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Racism and Racial Surveillance Modernity Matters 1st
Edition Sheila Khan (Editor) Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Sheila Khan (editor), Nazir Ahmed Can (editor), Helena Machado
(editor); Ana Monteiro (translator)
ISBN(s): 9780367856793, 0367856794
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 8.35 MB
Year: 2021
Language: english
Racism and Racial Surveillance

Based on the premise that the project of Western Modernity is a structuring

element of our societies, Racism and Racial Surveillance explores in detail
its legacies of coloniality and racialication that interfere in a subtle and per-
verse way in the current social, cultural and political systems.
Guided by an interdisciplinary methodology, the various contributions
privilege historical contexts of colonial formation and offer a thorough and
intersectional analysis on the spectres of coloniality in the upsurge of rac-
ism, surveillance and criminalisation, as well as the presence of the phan-
tom of the race in spaces of knowledge production such as that of the artistic
feld, forensic genetics and criminal identifcation.
Drawing on multi-case studies, the book then proffers key concepts and
historical background that will be of interest to researchers, students and
professionals in a broad range of areas of social sciences and humanities re-
search, including felds such as criminology and policing, science and tech-
nology studies, arts studies, literary studies, race and ethnic studies and,
fnally, memory studies.

Sheila Khan is Integrated Researcher at Communication and Society Re-

search Centre, University of Minho, Portugal.

Nazir Ahmed Can is a Serra Húnter Fellow, Professor of Portuguese Lan-

guage at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation at the Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

Helena Machado is Full Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Institute for
Social Sciences, University of Minho, Portugal.
Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity
Gypsy Feminism

Ethnic Subjectivity in Intergenerational Memory Narratives

Politics of the Untold,
Mónika Fodor

Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain

Uncorking the Champagne Supernova
Jason Arday

Translocational Belongings
Intersectional Dilemmas and Social Inequalities
Floya Anthias

Diasporas, Weddings and Trajectories of Ethnicity

Terence Heng

Black Families and Recession in the United States

The Enduring Impact of the Great Recession of 2007–2009
Dorothy Smith-Ruiz and Albert M. Kopak

Practicing Yoga as Resistance

Voices of Color in Search of Freedom
Edited by Cara Hagan

Racism and Racial Surveillance

Modernity Matters
Edited by Sheila Khan, Nazir Ahmed Can and Helena Machado

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/

sociology/series/RRRE
Racism and Racial
Surveillance
Modernity Matters

Edited by
Sheila Khan, Nazir Ahmed Can
and Helena Machado

Translated by Ana Monteiro

First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Sheila Khan, Nazir
Ahmed Can and Helena Machado; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of Sheila Khan, Nazir Ahmed Can and Helena Machado
to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of
the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978 - 0 -367- 85679-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978 -1- 032-10902-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978 -1- 003- 01430 - 0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003014300
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents

List of contributors vii

Preface xi
Acknowledgement xv

PART 1

1 Introduction 3
SH E I L A K H A N , NA Z I R A H M E D CA N A N D H E L E NA M AC H A D O

2 Empire and literature: from the schism of race to

the seism of the “other” 16
NA Z I R A H M E D CA N A N D R I TA C H AV E S

3 Breaking the complicity between the aesthetic device and

the colonial device: Afro-Brazilian art, Afro-descendant
Black art 41
M Á RC IO SE L IGM A N N - SI LVA

4 Black modernities, social memory and experiences

of insubordination 72
M Á R IO AUGUS T O M E DE I RO S DA SI LVA

5 Cape Verde, Brazil and Portugal: dubious Atlantic

triangulations 91
J Ú L IO C E SA R M AC H A D O DE PAU L A
vi Contents

6 << Voyez comme nous sommes beaux >> “Negro” and

négritude avatars in the islands of the south-western Indian
Ocean: hybridity and “racialised” thinking 108
VA L É R I E M AGDE L A I N E -A N DR I A NJA F I T R I MO

7 Insidious invisibilities: world literature, “race” and resistance 132

PAU L O DE M E DE I RO S

PART 2

8 Postcolonial racial surveillance through forensic genetics 153

SH E I L A K H A N A N D H E L E NA M AC H A D O

9 Politics of (non)belonging: enacting imaginaries of affected

publics through forensic genetic technologies 173
N I NA A M E LU NG

10 The (re)invocation of race in forensic genetics through forensic

DNA phenotyping technology 199
F I L I PA QU E I RÓ S

Index 223
Contributors

Nina Amelung is a post-doctoral research fellow at Universidade de Lisboa,

Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Lisboa, Portugal. In her current research,
she investigates the democratic challenges of cross-border biometric
data-exchange and explores the making of (non)publics in European
crime, migration and border control regimes. Currently, she conducts a
project entitled “Affected (non)publics: Social and political implications
of transnational biometric databases in migration and crime control
(AFFECT)” funded by the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Tech-
nology (FCT). She has published on biometric technologies in migration
and crime control regimes; modes of biobordering; citizenship, migration
& material politics.
Nazir Ahmed Can is a Serra Húnter Fellow, Professor of Portuguese Lan-
guage at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation at the Universitat
Autònoma de Barcelona. Between 2015 and 2021, he was a Full Professor
of African Literature at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He
holds a Ph.D. in Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature from
the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, a postdoctoral degree from the
Universidade de São Paulo and was visiting professor at the Universi-
dad de Salamanca. He is the author of João Paulo Borges Coelho: fcção,
memória, cesura (Folha Seca, 2021), O campo literário moçambicano.
Tradução do espaço e formas de insílio (Kapulana, 2020) and Discurso
e poder nos romances de João Paulo Borges Coelho (Alcance, 2014), as
well as co-editor of Hybridations problématiques dans les littératures
de l’Océan Indien (Éditions K’A, 2010) and Visitas a João Paulo Borges
Coelho (Colibri, 2017).
Rita Chaves is Full Professor of African Literature at the Universidade de
São Paulo. She holds a doctorate from the Universidade de São Paulo in
1993 and a postdoctoral degree from the Universidade Eduardo Mond-
lane, in Mozambique, and she was visiting professor at Yale University.
She is the author of A formação do romance angolano (2000) and Angola
e Moçambique – experiência colonial e territórios literários (2005), and
co-editor of Portanto Pepetela (2003), Boaventura Cardoso – a escrita em
viii Contributors

processo (2005), Literaturas Africanas de Língua Portuguesa – marcas da

diferença (2006), Brasil / África – como se o mar fosse mentira (2007), Pas-
sagens para o Índico (2012), Mia Couto – um convite à diferença (2013) and
Narrating the postcolonial nation (2014).
Paulo de Medeiros is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Stud-
ies, with a focus on Modern and Contemporary World Literatures, at
the University of Warwick, UK. As a member of the Warwick Research
Collective, one of his current projects is a study of post-imperial Europe.
His most recent publication is a co-edited volume on Contemporary Lu-
sophone African Film (Routledge, 2021).
Sheila Khan holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic and Cultural Studies (2004) and is cur-
rently a postdoctoral researcher on the project “EXCHANGE – Forensic
and the Transnational Exchange of DNA data in the EU: Engaging Sci-
ence with Social Control, Citizenship and Democracy” (ref. 648608),
funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Her main research in-
terests are postcolonial processes of racialization and racial surveillance
and reparatory memory in Mozambique. Her most recent publication is
a co-edited volume entitled The World in Europe. Crises and Identities
(Húmus, 2020).
Helena Machado is Full Professor of Sociology and Dean of the Institute for
Social Sciences, University of Minho, Portugal. Her current research crit-
ically engages the social studies of science and technology and the ethical,
legal and social implications (ELSI) of emerging sciences, notably pop-
ulation genetics and genomics in the governance of criminality. In 2015,
she was honored with a Consolidator Grant from the European Research
Council (ERC), to study the close links between a highly-specialized feld
of expert scientifc knowledge – forensic genetics – governance of crime
and terrorism, and challenges to privacy and data protection in the EU
in the 21st century.
Júlio Cesar Machado de Paula is Assistant Professor of African Literatures
at Fluminense Federal University at Niterói, Brazil. He taught at the Fed-
eral University of Amazonas and at the University for International Inte-
gration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony, both in Brazil. He holds a Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature from Federal University of Minas Gerais and a
Master’s Degree in Comparative Studies from Sao Paulo University. He
has conducted research projects at Fonds Ricoeur and at University of
Sorbonne Nouvelle (France). He is editor-in-chief of AbeÁfrica: Review
of the Brazilian African Studies Association. Recently, he has published
Alumbramento e claridade, on Brazilian and Cape-Verdean literatures.
Valérie Magdelaine-Andrianjaftrimo is a lecturer in French literature
at the University of Réunion and has been the editor of the journal
 Contributors ix

NEF – Nouvelles Études Francophones – since 2014. She is also a pro-

ject manager for the creation of Presses Universitaires India Océaniques.
She specialises in Indian Ocean literature, postcolonial issues related to
matters of domination and resistance, matters of “races, nations, classes”
and gender studies. She has recently published Interculturel francopho-
nies «Écrivaines de l’Ile Maurice et de La Réunion, “Tisser des fls épars”
» (2016) and Iles/Elles. Résistances et revendications féminines dans
les îles des Caraïbes et de l’océan Indien (XVIII-XXIè siècles), (in co-
direction with M. Arino), TROPICS, n° 4, Discours artistiques du con-
temporain au prisme de l’océan Indien: fctions, critique et politiques (in
co-direction with Y. Parisot and G. Armand).
Mário Augusto Medeiros da Silva holds a Ph.D. in Sociology, and is a sociol-
ogist and Professor at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). He is
the author of Os escritores da guerrilha urbana: literatura de testemunho,
ambivalência e transição política [Urban guerrilla writers: testimony lit-
erature, ambivalence and political transition] (1977–1984) [2008] and A
descoberta do Insólito: literatura negra e literatura marginal no Brasil [The
discovery of the Unusual: Black literature and marginal literature in Bra-
zil] (1960–2000) [2013]. His main research interests are social thinking,
Black intellectuals and social memory.
Filipa Queirós holds a Ph.D. and is a sociologist and a researcher at the Cen-
tre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. Between 2015 and 2020 she
was a researcher in the ERC project EXCHANGE, where she developed
her doctoral thesis on the controversies and expectations about forensic
DNA phenotyping in criminal investigation. Her research interests focus
on social studies of science and technology, surveillance studies and ra-
cial surveillance technologies. She has been publishing on the material-
ization of criminal bodies, the role of expectations in the application of
innovative technologies in forensic genetics and the expansion of surveil-
lance technologies and social control by the state.
Márcio Seligmann-Silva is Professor of Literary Theory at Unicamp (Uni-
versidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil) and a researcher with CNPq. He
holds a Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin, was a visiting scholar at
Yale and a visiting professor at universities in Argentina, UK and Mex-
ico. His publications include several books, including: O Local da Difer-
ença. Ensaios sobre memória, arte, literatura e tradução [2008] (Editora
34, 2005; 2nd edition, 2018); História, Memória, Literatura: o Testemunho
na Era das Catástrofes (UNICAMP, 2003). He researches translation;
Walter Benjamin and violence representation with focus on post-colonial
studies, the Shoah and Latin American dictatorships.
Preface

