Critical Race and Whiteness Studies www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal Volume 10, Number 2, 2014 10th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL ISSUE OF CRITICAL RACE AND WHITENESS STUDIES The taxonomic gaze: Looking at whiteness from east to west Vera Mackie University of Wollongong In this article I consider representations of whiteness which emanate from outside the Euro-American centres. I argue that it is necessary to understand how whiteness has been seen by non-white observers, and that we need to be sensitive to local taxonomies of difference which are not always reducible to the white/non-white distinction which is hegemonic in the Euro-American centres. I consider the works of some artists and writers from early twentieth century Japan who are sensitive to their positioning in international hierarchies and who attempt to place themselves in a position of power in these gendered, classed, ethnicised and racialised hierarchies through their deployment of what I call the ‘taxonomic gaze’. I argue that the concept of whiteness needs to be historicised and provincialised, and that the field of whiteness studies itself also needs to be historicised. Keywords: whiteness, racialisation, Japan, taxonomic gaze Introduction In 1921, I left Japan and headed for France. The ship had hardly docked in Shanghai before my fellow passengers, from curiosity to know a Western woman, went to visit the white-walled western building with the red light. There they were taken by the golden hair of the Polish Jewish women and the Russian refugee women, enchanted by the charm of blue eyes, and returned to the ship singing paeans. I was the only one who celebrated the beauty of the slender bamboo-like figures of the Chinese women, and did not listen to their stories. It was the same when we docked in Hong Kong. To them, the Malay and Indian women just seemed like sauvages. For me, however, they gave me a sense of aesthetiquement beauté. (Fujita, 1984, p. 57)1 1 Translations my own unless indicated otherwise. In this passage, the italicised words appear in the original passage in Sino-Japanese characters, with a French reading provided alongside. I have tried to convey this in the translation with the use of French ISSN 1838-8310 © Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association 2014 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 10.2 This account comes from Fujita [Foujita] Tsuguharu’s essay on the “Women of the World”, and provides a relatively rare example of a man from outside the Euro-American centres exercising a powerful gaze on the peoples of the world. Foujita is an artist who travelled from Japan to Paris in the 1920s, where he was also able to exercise the powerful gaze of a painter.2 The passage above reflects a taxonomic attitude which places all of the peoples in the world in hierarchies of value, in this case in gendered hierarchies of beauty. In this article I will explore manifestations of this attitude in the writings of selected cultural producers from Japan in the 1920s. However, in order to situate this particular taxonomic gaze, we first need to locate this study within recent developments in the field of whiteness studies. Provincialising whiteness In his pioneering book, White, Richard Dyer commented that the study of “race” had hitherto meant the study of “any racial imagery other than that of white people” (1997, p. 1). Dyer conceptualised his own project as being about the racial imagery of white people—not the images of other races in white cultural production, but the latter’s imagery of white people themselves. This is not done merely to fill a gap in the analytic literature, but because there is something at stake in looking at, or continuing to ignore, white racial imagery. As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people. (p. 1) Over a decade later, Dyer’s comments about the racialisation of white people probably seem quite self-evident. Dyer first commented on representations of racialised others by those who spoke from a dominant and unmarked position. He then extended this discussion to consider how these ‘white’ people had represented themselves, and produced their own ‘whiteness’ in opposition to a series of racialised others. It is also, however, necessary to consider how those positioned outside that sphere have critiqued the self-representations of those positioned as ‘white’ (Fujikawa, 2005; Gates, 1981; hooks, 1981; Lake, 2007). A further development might involve readings of how ‘whiteness’ has appeared in the texts of those who have been positioned as ‘non-white’. We need to historicise whiteness and to provincialise it: that is, to demonstrate that the concept of whiteness has a specific history in particular localised cultural and social contexts, and that the concept cannot easily be generalised beyond those contexts.3 Similarly, the field of whiteness studies itself needs to be historicised words in italics. As in the original, the French words may not integrate smoothly into the grammar of the sentence. 