Externality

How does externality play into how race is used as a technology, and how does the gaze of the outsider contrast and attack the views of the insider?

In “Algeria Unveiled”, I found the introduction of the tourist very interesting, as we are all cultural tourists in one way or another. What I was really interested in was the statement “belonging to a given cultural group is usually revealed by clothing traditions…[as is the case with] the veil worn by [Muslim] women [that] is at once noticed by the tourist” (35.) By thinking of clothing as a race we must also thing about the increased externality that clothing adds to our appearance. While the traditions or the religion (a type of “race”) of Muslim men may not be realized at first, as they are free to wear street clothes, that of Muslim women are, as they are immediately identified by their clothing. By covering up most of their physical racial identifiers, they are completely nude in the sense that their external religio-cultural identifiers are showing. To the tourist, they are easily identifiable; however, for the men, passing is much easier.

Since a large percentage of Muslim women wear the veils, it allows for representation of that cultural group without concrete knowledge, often leading to misrepresentation. As Bhaba states in “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, “the menace of mimicry is its double vision…that is a result of…partial representation/recognition” (88.) The tourist may try to represent and/or mimic these different cultures – not just Muslim cultures – and can create “the most terrifying thing to behold” (Bhaba 90) due to the fact that “what arises from…exterior forms” (Bhaba 90) may lead to a false representation, however valid it is on the outside. Either “reality [is taken] into consideration…[or] ‘reality’ [is disavowed and replaced by] mimicry…in [the form of] racist stereotypes, statements, jokes, [or] myths” (Bhaba 91) which are taken as truth all because of the idea of the external. In the current age of technology, what isn’t external? Everything can be accessed by whoever has the capabilities or just the determined drive to access it. We (mis)represent people we know, people we think we know, people we want to know and even people we don’t know. How does technology affirm these ideas of representation, and how is the external re- and mis-appropriated by the tourist?