Seshadri-Crooks describes this book as a tentative foray into a territory that has been left uncharted, that is, `race’ as a system of organising difference around a privileged term -`whiteness’. What Seshadri-Crooks actually delivers is an intriguing and in parts, a beautifully written book which examines in detail, and far from tentatively, how a chain of symbolic structuation which operates through a process of inclusions and exclusions constitutes a pattern for organising human difference. As Crooks notes, although it is commonplace to hear phrases such as `race is a construct’ or `race does not exist’, `race’ shows no actual signs of disappearing and is still in common usage in everyday language. So, why do we hold on to the concept, and why is it so difficult to give up?

In chapter one Seshadri-Crooks asks how we might begin to understand the concept of `race’, and more specifically, how can we decipher whiteness? After a short review of the literature on `race’ in which Seshadri-Crooks examines the work of authors such as Anthony Appiah (1992), David Goldberg (1993) and Etienne Balibar (1991) the author argues that `race’ appears like sex, a fundamental fact of human embodiment, something we are inherently born with. This may seem obvious, in that the notion of `race’ is dependent on the cosmetic characteristics of individuals, yet we have already argued that `race’ is a construct. The point the author seems to be making is that despite what we know about the construction of racial typologies, the pseudo sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the rise and fall of Social Dawinism, `race’ itself as a concept, or container, has been successfully `grafted’ to nature. In other words, the racial category appears natural. This leads Seshadri-Crooks to the central argument of this book:
 

“Race is a regime of visibility that secures our investment in racial identity. We make such an investment because the unconscious signifier Whiteness, which founds the logic of racial difference, promises wholeness... what guarantees Whiteness its place as master signifier is visual difference” (p. 21)

Whiteness therefore makes possible difference , it orders and classifies and separates people on the basis of what is considered a natural epistemology. The author quotes Foucault (1990) but this is also reminiscent of Bauman’s (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. The structure of `race’ forever asserts difference, for the sake of sameness, to reproduce the desire for whiteness, or in Foucault and Bauman’s case the rational modern subject and the `gardening state’. The difference for Seshadri-Crooks however, is the visible bodily marks of `race’ `serve to guarantee Whiteness as more than a discursive construction’ (p. 59). Using the example of Joseph Conrad’s (1966) short story The Secret Sharer the author attempts to show how Lacan’s notion of the gaze relates to the structure of Whiteness. It is not possible to go into the detail of the story in this short review, but this is an important chapter which demonstrates the application of Lacanian thinking in the analysis of `race’. This quote gives the reader a taste:
 

“The secret sharer can be interpreted as a story about the successful reaching of the goal of whiteness - the jouissance of absolute mastery and fullness. While the inevitable failure of such a goal could produce anxiety, and the captain is often on the brink of such affect, it is here presented as triumphant” (p. 78)

The lethal fantasy at the core of `race’ for Seshadri-Crooks is the possibility of transcending the visible phenotype, that is, reaching beyond the bodily to a place of being itself where difference and lack are wholly extinguished. The fantasy of encountering Whiteness would be to recover the missing substance of one’s being, coinciding not with some model of bodily perfection, but with the `gaze’, the void in the Other which could annihilate difference.

It is at this point in the text that I feel a non Lacanian reader would start to give up. The theory becomes denser and the ideas more tangential. I would, however, urge the reader to persevere. Seshadri-Crooks writing style is not always clear, but the use of Conrad’s work gives the reader a focus from which to try and unpack Lacan’s ideas, when eventually one emerges from the text, the reader is instilled with a sense of having been on a journey, a journey of discovery, though perhaps not the same as the captain of the Sephora:
 

“... it is the certainty of having Whiteness as the `object of desire’ (of recognising or fantasizing a lack in the symbolic order of race), of possessing it in and as his unconsciousness, that permits him to take up the command of his ship again with renewed vigour” (p. 78)

If for Seshadri-Crooks Conrad’s Secret Sharer is about the successful accomplishment of Whiteness, then the following chapter on colonial discourse and jokes portrays the failure of such an accomplishment. Using George Orwell’s writings of India, Burma and Morocco, the author argues that the repression of the historicity of race often appears in jokes as an uncanny encounter. A Lacanian reading of Freud’s (1919) notion of the Uncanny - Das Unheimlich in relation to jokes, offers the uncanny object placed in a joke,  as lack of lack. In other words in a place that should have been empty, thus causing anxiety. Jokes, argues Seshadri-Crooks, after Freud, can be of two types. First we have the innocent verbal joke that plays on words. Second, we have more sinister tendentious joke which engages with a thought or concept. This category can be subdivided into obscene, aggressive, cynical and sceptical jokes. Whilst tendentious jokes are the most appropriate or pertinent for understanding the anxiety entailed by whiteness, the author argues that we must first look at the persistence of the comic in colonial humour. This enables us to discern the uncanny joke implied by whiteness. Most racial humour is of a comic kind, that it characature and infantalisation which sustains the logic of colonialisation and portrays a scenario of domination. The comic is anything but subtle and is direct in achieving its purpose. Mimicry, exaggeration, slapstick and parody denigrate the racial `other’. The author argues that the racist joke is an aggressive joke which substitutes for the violence that is forbidden in society. It is a recycler of violence and used by the weak in society. Seshadri-Crooks goes on to analyse the nature jokes in detail with reference to Orwell’s (1953) Shooting an Elephant. This is the best chapter in the book - a chapter which explores the relationship between the joke, violence and the uncanny in a captivating style which both informs and illuminates the reader without getting to tangled in theory. Chapter four focuses on the film Suture:
 