How does the past defne the present? How has Western modernity, as a
philosophical, economic and political project built out of Europe, forged
meanings and hierarchies that continue to be operative today? What chal-
lenges arise, for academic communities and society in general, given the
realisation that the logic of domination, marginalisation and social dif-
ferentiation are the result of historically laminated processes? These are
the questions that guide the book we have before us. Although the reader
should not foster the empty hope of fnding straightforward answers to
these questions here, the gesture of defning them as the driving force be-
hind this book produces a certain perspective of the matter in hand: the
critical analysis of the mechanisms of production and reproduction of rac-
ism, racialisation and racial surveillance. A perspective that, in my opin-
ion, is based on three elements.
The frst of these elements tells us that research on racism – on its as-
sumptions and contents, on its explicit emergence or its silent reproduction –
lacks intersecting perspectives that go beyond disciplinary self-suffciency.
In this respect, the book proposes a series of nine chapters, which, when
read in their entirety, establish a kaleidoscope of problems and perspectives,
derived from a transdisciplinary view, which urges us to think of racism
as a complex and multifaceted reality. To perceive it in this way forces us
to adopt an intersectional stance, which addresses the articulations of the
notion of race with the notions of class and gender, and their embodiments
located in time and space. At frst glance, the two parts that make up this
Racism and Racial Surveillance. Modernity Matters – the former focused
on matters of culture, identity and memory, the latter on issues of racism,
technology, genetics and criminalisation – may cause some awkwardness to
those less prone to healthy disciplinary disorder. But this is precisely one of
the assets of this work.
As to the second element, this book maintains that the analysis of racism,
racialisation dynamics and the logic of surveillance, control and criminal-
isation of racialised subjects must take into account the founding place of
Western modernity in the construction of contemporary worlds. Indeed, the
xii Preface

violence, transits and (in)visibilities that modernity has structured, impact-

ing large territories and societies in effective, though different ways, still
constitute an inescapable backdrop for the structuring of social relations
and the maintenance of subjugation modes based on the imagination of a
“non-Western other.” The simultaneous compression and expansion of the
world, which will be historically operated, will outline what Boaventura de
Sousa Santos classifes as “abyssal lines,” defning a “dichotomy between
appropriation/violence,” and which would continue to be reproduced today,
by means of a boundary “that divides the human from the subhuman in
such a way that human principles don’t become compromised by inhuman
practices” and of varied ways of “return of the colonial” to the old metro-
politan societies.1
Pursuing an interpretive line that dialogues with this idea, Sheila Khan,
Nazir Ahmed Can and Helena Machado make clear in the introduction
that colonialism is a legacy of modernity that “has never fnished and has
a performative role not yet suffciently theorised and analysed in the aca-
demic world.” In fact, the outcome of colonialism, as a political reality, has
rocked and toppled – at least momentarily – the geopolitical and socioec-
onomic foundations that sustained much of the dynamic that existed until
the mid-20th century. The anti-colonial struggle was a watershed moment,
reprogramming the horizons of liberation and decisively infuencing the
processes of understanding that world, which, from the second half of the
last century onwards, would rise from the ashes produced by the political
end of colonialism. But it is also true that, in many respects, the hierarchies
drawn up during the colonial period have remained functional, contribut-
ing to the determination of specifc social formations, to the reconfgured
upholding of forms of racialisation, subjugation and violence and to the per-
sistent (re)constitution of social imaginaries still marked by colonial topics.
In fact, in many ways, colonialism is a corpse that is still breathing.
Finally, the third element refected in this book, although not entirely
explicitly, is its political dimension. In a context in which the expansion
of spaces of resistance and anti-racist denunciation have emerged all over
the world, and with renewed vigour in the wake of the Black Lives Matter
movement, discrimination and oppression of racialised subjects have also
increased, with the widespread growth of the far-right – from the outset,
within Europe – often capitalising on an objectively racist common sense,
based on deeply-rooted national mythologies and exclusive citizenship-type
ideals. On the other hand, and as we are shown in the second part of this
book, the omission of the notion of “race” as a category in the feld of ge-
netic technologies does not necessarily lead to the omission of racism and
racialisation. On the contrary, this avoidance can be an active part of pro-
cesses of marginalisation, criminalisation and objectifcation of vulnerable
groups and communities.
 Preface xiii

In a thought-provoking book recently published, Michael Rothberg pro-

poses the notion of the “implicated subject” as a way of dealing with painful
pasts that have defned historical injustices and whose strength is perpet-
uated in the present.2 Unlike victims and perpetrators with a direct and
experience-based relationship with these pasts, “implicated subjects’’ are
those that contribute, inherit or beneft from domination regimes, but do
not originate or control them. In this regard, colonial legacies – including
racism, in its varying forms – constitute a past-present that collectively
urges us to problematise this sedimented and naturalised history. In other
words, understanding how racism was built, how it keeps itself alive and
how it manifests itself, publicly or silently, is an ethical and political duty of
crucial importance. This book makes an important contribution towards
this task being accomplished.

Miguel Cardina

Notes
1 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2007), “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global
Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges,” Review, XXX, 1, 45–89.
2 Rothberg, Michael (2019), The Implicated Subject. Beyond Victims and Perpetra-
tors. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Acknowledgement

This book has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC)
under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation pro-
gramme (grant agreement N.º [648608]), within the project “EXCHANGE –
Forensic geneticists and the transnational exchange of DNA data in the EU:
Engaging science with social control, citizenship and democracy,” led by
Helena Machado and hosted at the Communication and Society Research
Centre, Institute for Social Sciences of University of Minho (Portugal).
Part 1
Chapter 1

Introduction
Sheila Khan, Nazir Ahmed Can and
Helena Machado

This book is based on the premise that the project of Western modernity,
in its aspects of colonialism and of racial domination and subjugation, ex-
tends into today’s societies. Defending this claim and conviction requires
thorough investigation able to encompass the various dimensions and the
density associated with the creation, maintenance and continued existence
of modernity beyond its moment of creation, which is commonly situated by
Western thought in the 18th century, the century of Enlightenment. Without
detailed research into what Western modernity was and the characteristics
of the devices that enabled the global expansion of its principles, it proves
fruitless to understand, contextualise and reveal today the mechanisms of
racism, racialisation and racial surveillance, principles that guide our work
as editors and that of the authors of the various texts collected here. We be-
lieve that one of the great dangers facing current social, historical, economic
and philosophical thinking about the various phenomena of violence and
inequality that haunt our societies is, on the one hand, historical indolence
with regard to the interference of the past in divisive issues of the present,
from the refugee crisis to the “threats” of terrorism or manipulation of the
masses through communication technologies;1 and, on the other hand, the
reckless perception of historical legacies anchored to the emergence and
survival of the logics of coloniality, imperialism and human racialisation,
without which the project of Western modernity would be a jaded and un-
workable endeavour.
To leave this cartography of thinking, aspiring to be solid and capable of
providing sensitive interpretations of the debate around racism, xenopho-
bia, populism, ethno-racial criminalisation and the surveillance of certain
social groups, condemns the possibility of serious and balanced refection
to historical inconsistency. In particular, we need sensitive concepts for the
examination of the devices of modernity: domination, exploitation, violence
and racial differentiation, which cannot be regarded as the remnants and
rags of a distant era. On the contrary, under the guise of a technocratic,
technological, scientifc, rational and ideological language, the modernity

DOI: 10.4324/9781003014300-2
4 Sheila Khan et al.

worldview, conquered and constructed in the past tense, inhabits, breathes

and infltrates our current human grammar (El-Enany, 2020; Gilroy, 1987;
Lowe, 2015; Melson, 2012).
How and which aspects of Western modernity have implications for our
reality are the issues that question us and that, therefore, summon us to a
moral, critical and joint commitment towards the importance of embrac-
ing research from the perspective of an archaeology of knowledge, and of
dissecting the current logics of racism, racialisation (Medeiros, 2020) and
racial surveillance (Browne, 2015; Marshall, 2019). This departure point en-
trenched in our book demands, from us, a gaze that manifests itself not only
from a Western geopolitical perspective, but one that impels us to expand
our range of study into other realities with different human experiences,
which allow us to grasp the analytical richness of other contexts, of other
historical, cultural and political dynamics and maturities.