2 Foujita’s family name was variously spelt as “Fujita” or “Foujita”, and his given name was sometimes read as “Tsuguharu” and sometimes “Tsuguji”. He also adopted the name “Léonard”. As he is most well-known in European languages as “Foujita”, I will use this spelling hereafter, except where citing Japanese language sources. On Foujita’s life, see Birnbaum (2006). 3 Here, I am drawing on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) discussion of ‘provincialising’ Europe. 2 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 10.2 and placed in its specific academic and intellectual context in the (mainly) Anglophone Euro-American academy at the turn of the twenty-first century. In reading texts which have been produced outside the Euro-American sphere where whiteness acts as a privileged signifier of difference, we can not assume that the concepts, discourses and debates around racialisation can simply be translated into another sphere. The dynamics of difference will be expressed in very specific terms in particular local contexts. For example, in South Asia, there has apparently been a valuing of paler skin which was quite independent of the encounter with Europe (Robb, 1995, pp. 1-76). Or, in Japan, there is a form of white facial make-up which is associated with specific professions or theatrical performances, with nothing to do with racialisation (Kazami, 1997). In specific contexts, racialised meanings may be attributed according to the shape of facial features, the relative presence or absence of body hair, specific bodily odours, or the proportions of the body, rather than just skin colour. These features interact with dress, adornment, deportment, the dressing of hair, and the modification of bodies through such practices as shaving, piercing, or tattooing. Similarly, the semantic field encompassed by the signifier ‘white’ cannot be expected to translate neatly across languages. In each language, the local equivalent of the colour ‘white’ will have specific associations and connotations. In this article, I consider some representations of whiteness from the early decades of the twentieth century in Japan. By this time, intellectuals in Japan had been exposed to the ideologies of racial hierarchy which emanated from Europe and the United States. These had particular relevance in Japan, which had faced the threat of colonisation by Europe and the United States. By the 1920s, the Japanese government had managed to renegotiate the unequal treaties with the United States, Britain and other European powers; had forged an alliance with Britain; and had acquired its own colonies in East Asia. In the First World War, Japan had been allied with the Anglophone powers, but nevertheless was unsuccessful in its campaign for a racial equality clause in the Charter of the newly-formed League of Nations. Japanese national identity was always, then, defined with reference to both the Euro-American powers and other Asian countries. These international geopolitical hierarchies were naturalised according to the discourses of racialisation, and ideologies of racial hierarchy were given local inflections in Japan (Morris-Suzuki, 1998; Oguma, 2002). As Dyer has commented, with respect to more recent manifestations of hierarchical thought, race was “never not a factor, never not in play” (Dyer, 1997, p. 1). In early twentieth century East Asia, cultural representations were integrated into international circuits which referenced the circulation of signs, products, practices, finance and capital which have been associated with the condition of ‘colonial modernity’. Tani Barlow has emphasised the “interrelatedness of colonizing powers and colonial regimes” and has drawn our attention to the “colonial commodities (e.g. opium, tea, labour), reordered styles of governmentality, juridical norms (e.g. international laws and treaties), administrative innovations (e.g. customs, extraterritoriality, treaty ports), and colonial trade in ideas that characterize colonizers … as well as colonial regimes” (2004, p. 7; see also 1997, pp. 1-20). 3 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 10.2 In this article I explore some cultural representations whereby artists and writers trained in early-twentieth century Japan gazed on whiteness and thereby constituted their own gendered, classed, sexualised, racialised, and ethnicised positionings in the taxonomies of difference in East Asia and beyond. The three case studies involve male artists whose work ranged across the literary and the visual: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô (1886–1965), a novelist with an intense interest in visuality (see Lamarre, 2005); Koide Narashige (1887–1931), an artist and essayist who collaborated with Tanizaki; and Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968), another painter who used the essay form to reflect on his artistic practice. In the works of these artists, the themes of gender, visuality and racialisation intersect. Their works are characterised by what I call a ‘taxonomic gaze’, a gaze which classifies, categorises, and produces hierarchies.