“I suggest that Suture through its abrogation of racial looking, also specifies and ethics for the subject of race. It exemplifies the possibility of transversing the fundamental fantasy of wholeness by calling into question the gestalt of racial looking” (p. 10)

The plot of the film is fairly simple. After the death of their father one of two identical brothers is implicated in the drama and becomes part of a criminal investigation. To avoid investigation Vincent manoeuvres his brother Clay into participating in a planned car accident in which he intends to kill him and assume his identity. Clay, however, lives, and is sutured back together, both physically and psychologically. Vincent returns apparently to finish Clay off, but Clay shoots Vincent in the face rendering him unidentifiable. As Seshadri-Crooks notes, this is not particularly an original plot, many films have used the theme of mistaken identity, or the wrong person framed for a murder. This film however asks us to suspend our credulity. We as spectators know what non of the characters in the film seem to know or care about. The identical brothers are in fact not identical. Not only do they look nothing like each other, but Vincent is white and Clay black  Clay, in his bandages, argues the author, is as a Magritte canvas - N’est pas une Pipe, but in this case `This is not a black man’. The film makes a paradox of `race’, as Seshadri-Crooks argues `the film subverts the logic of racial gestalt in both resemblance and similitude. By refusing our demand that both black and white be recognised, the film radically subverts our suture as subjects of race’ (p. 125) The film, argues Seshadri-Crooks, affords us pleasure, but not in a conventional sense, rather a satisfaction derived from disarray and discontinuity. Can we cope with this unravelling of our subjective support? or will we be tempted to sew it back together again.

In the following chapter the author continues to unravel notions of racial embodiment and identity by examining Toni Morrison’s (1983) short story Recitatif, which  Seshadri-Crooks describes as a story of interracial love centring on the will to ignorance. A certain `nothing to know’ that is the anxious `truth’ about racial signifiers. Quite literally by emptying the racial signifier of its properties, white and black have no connotations, it is this emptiness that makes love approachable. The author draws these ideas together in the final chapter - Discolorations.

How does `race’ as a symbolic system sustained by a regime of visibility translate into social policy? Identity politics work, but ultimately reinforce the very system that such politics are trying to redress. Seshadri-Crooks argues the her theory is anti-policy, it is race itself which should be dismantled. We should develop new adversarial aesthetics which will throw racial signification into disarray, use the visual against the visual as in the film Suture. We should stress doubt in the concept of `race’ to the extent that everyone mistrusts their knowledge of racial belonging in the practice of discoloration.

After reading Desiring Whiteness for the first time I felt terribly split, frustrated at what appeared on the surface as a linguistically privileged text which excludes all but those with a thorough understanding of Lacan’s work. The counter to this feeling is that Seshadri-Crooks has really got something quite important to say, after all, who can be excluded from the subject of `race’. It is with this in mind that I implore the reader to be patient, to unwrap the bandages, and unravel the theory. Desiring Whiteness could and should reach a much wider audience than a Lacanian readership, the issues it confronts are too important and far reaching to be ignored. Seshadri-Crooks explores theory, the visual and written text in tandem in attempt to reveal the complexities of `race’ and of identity in a psychoanalytic account of a social problem. This book has something for both the theorist and academic, the psychoanalytically inclined Sociologist and the reader of cultural studies. It offers a refreshing new interpretation of `race’, colonialism and ethnic identity, and as such, makes compelling reading for the patient reader.
 

References:

Appiah, A (1992) In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, I. (1991) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. London: Verso.

Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence. London: Polity Press.

Conrad, J. (1966) The Secret Sharer. Great Short Works of Joseph Conrad. New York: Harper and Row.

Foucault, M (1990) The History of Sexuality, Vol 1. New york: Vintage Books.

Freud, S. (1919) Das Unheimlich. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol XVII, 219. London: Hogarth Press.

Goldberg, D. (1993) Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. London: Blackwell.

Morrison, T. (1983) Recitatif. Baraka, A. and Baraka, A. (eds) Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women. New York: William Morrow.

Orwell, G. (1953) Shooting an Elephant. A Collection of Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace.
 

Simon Clarke
Simon.Clarke@uwe.ac.uk