Modernity matters
Understanding how the breadth of modernity is integral to our societies also
challenges us to interweave histories, narratives, dimensions and phenom-
ena that reveal, in their fullness, the fact that colonialism never fnished and
that it has a performative role not yet suffciently theorised and analysed in
the academic world (Sa’di, 2012). The persistence of the legacy of modernity
can be seen in the continuation of systemic racism and in the increasingly
covert nature of racial discourse and practices, which is revealed so much
in the avoidance of direct racial terminology, in the development of a racial
political agenda that sidesteps direct racial references, in the subtle nature
of most mechanisms of reproducing racial privilege and in the reconfgura-
tion of some racial practices of the past (Shain, 2020).
It is within this awareness of the perpetuation of the legacies of the Euro-
pean empire and its multiple forms of colonialism that we have established
a dialogue between different refective approaches and schools of thought
and different cultural and historical situations. Guided by a transdiscipli-
nary methodology and an intersectional perspective in which the concepts
of race, gender, class, culture, politics, art, identity and technology converge
and enrich each other, this book seeks to understand the complexity and
scope of the project of modernity. The narrative of the Western modernity
project ushered in one of the most auspicious and glorious times of eman-
cipation, expansion, economic growth and cultural development in the Eu-
ropean context. However, together with an era celebrated as unique and
original in its guiding principles, it also conceived one of the darkest ma-
chines of power and violence that served as tools that originated the slave
trade, slavery and the illegitimate appropriation of territories, expropriat-
ing, expelling and punishing anything opposing the magnitude proposed
 Introduction 5

and engineered by that narrative. The humus of modernity is the conception

of major contradictions and attacks on human dignity, on respect for cul-
tural diversity and on equality in the sharing of both material and symbolic
goods. We are not alone in being aware of this nature of oppositions, di-
chotomies and the back and forth that the project of modern man carries
into the global world. Authors such as Albert Memi, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B.
Dubois, Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Walter Mignolo,
Ann Laura Stoler, Lisa Lowe, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Cedric Rob-
inson, Jordi A. Byrd, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy and Nadine El-Enany,
among others, are resounding in their insistence on the argument that the
genealogy of Western modernity is entirely complicit in the genealogy of a
grammar of racial differentiation, racialisation and racism. Accordingly, in
order to conquer and grow, it was imperative to colonise, appropriate, sub-
jugate, surveil (Fanon, 2008) and, if possible, eliminate (Wolfe, 2006).2 It is
in this context that colonialism and imperialism emerge as mechanisms that
care for, protect and reinforce the pillars underpinning Western modernity.
As guardians of modernity, colonialism and imperialism, they symbolise
and assume the power of colonising mother countries in conquered and
plundered lands (Galeano, 2017). For Walter Mignolo, this is a fundamental
characteristic in better dissecting the necessary compatibility between the
modern and the colonial. According to his thesis, “if coloniality is consti-
tutive of modernity, in the sense that there cannot be modernity without
coloniality, then the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality are
also two sides of the same coin” (Mignolo, 2007, 464). Boaventura de Sousa
Santos will highlight this duality, designating it as abyssal lines, detailing
the concept of modernity in the following terms:
Modern abyssal thinking stands out for its ability to produce and radicalise
distinctions. Modern Western thinking still operates along abyssal lines that
divide the human world from the sub-human, in such a way that principles of
humanity are not undermined by inhumane practices. The colonies represent
a model of radical exclusion that remains in modern Western thinking and
practices today, just as it did in the colonial cycle. Today, as then, the creation
and – at the same time – the negation of the other side of the line are an inte-
gral part of hegemonic principles and practices (Santos, 2007, 3–10).
With the aim of lending consistency to this observation, and although it
is not our intention to review the extensive literature already produced on
this subject, it is important to emphasise, by way of example, the mindset
of Lisa Lowe, who, in her work The Intimacy of Four Continents, notes the
following:

This genealogy also traces the manners in which the liberal affrmations
of individualism, civility, mobility, and free enterprise simultaneously
innovate new means and forms of subjugation, administration and
6 Sheila Khan et al.

governance. The genealogy of modern liberalism is thus also a gene-

alogy of modern race; racial differences and distinctions designate the
boundaries and endure as remainders attesting to the violence of liberal
universality.
(Lowe, 2015, 3–7)

The study of this narrative of modernity as emancipating and developmental

in nature, demonstrates in co-existence other attributes less worthy of its prin-
ciples and how those are inexorably maintained and calibrated to preserve
its nomenclature and longevity. Without violence, domination and the hierar-
chisation of the “Other,” the clauses of expansion, exploitation and economic
growth in Western colonising mother countries could not have been activated
and validated. In this sense, as Nelson Maldonaldo-Torres points out, the
lights of Western modernity carry with them the shadows of a heinous and
mournful disrespect of thousands and thousands of other human beings who
were stripped of their sense of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) and the aware-
ness of the right to their humanity. The archaeology of modernity brings with
it the emergence of an ambitious and thirsty source of epistemological and
ontological control of the “Other,’” assuming the act of violence and force as
logics protected from any questioning and review. The logic of elimination is,
thus, presented as the aqueduct over which fows the whole spring of dispos-
session, banishment and denial of human and moral rights – the characteristic
attributes of the expansionist projects of the Western world.3 In fact, the leg-
acy of modernity is the archive of repeated legitimisation processes of racial
hierarchisation, of colonial surveillance over men, women and children, who
were denied the right to cultural autonomy and civic emancipation.

Race, racialisation and racial surveillance

Flowing through a logic marked by the interest of territorial domination,
driven by a heroic discourse of self-justifcation and anchored, in practice,
in human atrocities and human rights violations, the narrative of Western
modernity caustically elevates the creation of race. Modernity cultural and
political constructs race as another essential element for human demarca-
tion and hierarchisation, performing race through new semantics and lan-
guage based on the humanity versus sub-humanity binomial, therefore the
understanding of the racial dimension and of the process of racialisation
and surveillance of the “Other” is of unquestionable importance for a tri-
angular articulation and survival of modern thought: at the top, Western
modernity, as macro-structure; in the middle, the logic of coloniality and
imperialism; and, at its base, racial classifcation designed as the ground for
the durability of conquered territories and people. The logic of racialisa-
tion is the right and effective key for the strengthening of colonised spaces,
 Introduction 7

slavery and forced labour, but also the armour of a praxis and ideology that
modern European thought instrumentalised so as to eternalise, without
moral remnants, the experience of colonial and imperialist expansion in the
world. Each in their own way, but always without measure or modesty, the
various European empires made use of this logic to reap the benefts and
advantages that fuelled the hegemony and wealth of their colonising mother
countries. The experiences of this modern colonisation and imperialism that
the texts analyse here represent various living repositories and testimonies
of the force, magnitude and impact that the abyssal experience of moder-
nity has left as a legacy in our present time. Indeed, this force was not only
territorial, it was also tentacular, feeling its way into other dimensions such
as gender,4 ethnic groups, caste, religion, social class, sexuality, law and the
enforcement of these laws through measures of control and surveillance. As
Ann Laura Stoler points out, to understand the archive of modernity is to
immerse our thinking into a fne-tuned engine, pumped for power, in which
the law and logic of domination and elimination were fuelled to serve one
single purpose: to dominate, demoralise and strip the racialised “Other”
trapped into the category of sub-human:

[W]hat constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of
classifcation and epistemology signals at specifc times are (and refect)
critical features of colonial politics and power. The archive was the su-
preme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a repos-
itory of codifed beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections
between secrecy, the law, and power.
(2002, 87)

Control and surveillance were the measures assumed by colonial and im-
perial powers (Cole, 2000) to enclose in the space of sub-humanity all those
who served through their enslaved labour-force the goals of sovereignty and
domination, the modern logic of colonial expansion. In Black Skin and White
Masks, Frantz Fanon portrays in detail how the gaze of the white man –
“the white gaze” – reigned over the lives of those whom modernity had
stripped of their sense of mobility, civility and humanity. Simone Browne
picks up Fanon’s thought by showing in her book, Dark Matters, on the Sur-
veillance of Blackness, the closed devices that mark the enslaved body, mon-
itored and conditioned by an idea of possession and power when she says,

[T]ake, for example, Fanon’s often cited “Look, the negro!” passage in
Black Skin, White Masks on the experience of epidermization, where
the white gaze fxes him as an object among objects, and he says, “the
white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me.”
(Browne, 2015, 7)
8 Sheila Khan et al.

The history of empires was simultaneously a vast legacy of violence and

an unbridled string of crimes against humanity. As several authors point
out, “[T]he history of empire, is the history of crime and violence. Empires
are, criminally speaking, criminal organisations” (Iadicola apud Kakel,
2019, 5). Techno-colonial legacies endure and are imported through other
much more refned tools and measures – such as border control (Amelung
and Machado, 2019); transnational genetic-database-sharing protocols
(Machado and Granja, 2020; Machado, Granja and Amelung, 2020; Que-
irós, 2019) and the use of surveillance cameras, drones and Big Data in crim-
inal investigations (Ferguson, 2019; Neiva, 2020) – which make abundantly
clear the survival and longevity of the current logics of racialisation, crim-
inalisation and racial surveillance (M’charek, 2020; Skinner, 2018). Equally
regrettable is this uncompromised judgement when witnessing the inevita-
bility of a past of modernity that is not extinct, but by other ways and con-
spicuities, remains present, austere and racialising. With regard to this last
observation, what we read in the book (B)ordering Britain is worrying, as
Nadine El-Enany is peremptory in asserting the following:

It is spurred on by a widespread and concerted refusal to understand

contemporary British politics in the context of Britain’s colonial his-
tory. The failure to connect the presence of many racialised people in
Britain to the destruction and dispossession of British colonialism is
as profound as it is pervasive. Britain is a young nation-state, but an
old imperial power. The task of bordering Britain is an ongoing and
centuries-old process. Britain’s borders, articulated and policed via
immigration laws, maintain the global racial order established by co-
lonialism, whereby colonised peoples are dispossessed of land and
resources. They also maintain Britain as a racially and colonially con-
fgured space in which the racialised poor are subject to the operation
of internal borders and are disproportionately vulnerable to street and
state racial terror.5 Britain is thus not only bordered, but also racially
ordered, through the operation of immigration control.
(El-Enany, 2020, 1–3)

Above all else, logics that pervade times and contexts through the main-
tenance of an abyssal vision of the world, which we witness with the in-
crease of racial crimes, and with demonstrations of exacerbated populism
and xenophobia directed towards certain social groups still perceived as
racialised bodies and human dangers in the space of not only European
contemporaneity, but a contemporaneity in which the gaze of the white man
still assumes a primacy and sovereignty vis-à-vis the “Other.” If anything
contradictory and restless can be found in the prefxes of “post”-colonialism
and “post”-imperialism, it is clearly this constant predisposition to mark
bodies by their colour, national origin, gender, culture and identity, ignoring
 Introduction 9

in this demarcation any awareness and responsibility of the historical lega-

cies that racialised bodies carry.

