative. Young's writing is limited itself. It introduces work that breaks with Westem-centrism, but, as it does so, it sometimes falls prey to a form of ‘new’ Orientalism that manipulates and represents such work in the interests of ‘the West’, These limits to the book provide an example of anemic geography. This reified and reifying geography fails to deal adequately with the questions of geographical complexity opened up by the displacement of Western History. Instead, it clokes them beneath the use of a geographical vocabulary employed as a vehicle in the metaphorisation of political debate. Alternatives are possible.