Bringing home the debate on racism and

racial surveillance
The various chapters that make up this book are all committed to this aware-
ness of the legacies of modernity in the treatment of the subjects analysed.
Accordingly, different refections and analyses detail the relevance of mod-
ern colonial historicity as well as the temporal, social, political and cultural
durability of the logics of racialisation and racial surveillance in today’s
societies. The precedence given to an intersectional vision is a characteristic
that stands out in each text without, however, interfering with the authorial
originality that is inherent to it. Confrming its transdisciplinary vocation
and its intersectional dimension, the book is divided into two working mo-
ments. The frst, which we refer to as “Arts, Race, Identity and Memory,”
is dedicated to refecting on how the cultural, artistic, identity and memory
dimensions are spaces that critically dissect the survival of Western moder-
nity and its logics of racialisation and racial surveillance.
Focusing on the relations between literary writing and empire, Nazir
Ahmed Can and Rita Chaves analyse some of the ways in which the no-
tion of race, the engine of Western expansion in the world (still ongoing), is
projected in works published in different contexts. In a frst moment, they
observe how a certain idea of race brings together three European narra-
tives separated by more than a hundred years: Heart of Darkness (1902) by
Joseph Conrad, Zambeziana – Scenas da vida colonial [Zambezian – Scenes
of Colonial Life] (1927) by Emílio de San Bruno and A última viúva de África
(2017) by Carlos Vale Ferraz. They then examine the literary project of An-
golan Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, who, between the fnal decades of the 20th
century and the frst few of the 21st century, resizes the debate. In these two
tempos, they identify the process that refects the permanence of a world-
view that hierarchises human beings by skin colour, which they call “the
schism of race,” and its counterpoint, produced on African soil, which they
call the “seism of the other.”
Márcio Seligmann shows us how the history of Afro-Brazilian Black art
is inhabited by all sorts of violence, often read as “achievements of civili-
zation.” In this history, science, academia and the entire cultural feld are
presented as a structuring part of the colonial system. This reality, accord-
ing to the author, takes on particularly astounding proportions in a country
where, like no other in Latin America, politicians nostalgic for slavery and
torture assume positions of power through the legitimacy of voting. After
shining a light on the ethical, aesthetic and institutional contours of con-
temporary Black art in Brazil, he examines the production of two artists,
Rosana Paulino and Aline Mota, to confrm the strength of this production.
10 Sheila Khan et al.

Through the analysis of their works and installations, he defends the idea
that this production can only be called “Afro-Brazilian art” if the term
“Brazilian” serves as a means to situate the context of the diaspora and not
to impose national limits of colonial vocation.
Mário Augusto Medeiros da Silva addresses a series of elements mak-
ing up the social process of Western bourgeois modernity and the place of
Black resistance in this dynamic that spans centuries. In the frst section, he
analyses the construction and consequences of the experiences of counter-
hegemonic Black subjects, who are part of processes of insubordination in
the 19th century and in anti-colonial movements in the 20th century. The
author then examines the notions of postcolonial and postcolonialism,
within which historically subordinated subjects vie for a place of meaning
and prominence. Finally, placing the refection in contemporary Brazil,
he offers data on the issue of Black modernity and the circulation of ideas
that characterises it. In the fnal section, prioritising the notion of intersec-
tionality, he refects on the relationship between social memory and Black
modernity to unveil how experiences of Black insubordination have been
established in recent decades.
Júlio César Machado de Paula provides a refection on how the intention
of the Cape Verdean authors responsible for the publication of the magazine
Claridade (Manuel Lopes, Baltasar Lopes and Jorge Barbosa) was, on the
one hand, the literary emancipation of the archipelago in relation to the
Portuguese literary system; but, on the other hand, and at various times,
the intention was also to reproduce ideological values similar to the colonial
policy of António de Oliveira Salazar. To validate this hypothesis, he high-
lights the presence of the work of the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre
in this process and, in particular, his role as a thinker and advocate of a
supposed positive differential of the Portuguese colonial model. The ties be-
tween the concepts of “miscegenation,” worked by Freyre and appropriated
as the political foundation of the Portuguese Estado Novo, and “creolity,”
adopted by the authors of Claridade as a central element of Cape Verdean
cultural education, will give the measure of this paradox formed almost a
century ago.
For Valérie Magdelaine-Andrianjaftrimo, modernity is rarely defned as
a project and, as such, is usually seen less as a question than as an observa-
tion. Favouring some Francophone literary contexts in the Indian Ocean,
the author examines how some writers position themselves vis-à-vis notions
of modernity, universalism, racialisation and the coloniality of power, high-
lighting, in certain works, what she defnes as an “ambiguous decolonial de-
sire.” In the process, she also emphasises the various critical traditions that
address the literary phenomenon of the region, the impasses of “hybrid”
aesthetics usually celebrated by them, despite the fact that these aesthetics
paradoxically intersect colonial and postcolonial imageries, the silences that
are still felt about the place of the “Black man” in Indo-Oceanic societies
 Introduction 11

and the forms of resistance that have been produced throughout recent dec-
ades by local literary agents.
Basing his examination on various authors and works of a literary and
critical nature, Paulo de Medeiros looks into how the debate around issues
of race and racism is balanced between political and historical contexts that
at times promote their absence but, at others, imply a return to a thinking
that is deeply committed to the more underground roots and dynamics of
racial and racialising logics. In the body of his refection, the works analysed
help in exercising a memory duty about contemporary human experiences
and that, as the author notes, recognising the intense damage wrought by
racism and other causes of the profound inequality that limits all of our
potential to be human and free – and extolling the capacity for literature to
help us in the never-ending process of becoming and belonging – is certainly
not a new theory of World Literature, but could, or should, be one of its
main tasks.
The second part of the book embraces the subjects of racism, technology
and crime. Refecting on the incorporation of genetic technologies in crimi-
nal identifcation, this section provides an analysis of the bio-objectifcation
of human beings, criminalisation and racial surveillance, which are still
hostages of processes of coloniality and racialisation, even if under another
guise and different semantics. The debate on the silent interference of race,
racism and racialisation is deconstructed under various angles of analysis
based on specifc case studies in which sophisticated genetic technologies are
adopted to infer population groups in order to identify suspects of crimes.
In these practices, constructed and performed under the alleged neutral-
ity of science, any direct reference to “race” is omitted. At the same time,
in a varyingly veiled or overt way, racial assumptions are perpetuated and
“scientifc evidence” is produced to sustain practices of police surveillance
systemically moulded by purposes of criminalisation and surveillance of
certain racial groups and more dispossessed and vulnerable communities.
The text by Sheila Khan and Helena Machado explores the concept of
postcolonial racial surveillance to deconstruct the rhetorical and opera-
tional devices of genetics and map out modes of biopolitics that connect
science with the imposition of state power in its meshes of social classifca-
tion and discriminatory exclusion. In strange times, in which “truth seems
to be in the genes,” the authors analyse the ways in which Western science
develops techno-scientifc apparatus fxated on the quest for knowledge of
biological individuality. At the same time, logics are unleashed that consol-
idate imperial and colonial legacies, whereby the search for “individuality”
is interconnected, in a complex and intertwined way, with the “collective.”
These relationships, interpenetrations and connections between the “indi-
vidual” and the “collective” denote, in a particularly illustrative way, a form
of technological control based on the knowledge of biological individuality
and on the interweaving of suspicion and cultures of objectivity. These fows
12 Sheila Khan et al.

between the individual and the collective have profound implications for the
reinforcement of discriminatory logics and the marginalisation and surveil-
lance of certain social groups in the light of the tension of the colonial past
in postcolonial European time and space.
The following texts, by Nina Amelung and Filipa Queirós, exemplify how
concretely racism and scientifc and police practices, respectively, go hand
in hand. Both authors use the case of the highly controversial technology
of forensic DNA phenotyping (FDP) technologies. FDP brings together a
series of technologies geared towards inferring externally visible character-
istics from DNA traces found at crime scenes, which would then ostensibly
provide investigative leads in the criminal investigation based on the infer-
ence of externally visible human traits, such as eye, hair and skin colour, as
well as biological age and, potentially, biogeographic ancestry.
Nina Amelung studies the profound social, ethical and political impli-
cations of the use of FDP in Germany, a nation whose collective memory
regarding genetics is still infuenced by memories of its Nazi past and of
how science was used in racialising genetics and the eugenics movement.
Germany’s past has contributed to a strong sense of privacy regarding ge-
netics and a general suspicion about state players accessing sensitive genetic
information. Germany, therefore, offers a politico-cultural context in which
various stakeholders have a deep-seated awareness of the risks of racial dis-
crimination, and where diverse safeguards are urgently needed to achieve
acceptable and accountable technologies. Controversies remain due to un-
ease concerning racialised legacies, and fears of aggravating racial bias in
an effort to fx it. The author argues that, quite clearly from Germany’s his-
tory of race science and eugenics, particularly in the 20th century, to the
criminalisation of migrants after the 2015 summer of migration in the 21st
century, various discriminatory systems in different eras have produced and
reproduced social divisions and inequalities, producing wider ecologies for
the politics of belonging and non-belonging.
Filipa Queirós explores, via different examples from European jurisdic-
tions, the expectations of scientists regarding phenotype inference technol-
ogy, seen as one of the most controversial but also most promising weapons
of genetics in the identifcation of suspects. The extent of the controversies
raised by this inference technology of visible physical characteristics of hu-
man beings is sustained mainly by the fears that geneticists have, in Europe,
about explicitly invoking the idea or concept of race. Indeed, in Europe,
science has an ambiguous and contradictory relationship with the concept
of race (M’charek, 2020) that involves concealing and – in that process of
absence – making race more present than ever. By exploring how FDP com-
bines and confates ideas about human biological differences that are both
race and population-based, the author demonstrates how attempts to de-
construct race within science can also, potentially, converge in its recon-
struction, (re)creating dynamics of collectivisation of suspicion over specifc
 Introduction 13

population groups. Queirós argues that geneticists’ engagement in contro-

versial aspects around the development and application of this technology,
created within a logic of race-sorting, reveals hopes of ethical sensitivity
towards historical and cultural past experiences associated with the hegem-
onic use of racially differentiated categories, eugenics and colonialism.
This book aspires to offer readers the opportunity to become familiar
with and aware of the richness of human realities that are absent from the
mainstream agendas and curriculum of Western research and correspond-
ing patterns of knowledge. In view of this auspicious intention, this collec-
tive endeavour proves how fruitful it is to discern and voice the existence of
socially invisible and marginalised realities. Finally, this collective book also
aims to draw attention to a historical duty of memory and of recognition.

Notes
1 In this respect, see the book by Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Mon-
teiro (2020), História(s) do Presente. O Mundo que o Passado nos Deixou, in
which the authors bring together different scholars from the disciplines of his-
tory, politics, human rights, sociology of power, psychology and gender stud-
ies, to critically assess the intimacy and collusion intertwined between past and
present in the debate of the most contemporary issues, such as globalisation;
human rights throughout time; the refugee crisis; the political emancipation of
several African countries; neo-colonialism; post-colonialism; the interference
of communication technologies in matters about terrorism; fake news; the pa-
triarchy and social and gender activism.
2 In his work, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006),
Peter Wolfe presents an argument that must be highlighted, with regard to the
huge importance of settler colonialism in sustaining and controlling territories
stolen from the native communities, for example, in North America. In this
sense, the author straightforwardly points out:
Settler Colonialism Is Inherently Eliminatory […]. The logic of elimination
not only refers to the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it
includes that. […] [I]t erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land
base […], settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.
Settler colonialism destroys to replace.
(Wolfe, 2006, 387–388)
Following this refection, see also, Goldstein, Alyosha. 2008. “Where the Nation
Takes Place: Proprietary Regimes, Anti Statism, and U.S. Settler Colonialism.”
South Atlantic Quarterly, 107(4), 833–861.
3 In her recent book, “(B)ordering Britain. Race, law, empire” (2020), Nadine El-
Enany observes: “Europe’s appeal to notions of liberté, égalité, fraternité has
always coexisted with imperial wars and dispossession. Its founders drew on
contradictions that were undemocratic, militaristic, imperialistic, White and
Christian-supremacist” (El-Enany, 2020, Chapters 5 and 9).
4 The contribution of studies on the relation between colonialism, race and gen-
der enrich the possibility of seeing the relevance of this intersectionality for the
study of the logics of coloniality and racialisation. Here are some such works:
Stoler, A. L. 1989. “Rethinking Colonial Categories.” Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 13(1), 134–161; Stoler, A. L. 1991. “Carnal Knowledge and
14 Sheila Khan et al.

Imperial Power.” In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthro-

pology in a Postmodern Era, edited by M. di Leonardo, 51–101. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press; Stoler, A. L. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire:
Foucault’s “History of Sexuality” and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press; Davis, Angela. 1989. Women, Race, and Class. New
York: Random House; Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Inter-
section of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doc-
trine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal
Forum, 139–167; Collins, Patricia H. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman;
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Anne Russo, Lourdes Torres, eds. 1991; Williams,
P. 1992. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press; Mohanty, Chandra T. and Alexander, M. Jacqui, eds. 1996. Feminist Ge-
nealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge.
5 On this subject, see: Razack, Sherene H. 2014. “Racial Terror: Torture and
Three Teenagers in Prison.” Borderlands, 13(1), 1–27.

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Chapter 2

Empire and literature

From the schism of race to the
seism of the “other”
Nazir Ahmed Can and Rita Chaves

Supported by mechanisms of a legal and/or scientifc nature, the exploitation

of the difference of others has always been a safe way to exercise domina-
tion. The frontiers of intolerance are moving and encompass cultural herit-
age, religious worlds and issues of gender and sexuality. But it is impossible
to disregard the prevalence of racial distinction in the hierarchisation of
people, a fact that has acquired systemic outlines with the advent of moder-
nity. We cannot ignore the fact that the great voyages led by the Europeans,
so praised by the history of the West, founded the colonial system and, with
it, spread meanings and practices that established racism as the basis of
relations in occupied territories. Confrming Walter Benjamin’s argument
about the contiguity between cultural documents and barbarism (1994), the
same voyages to which the ability to bring land and people together is usu-
ally attributed have also normalised violence. To this end, a pyramid has
been erected, securing the white standard at its peak, thus elevating it to the
norm of the Western eye. In the words of Cameroonian Achille Mbembe:

For many centuries, the concept of race – which we know stems from
the animal world – has been frst and foremost useful in naming non-
European humanities. What we refer to as a state of degradation of an
ontological nature. The notion of race allows non-European humanities
to be represented as if they were a lesser being, the poor refection of the
ideal man from whom they were separated by an insurmountable time
gap, a practically insurmountable difference.
(Mbembe, 2014, p. 39)

Diffcult to systematise, the ramifcations of this process of hierarchisation

affect the literary feld in a particular way. Focusing on the complex ties be-
tween literary writing and colonial/anti-colonial relations, the proposal of
this chapter is to unveil some of the ways in which the notion of race, carried
as essential baggage in Western expansion in the world and with an energy
that is still striking today, is also projected in literature. In the frst section,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003014300-3
 The schism of race and the seism of the “Other” 17

we will take a look at the intensity of the concept of race from the point of
view of three European narratives separated by more than a hundred years:
Heart of Darkness (2008 [1902]) by Joseph Conrad, Zambeziana – Scenas da
vida colonial [Zambezian – Scenes of Colonial Life] (1999 [1927]) by Emílio
de San Bruno and A última viúva de África [The Last Widow of Africa] (2017)
by Carlos Vale Ferraz. In the second section, we will address the work of
Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, who, between the fnal decades of the 20th cen-
tury and the frst ones of the 21st century, challenged us to re-examine the
debate posed by racial issues. The voyage through these works allows us to
follow a process identifed here as the “schism of race,” which mirrors the
permanence of a “structure of feeling” (Said, 2011; Williams, 1973), and its
opposition to what we call the “seism of the other.”
Published in different contexts by authors who moved in different uni-
verses of colonial formation, the narratives of Conrad, San Bruno and Vale
Ferraz share an interest in the African space and in the power relations that
had been engineered there, primarily since the historic Berlin Conference of
1884–1885.1 With distances in terms of conception and aesthetic realisation
preserved, these novels naturalise the belief that between white Europeans
and Black Africans there is an insurmountable barrier. Race, in fact, shapes
the worldview of narrators and characters and, considering its permanent
updating, is confgured as an obsession and can be identifed as the main
“schism” of these and so many other Western works.
Conversely, the work of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho invites us to refect on
the power dynamics of a less usual prism: pinpointing the singularities of a
process initiated with the Western expansion in the world, drawing atten-
tion to the old and new forms of racial and ethnic segregation. The author
includes, in the eyes of his narrators, populations that, while being mar-
ginalised by white occupation and the Bantu impact,2 preserved and refor-
mulated practices more in line with other modes of existence. Due to the
knowledge they accumulated that would come to be very useful to everyone,
including Westerners and Westernised people, who tend to despise them,
these communities represent a kind of “seism” that goes against the rigidity
of the premises defended in the other novels examined here.

The schism of race

The opposition between Greeks (civilised) and barbarians (animalised)
is an obsessive marker in texts from Ancient Greece, just as the register
based on the division between “us” and “them” characterises various pre-
modern eras and artistic forms. But such separation becomes more struc-
turally consistent with Western expansion in the world. In this long-lasting
environment, from which orientalist3 narratives of travellers and colo-
nists arise, we fnd Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, possibly the most
18 Nazir Ahmed Can and Rita Chaves

important among the many novels that have interceded in the “invention”
of spaces and peoples settled outside of what has been assumed as “the
West,” having contributed to the development of readers and writers every-
where. Remarkable with regard to formal cohesion, to effects of ambigu-
ity that veiled and simultaneously unveiled meanings, to the harmonious
alliance between the fragmentation of the narrative voice and the unity of
narrated content, to the creation of an unusual hero and territory, and to
the threshold of indistinctness created around direct, indirect and free in-
direct discourse, this novel had a great impact on Western literature. Irony
is joined to these elements, assuming its condition as a trope, scrutinising,
among other things, the European presence on the African continent. For
some of these reasons, Conrad is certainly still seen today as one of the
frst anti-colonial authors, a position greatly relativised by the readings
of Edward Said and, frst and foremost, of Chinua Achebe, who considers
this great novel vital to the “defamation of the name of Africa” (Achebe,
2012, p. 64). With a dose of acidity, the Nigerian writer uses his experience
as a child brought up in a British protectorate to point out clues that help
us understand the connection between the more general lines of Conrad’s
literary project and the expansionist project. From his African viewpoint,
he fnds himself shaken by a certain imbalance that runs through this novel
and raises interesting questions as to the relationship between literature
and domination too.
Clearly, because of the power of its images, Conrad’s narrative leads to
the awareness of the absurdity of the colonial project. And from this we can
glean aspects that express the horror of the system that mutilated a conti-
nent. Conversely, we can see how, in the text, irony is directed primarily at
the European “others”: the Belgians, who represent the policies of Leopold
II; the French; individuals of various nationalities who are part of the Com-
panies or the Danes:

their administration was merely a squeeze, and noting more, I suspect.

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing
to boast of […], since your strength is just an accident arising from the
weakness of others.
(Conrad, 2008, p. 28)

The accusatory intensity present there does not, however, touch the Eng-
lish; that is to say, as a system, colonialism is not the target of an effectively
critical eye. Along with the relative acceptance of the colonial system, there
is the recognition of the dichotomous division of the world: by limiting to
Western man the dimension of humanity – which can be degraded through
contact with the “heathen continent” or pluralised thanks to the expe-
rience of travel – Conrad places Africans in the space of barbarism, in-
cluding them, without exception, in the inescapable savagery of the cursed
 The schism of race and the seism of the “Other” 19

continent. Accordingly, the local population is read through reduction and

its physical and socio-cultural difference is fltered, compared to the ani-
mal world:

That fool helmsman, his hands on the spokes, was lifting his knees
high, stamping his feet, champing his mouth, like a reined-in horse […].
A black fgure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long black
arms, across the glow. It had horns – antelope horns, I think – on its head.
(Conrad, 2008, pp. 45, 88–89)

Conrad’s transgressive genius can be associated with his ability to construct

a narrative in which the author’s imagery would operate as a symmetrical
fip side to what narrators and characters proclaim. The diffculty, though,
in calmly accepting this idea lies in identifying textual signs that support
this hypothesis. The lack of evidence of these signs and the great signif-
cance of references to Africans paint a picture of a complicated fctional
pact, which certainly has different contours depending on the hemisphere
of reading. The recognition of the plausibility that maps out the connection
points with the reader naturally depends on the repertoire of experiences in
which the text is projected. When the “lugar de fala” [“speaking place”]4 is
discussed so much, it seems logical to also consider the “listening place,” an
expression that can be seen in Achebe’s steadfast position. Enshrined in the
centre of the contradiction that raises the deadlock between the oppressor
and the oppressed in the colonial setting, Conrad’s novel is not free from
the risk of being seen as a text contaminated by the prejudices displayed
by its characters. Set in a stifed and prehistoric universe, Africans are not
invited to take part in the chorus of voices, which is restricted to a portion
of the society of the novel. With the silencing, which, according to Achebe,
robs humanity from the African, you can associate the violation of a basic
principle of an artistic proposal: that of foreseeing the other. The inabil-
ity to absorb the other side invalidates polyphony and dialogism (Bakhtin,
1998), central elements of the aesthetics that disembark in modernity and
are stranded there.
The abyss between human beings, the centreline of all forms of colonial-
ism, found a fertile ground in the scientifc feld and had a signifcant compo-
nent of justifcation in the artistic feld. If, in the case of England, important
writers made the Empire their soil,5 in Portugal the commitment was taken
up by a literature of fragile aesthetic grasp. A colonial project based on pre-
cariousness, such as the Portuguese one, only from the 1920s onwards, saw in
literary writing an alliance to be cultivated, with the rise of authoritarianism
and the subsequent establishment of the Estado-Novo. António de Oliveira
Salazar and his collaborators saw the strength of colonialism as a total fact,6
which, more than the social and economic plan, touched the sphere of cul-
ture. Aware of this, they encouraged the production of narratives that would
20 Nazir Ahmed Can and Rita Chaves

allude to the occupation and would incorporate the conquered lands.7 The
centrality of the division between worlds based on the idea of race would,
thus, favour the improbable communion between prestigious fgures such
as Conrad and “profane authors” (Bourdieu, 1992), such as Emílio de San
Bruno, for example. A colonial offcial in various contexts, the author left
us, from his experience in Mozambique, the novel Zambeziana – Scenas da
Vida Colonial [Zambezian – Scenes of Colonial Life].
Without the sophistication and aesthetic quality of Conrad and other
English- and French-speaking fgures analysed by Said in works such as
Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, we fnd in the colonial repertoire
written in the Portuguese language a series of narratives in which we can
detect severe incommunicability between the occupiers and the occupied.
Always in the majority, the white characters occupy a prominent position
in the storylines, leaving the African in the extension of nature. On the spa-
tial plane, too, the imbalance is clear: while in the French universe you can
identify echoes of contact with the landscape of the tropics in the literature
of the mother country, visible even in the avant-garde aesthetics of the 20th
century,8 in the Portuguese panorama there is a strong occlusion – that is
to say, a great unwillingness for contact with any sign from the other side.
The reference in the title to a native in Zambeziana – Scenas da vida co-
lonial [Zambezian - Scenes of colonial life] may suggest a softening of the
gravity of ideological commitment as if it were an exception. However, the
apparent desire to approach this new universe fades into the limits of the pro-
ject, expressed in language and confrmed by extratextual elements. Emílio
de San Bruno is the penname of Filipe Emílio de Paiva, a naval offcer who
served for some years in territories of the Portuguese empire, including An-
gola, Macao and Mozambique, having published works such as O Caso da
Rua Volong – Scenas da Vida Colonial [The Case of Rua de Volong – Scenes
of Colonial Life] (1928) and A Velha Magra da Ilha de Luanda. Scenas da vida
colonial [The Thin Old Woman from the Island of Luanda. Scenes of Colonial
Life] (1929). From these titles, one can infer a tendency towards hypocrisy
that the author then confrms in his writing, including the repetition of the
subtitle [Scenes of Colonial Life], revealing the purpose of the project aimed
at capturing views of life in lands dominated by his country. At least in the
novel that is of interest to us here, San Bruno accomplished his goal: the
work selects situations experienced in Quelimane, capital of Zambezia, a
province within the Mozambican territory boasting certain characteristics,
in the period of transition to a more effective occupation and a new form
of economic exploitation. Positioned by Francisco Noa within the phase of
Portuguese colonial production that he called “exotic,” the work refects, in
its fascination with the landscape, a certain enchantment for the fora and
fauna, markers that lead us to perceive an urge of valorisation of the “discov-
ered” land (Noa, 2002). Written in the phase of the effective establishment
of the Portuguese in Mozambique, Zambeziana benefts from this feeling of
 The schism of race and the seism of the “Other” 21

wonderment, but the danger of a kind of schizophrenia was not avoided, in

which we can see the apprehensive eye refected, through the very inability
to capture the reality before him. The need to present as decoded a world
that he knows is another explains the hesitation of the narrator, who alter-
nates assertive opinions about the beings he thinks he grasps. The intense
attraction that the landscape exerts is not enough to block the conviction
that there is also the “far background where no point of light marked human
life” (San Bruno, 1999, p. 34). Thus, if for Conrad the Congo was the centre
of evil (or the “heart of darkness”) – a kind of metonymy of the misbegotten
continent – for the Portuguese-speaking colonial authors, the African geog-
raphy would be predominantly the “wilderness” (Noa, 2002).
In this “wilderness” the most frequent trait of “race” is laziness, the cap-
ital sin that justifes subordination in terms of relations and the urgency for
the European’s intervention: “[T]o work, and this is what the blacks do not
want, especially if they of a warrior race” (San Bruno, 1999, p. 75). It is in-
teresting, however, that, perhaps out of distraction, the narrator lets himself
be carried away by the ballast of reality and in some passages registers a
disposition to work, as we can see in scenes such as:

Then, all the guests happily sat down, quickly unfolding their napkins
and the boys, so light that they appeared to be winged, without noise
ran quickly around the table, attentive and diligent to the service that
was about to begin.
(San Bruno, 1999, p. 97)

Other aspects such as the disregard for hygiene and the vocation for prom-
iscuity reinforce the demarcation between worlds. Africans are also defned
here by the contrast between larger proportions, from a physical point of
view (“membrudo e imponente” [robust and imposing], p. 61), and infan-
tilisation in psychological terms (“velhaco moleque” [childish old timer],
“gigante criança” [giant child], pp. 61, 73). In some moments, this rises to
the level of animalisation (“the old woman arranged the burning cinders
with the bony and sharp fngertips like the claws of a bird of prey,” p. 11). In
this light, religious differences become a factor that aggravates the physical
and moral limitation. Besides the fears generated by the practices of African
rituals, always shrouded in the darkness of prejudice, the dissemination of
Catholicism, one of the justifcations for the colonial project, was disturbed
by the shadow of Islam, which certainly prospered because it “took their
primitive brains more into account” (p. 106 – emphasis added by San Bruno).
In short, in canonical travel literature and in the constraining Portuguese
colonial literature, there were many elements that referred to the portrayal
of individuals collected in human zoos from the colonial exhibitions of the
19th and 20th centuries, such as the one from 1934 that was held in the gar-
dens of the Palácio de Cristal in the city of Oporto.
22 Nazir Ahmed Can and Rita Chaves

The incommunicability between worlds is intensifed in the construction

of the narrative focus, a structural element that in these texts seals the alli-
ance with the imperial vision. Interestingly, in this production to which the
function of building and disseminating accumulated knowledge (colonial)
about conquests was attributed, signs of the fallacy of discourse about the
encounter between cultures are spread. In response to the shock experienced
before what seems unacceptable, the irritability of the narrators is one of
the ways of expressing the shock when faced with the difference revealed
before their eyes. In addition to people, the disgust of the white characters
spreads throughout the material universe, forcing physical distancing even
from objects: “[T]he auctioneer announced to the bidding audience a small
camphorwood box, containing various exotic, African, Oriental trinkets, of
no value […]. He was indifferently prodding around in that colonial rubbish
with the tip of his cane” (San Bruno, 1999, p. 3).
Published 25 years after and far from the aesthetic refnement of Conrad’s
work, we repeat, Zambeziana approaches Heart of Darkness in how it conse-
crates what Mary-Louise Pratt called “the monarch of all I survey” (Pratt,
1999). The image alludes to the conviction of the dominator that it is his eye,
that of a white man, recorded in the written word, that grants existence to
places and beings. Without this record, nothing would have any legitimacy,
neither the source of rivers, nor mountains, nor plants, animals, men […] In
his omnipotence, the occupier, ignoring all that preceded him, enforces the
supremacy of his voice. On page 238, San Bruno shares Conrad’s attitude
and highlights the dealings that generated so much indignation in Achebe:
“Entering the Cahora Bassa all is darkness […] absolute ignorance; it is a path
that no one has ever walked, a truly infernal, savage path, like the entrance
to Dante’s hell” (San Bruno, 1999, p. 238 – emphasis added by San Bruno).
Fragile as a mother country, Portugal always insisted on the construction
of a self-image centred on hyperbole, ensuring that the enhancement of it-
self, common in imperial textuality, becomes oversized here. To boost its
position as a small country with a great destiny – the “illustrious Lusitanian
bosom” that Camões, the greatest poet promoting Portugal, sang of – it
invests in the argument of the historical right of occupation, a principle
supplanted by the pragmatic vision of the Berlin Conference. In San Bruno’s
novel, the dispute with other powers is acted out:

There’s so much of this kind of literature in England, you can’t imagine! –

said one of the engineers. (…) they tell of all sorts of adventures and put
the Portuguese to shame […]. Anyway, the English always like and read
with particular care everything about our colonies in South-East Africa.
(San Bruno, 1999, p. 167)

The Berlin Conference soon arrived and Portugal did not proft from
it at all […]. It was a small and weak nation, Germany imposed itself,
 The schism of race and the seism of the “Other” 23

England imposed itself, France imposed itself […] our representatives

writhed around, shouted, argued, presented beautiful documents of
ownership, of tradition, of legitimate defence of their rights, but on
those occasions the illustrious attendees were not interested.
(San Bruno, 1999, p. 29)

As a compensatory strategy, the mother country was divided between prac-

tising hyperbole and the use of euphemism. Against the poverty of the pres-
ent, there was confdence in the future, which was shared between the illusion
of prosperity and the certainty of its ability to perform a special task. Thus,
the country that was yet to be was ahead of itself in superlative fgures: “saw
that the Diário de Notícias interviewing the active and energetic General
Agent of the Colonies – these are the words of the newspaper – explained
to its fve hundred thousand readers” (San Bruno, 1999, p. 4). Now, if in
1930, 70 out of every 100 Portuguese people were unable to read (Mónica,
1977, p. 321), what is this fgure based on? The colonist he already was, was
playing his move, a peacemaker, impervious to the greed of his European
neighbours, open to sacrifce. A partner in the expansion of faith and of the
empire, he reaffrmed his willingness to weather the storms.
With an eye ever set on rival, more economically powerful nations, the myth
of “acclimatisation” to the tropics was brandished, confrmed in the version
of the “people more resistant and adaptable to the intertropical climate, more
than the English, more than the German” (San Bruno, 1999, p. 65). Having
acquired scientifc status, with the Luso-tropicalist interpretation of Gilberto
Freyre, the supposed vocation to be among other peoples was already being
bandied about in the initial texts of colonial fction. It is also interesting to ob-
serve the effrontery with which this vocation was integrated into the exercise
of violence, including physical violence: “I for one always have a whip on me,
ready to give a fogging! But they aren’t needful, what with the abundant well,
that is to say, with their little ration rice and beans, and cassava” (San Bruno,
1999, p. 81 – emphasis added by San Bruno). With the composure that the
passage of years allows, Portuguese colonialism can no longer be highlighted
by the gentleness that the Luso-tropicalist fantasy tried to legitimise. The level
of violence is attested to in Portugal’s role in the slave trade, in the upholding
forced labour until so late, in the duration of the last colonial war of a Euro-
pean mother country. As can be seen in this work from the frst half of the 20th
century, in colonial society the borders had been carefully drawn and the seal
of subaltern condition was given colour. In comparison with other colonial
systems, the Portuguese system was set apart by its temporal extension and for
the nature of the contradictions enclosed in its discourse about itself. Also seen
in the voices of his agents, we can say that this is the colonialism of an oxymo-
ron, the hallmark of the literature that frames it: “Paulo could clearly see how
much dedication, how much effort it would take to protect the great remains of
our Africa from the covetousness of foreign nations” (San Bruno, 1999, p. 32).
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 [As Baldwine indeede being a minister, had bene most fit to set
forth the life of a cardinall and byshop (for causes belonging to his
knowledge and ministery) so to encourage a writer now aliue to play
the part of a Pasquill, and rather make his pen his plough, then in a
hard season, liue like a labourer that doth seruice to many and litle
good to himselfe, I thought it necessary in a kinde of beneuolence
and curtesy of minde, to bestow some credit on that person that not
only hath preferred my tragedy to the printer, (being of his owne
deuice and penning) but also hath enlarged, by playne and familier
verse, the matter the world desires to heare or read, and makinge
common among a multitude that were secret and priuat among a
fewe. Which study and paynes of his owne purpose procures mee
(as one whom fortune hath flattered and afflicted) to appeare vnto
him, for the hearing of my calamity, and for the setting out both of my
rising vp and falling downe. So, to the whole worlde, by his helpe
and mine owne desire, I step out from the graue, where long I lay in
forgetfulnes, and declare in the voyce of a cardinall, a curious
discourse; yet sadly and sorrowfully tolde, as well vnto Churchyard
(the noter thereof) as to the rest that pleaseth to heare any peece of
my misfortune.]
 How Thomas Wolsey did arise vnto
great authority and gouernment, his
maner of life, pompe, and dignity, and
how hee fell downe into great
disgrace, and was arested of high
treason.
1.

Shall I looke on, when states step on the stage,

And play theyr parts, before the people’s face:
Some men liue now, scarce four score yeares of age,
Who in time past, did know the cardnall’s grace:
A gamesom worlde, when byshops run at bace:
Yea, get a fall, in striuing for the gole,
And body loase, and hazarde seely sole.

2.

Ambitious minde, a world of wealth would haue,

So scrats and scrapes, for scorfe, and scoruy drosse:
And till the flesh, and bones, be layde[2001] in graue,
Wit neuer rests, to grope for mucke and mosse:
Fye on prowde pompe, and gilted bridels’ bosse:
O glorious golde, the gaping after thee,
So blindes men’s eyes, they can no daunger see.

3.

Now note my byrth, and marke how I began,

Beholde from whence rose all this pryde of mine:
My father but, a plaine poore honest man,
And I his son, of wit and iudgement fine,
Brought vp at schoole and prou’d a good diuine,
For which great gifts, degree of schoole I had,
And batchler was, and I a litle lad.

4.

So, tasting some of fortune’s sweete consayts,

I clapt the hoode, on shoulder, braue as son,
And hopt at length to bite at better bayts,
And fill my mouth, ere banket halfe were don:
Thus holding on, the course I thought to ron:
By many a feast my belly grue so big,
That Wolsey streight became a wanton twig.

5.

Lo, what it is to feede on daynty meate,

And pamper vp the gorge with suger plate:
Nay, see how lads, in hope of higher seate,
Rise early vp and study learning late:
But hee thriues best that hath a blessed fate:
And hee speeds worst that worlde will nere aduaunce,
Nor neuer knowes what meanes good lucke nor
chaunce.

6.

My chaunce was great, for from a poore man’s son,

I rose aloft, and chopt and chaungde degree:
In Oxford first my famous name begon,
Where many a day the sholers honourd mee:
Then thought I how I might a courtier bee:
So came to court, and fethred there my wing,
With Henry th’eight, who was a worthy king.
 7.

Hee did with words assay mee once or twice,

To see what wit and ready sprite I had:
And when hee saw I was both graue and wice,
For some good cause, the king was wondrous glad:
Than downe I lookt, with sober countnaunce sad,
But heart was vp, as high as hope could go,
That suttell fox might him some fauour so.

8.

Wee worke with wiles, the mindes of men like wax,

The fauning whelp gets many a peece of bred:
Wee follow kings, with many coning knacks,
By searching out how are their humoures fed:
Hee haunts no court, that hath a doltish hed:
For as in golde, the pretious stone is set,
So finest wits, in court the credit get.

9.

I quickely learnde to kneele and kysse the hand,

To waite at heele, and turne like top about,
To stretch out necke and lyke an image stand,
To taunt, to skoffe, and face the matter out,
To preace in place, among the greatest rout:
Yet like a priest, my selfe did well behaue,
In fayre long gowne, and goodly garments graue.

10.

Where Wolsey went, the world like bees would swarme,

To heare my speach, and note my nature well:
I coulde with tongue vse such a kinde of charme,
That voyce, full cleare, should sounde like siluer bell:
When head deuisde a long discours to tell,
With stories straunge, my speach should spised bee,
 To make the worlde to muse the more on mee.

11.

Each tayle was sweete, each worde a sentence wayde,

Each ear I pleasde, each eye gaue mee the vewe,
Each judgment markt, and paysed what I sayde,
Each minde I fed, with matter rare and newe,
Each day and howre my grace and credit grewe:
So that the king, in hearing of this newes,
Deuysed howe hee might my seruice vse.

12.

Hee made mee then his chaplayne, to say masse

Before his grace, yea, twise or thrise a weeke:
Now had I time, to trym my selfe by glasse,
Now founde I meane, some liuing for to seeke,
Now I became both humble, mylde, and meeke:
Now I applyde my wyts and sences throwe,
To reape some corne, if God would speede the plowe.

13.

Whom most I sawe in fauour with the king,

I followde fast, to get some hap thereby:
But I obserude another finer thing,
That was, to keepe me still in prince’s eye:
As vnder wyng the hawke in winde doth lye,
So for a pray, I prowled heere and there,
And tryed frendes and fortune euery where.

14.

The king at length sent mee beyonde the seas,

Embastour then, with message good and greate:
And in that time, I did the king so pleas,
By short dispatch, and wrought so fine a feate,
That did aduaunce my selfe to higher seate,
The deanrie then of Lincolne hee mee gaue:
And bownty shewde before I gan to craue.

15.

His amner to, hee made mee all in haste,

And threefolde gyftes hee threwe vpon mee still:
His counslour straight listewise was Wolsey plaste,
Thus in shorte time I had the world at will:
Which passed far man’s reason, wit, and skill:
O hap, thou haste great secrets in thy might,
Which long lye hyd from wily worldlyngs sight.

16.

As shures of raine fall quickly on the grasse,

That fading flowres are soone refresht thereby:
Or as with sun the morning dewe doth passe,
And quiet calme makes cleare a troubled skye:
So prince’s powre, at twinkling of an eye,
Sets vp a lofte a favret on the wheele,
When giddy braynes about the streetes doe reele.

17.

They are but blinde that wake where fortune sleepes,

They worke in vayne that striue with streame and tyde:
In double garde, they dwell that destnye keepes,
In simple sorte they liue that lacke a gyde:
They misse the marke that shoote theyr arrowes wide,
They hit the pricke that make theyr flight to glaunce
So nere the white, that shafte may light on chaunce.

18.

Such was my lucke I shot no shafte in vayne,

My bow stoode bent and brased all the yeere:
I wayted harde but neuer lost my payne:
Such wealth came in to beare the charges cleere:
And in the end, I was the greatest peere
Among them all, for I so rulde the land,
By king’s consent, that all was in my hand.

19.

Within on yeare three bishoprickes I had,

And in small space a cardnall I was made:
With long red robes rich Wolsey then was clad,
I walkte in sun when others sate in shade:
I went abroade with such a trayne and trade,
With crosses borne before mee where I past,
That man was thought to bee some god at last.

20.

With sonnes of earles and lordes I serued was,

An hundreth chaynes at leaste were in my trayne:
I dayly dranke in gold, but not in glas,
My bread was made of fynest flowre and grayne:
My daynty mouth did common meates disdayne,
I fed like prince on fowles most deare and straunge,
And bankets made of fine conceites for chaunge.

21.

My hall was full of knightes, and squires of name,

And gentlemen, two hundreth tolde by powle:
Tall[2002] yeomen to did howrely serue the same,
Whose names each weeke I saw within checke rowle:
All went to church, when seruis bell did knowle,
All dinde and supte and slepte at cardinall’s charge,
And all would wayte, when Wolsey tooke his barge.

22.
My householde stuffe, my wealth and siluer plate,
Mighte well suffice a monarke at this day:
I neuer fed but vnder cloth of state,
Nor walkt abroade till ushars clearde the way:
In house I had musitions for to play,
In open streete my trompets lowde did sownde,
Which pearst the skies and seemde to shake the
grownde.

23.

My men most braue, martcht two and two in ranke,

Who helde in length, much more then halfe a mile:
Not one of these, but gaue his maister thanke,
For some good turne, or pleasure got some while:
I did not feede my seruantes with a smile,
Or glosing wordes, that neuer bring forth frute,
But gaue them golde, or els preferde theyr sute.

24.

In surety so, whiles God was pleasde, I stoode,

I knewe I must leaue all my wealth behinde:
I sawe they lou’d mee not for byrth or bloode,
But serude a space to try my noble minde:
The more men gieue the more in deede they finde
Of loue, and troth, and seruice, euery way:
The more they spare, the more doth loue decay.

25.

I ioyde to see my seruantes thriue so well,

And go so gay with little that they gote:
For as I did in honour still excell,
So would I oft the wante of seruantes note:
Which made my men on maister so to dote,
That when I sayde let such a thing bee donne,
They woulde in deede through fyre and water ronne.
 26.

I had in house so many of’sars[2003] still,

Which were obayde and honourde for their place,
That carelesse I might sleepe or walke at will,
Saue that sometyme I wayde a poore man’s case,
And salude such sores whose griefe might breede
disgrace:
Thus men did wayte and wicked world did gaze
On mee and them, that brought vs all in maze.

27.

For worlde was whist, and durst not speake a woorde,

Of that they sawe, my credite curbde them so:
I waded far, and passed ore the foorde,
And mynded not, for to returne I troe:
The worlde was wise, yet scarce it selfe did knoe,
When wonder made, of men that rose by hap:
For fortune rare, falls not in each man’s lap.

28.

I climde the clouds, by knowledge and good wit,

My men sought chaunce by seruice or good lucke:
The worlde walkte lowe when I aboue did sit,
Or downe did come to trample on this mucke:
And I did swim as dainty as a ducke,
When water serues to keepe the body braue,
And to enioy the gyftes that fortune gaue.

29.

And though my pompe surpast all prelates nowe,

And like a prince I liu’d and pleasure tooke:
That was not sure so great a blur in browe,
If on my workes indiffrent eyes doe looke:
I thought great scorne such liuings heare to brooke,
 Except I built some howses for the poore,
And order tooke to gieue great almes at doore.

30.

A colledge fayre in Oxford I did make,

A sumptuous house a stately worke in deede:
I gaue great lands to that, for learning sake,
To bring vp youth and succour scholer’s neede:
That charge of myne full many a mouth did feede,
When I in courte was seeking some good turne,
To mend my torch, or make my candell burne.

31.

More houses gay I builte, then thowsands do

That haue enough, yet will no goodnes shoe:
And where I built I did mayntayne it to,
With such great cost as few bestowes I troe:
Of buildings large I could reherse a roe,
That by mischaunce this day haue lost my name,
Whereof I do deserue the only fame.

32.

And as for sutes, about the king was none

So apte as I, to speake and purchase grace:
Though long before, some say, Shore’s wife was one
That oft kneelde downe before the prince’s face
For poore men’s sutes, and holpe theire woefull case,
Yet shee had not such credite as I gate,
Although a king would beare the parret prate.

33.

My wordes were graue and bore an equall poyes,

In ballaunce iust for many a weighty cause:
Shee pleasde a prince with pretty merry toyes,
And had no sight in state, nor course of lawes:
I coulde perswade and make a prince to pawes,
And take a breath before hee drew the sworde,
And spy the time to rule him with a worde.

34.

I will not say but fancy may do much,

Yet worlde will graunt that wisdom may do more:
To wanton gyrl’s affection is not such,
That prince’s wise will bee abusde therefore:
One sute of mine was surely worth a score
Of her’s indeede, for shee her time must watch,
And at all howres I durst go draw the latch.

35.

My voyce but heard, the dore was open streyght,

Shee might not come, till shee were calde or brought:
I rulde the king by custom, arte, and sleight,
And knew full well the secrets of his thought:
Without my minde all that was done was nought,
In wars, or peace, my counsayle swayed all,
For still the king would for the cardnall call.

36.

I kept a court my selfe, as great as his,

(I not compare vnto my maister heere)
But looke my lords what liuely worlde was this,
That one poore man became so great a peere?
Yet though this tale be very straunge to heere,
Wit wins a worlde; and who hath hap and wit,
With triumph long in princely throne may sit.

37.

What man like mee bare rule in any age,

I shone like sun more cleare then morning star:
Was neuer parte so playde, in open stage,
As mine, nor fame of man flewe halfe so far:
I sate on bench, when thowsands at the bar
Did pleade for right: for I in publique weale
Lorde chaunclour was and had the great broad seale.

38.

Now haue I tolde how I did rise aloft,

And sate with pride and pomp, in golden hall,
And set my feete on costly carpets soft,
And playde at goale with goodly golden ball:
But after, Lord, I must rehearse my fall:
O trembling heart, thou canst not now for teares
Present that tale vnto the hearer’s cares.

39.

Best weepe it out and sodayne silence keepe,

Till priuy pangs make pinched heart complayne:
Or cast thy selfe into some slumbring sleepe,
Till wakened wits remembraunce bring agayne:
When heauy teares, do hollow cheekes distayne,
The world will thinke thy sprits are growne so weake,
The feeble tongue hath sure no powre to speake.

40.

A tale by signes with sighes and sobs set out,

Moues people’s mindes to pity plaged men,
With howling voyce do rather cry and showt,
And so by arte shew forth thy sorrow then:
For if thou speake some man will note with pen
What Wolsey sayde, and what thrue Wolsey downe,
And vnder foote flings Wolsey’s great renowne.

41.
What force of that my fall must needs be herd,
Before I fell I had a time to rise:
As fatall chaunce and fortune mee preferd,
So mischiefe came and did my state despise:
Yf I might pleade my case among the wise,
I could excuse right much of mine offence:
But leaue a while such matter in suspence.

42.

The pope, or pride, or peeuish parts of mine,

Made king to frowne and take the seale from mee:
Now seru’d no words, nor plesaunt speeches fine,
Now Wolsey, lo, must needs disgraced bee:
Yet had I leaue (as dolefull prisner free)
To keepe a house (God wot) with heauy cheere,
Where that I founde no wine, ne bread, nor beere.

43.

My time was come, I coulde no longer liue,

What should I make my sorrow further knowne?
Upon some cause that king, that all did giue,
Tooke all agayne and so possest his owne:
My goods, my plate, and all was ouerthrowne,
And looke what I had gathred many a day,
Within one howre was cleanly swept away.

44.

But harken now how that my fortune fell,

To Yorke I must, where I the bishop was:
Where I by right in grace a while did dwell,
And was in stawle with honour great to pas:
The priors then and abbots gan to smell,
Howe cardinall must bee honourd as hee ought,
And for that day was great prouision brought.
 45.

At Cawood then, where I great buildings made,

And did through cause exspect my stawling day,
The king deuisde a secrete vnder shade,
Howe cardnall shoulde bee reste and brought away:
One Wealsh a knight, came downe in good aray,
And seasned sure, because from courte hee cam,
On Wolsey wolfe that spoyled many a lam.

46.

Then was I led toward courte, like dog in string,

And brought as biefe that Butcherrowe must see:
But still I hoapt to come before the king,
And that repayre was not denyde to mee:
But hee that kept the towre, my guide must bee:
Ah, there I sawe what king thereby did meane,
And so I searcht yf conscience now were cleane.

47.

Some spots I founde, of pryde and popishe partes,

That might accuse a better man then I:
Now Oxford came to minde, with all theire artes,
And Cambridge to, but all not worth a flye:
For schoolemen can no fowle defects supplye:
My sauce was sowre, though meate before was
sweete,
Nowe Wolsey lackte both conning, wit, and spreete.

48.

A deepe conceyte of that, possest my heade,

So fell I sicke, consumde as some did thinke:
So tooke in haste my chamber, and my bed,
On which deuise, perhaps, the worlde might winke:
But in the heart sharpe sorrow so did sinke,
 That gladnes sweete, (forsooke my senses all)
In those extreemes did yeelde vnto my fall.

49.

O let mee curse the popish cardnall hat,

Whose myters big, beset with pearle and stones,
And all the rest of trash, I know not what,
The saints in shrine, theyr flesh and rotten bones,
The maske of monkes, deuised for the nones,
And all the flocke of freers, what ere they are,
That brought mee vp and left mee there so bare.

50.

O cursed priestes, that prate for profit’s sake,

And follow floud and tyde where ere it floes:
O marchaunts fine that no aduauntage take
Of euery grayne, how euer market goes:
O fie on wolues that march in masking cloes,
For to deuoure the lambs when shepperd sleepes,
And woe to you that promise neuer keepes.

51.

You sayd I should be reskude if I neede,

And you would curse, with candell, booke, and bell:
But when yee should now serue my turne indeede,
Yee haue no house I know not where yee dwell:
O freers and monkes your harbour is in hell,
For in this world yee haue no rightfull place,
Nor dare not once in heauen shew your face.

52.

Your fault not halfe so great as was my pryde,

For which offence fell Lucifer from skyes:
Although I would that wilfull folly hyde,
The thing lyes playne before the people’s eyes,
On which hye heart a hatefull name doth ryes:
It hath beene sayde of olde, and dayly will,
Pryde goes before, and shame coms after still.

53.

Pryde is a thing that God and man abores,

A swelling tode, that poysons euery place,
A stinking wounde, that breedeth many sores,
A priuy plague, found out in stately face,
A paynted byrd that keepes a pecock’s pace,
A lothsome lowt that lookes like tinker’s dog,
A hellish hownd, a swinish hatefull hog

54.

That grunts and groanes at euery thing it sees,

And holds vp snowt like pig that coms from draffe:
Why should I make of pride all these degrees,
That first tooke roote from filthy drosse and chaffe,
And makes men stay vpon a broken staffe:
No weaknes more than thinke to stand vpright,
When stumbling blocke makes men to fall downright.

55.

Hee needes must fall that looks not where he goes,

And on the starrs walkes staring goezling like:
On sodayne oft a blostring tempest bloes,
Than downe great trees are tumbled in the dike:
Who knowes the time and howre when God will strike:
Then looke about, and marke what steps yee take,
Before you pace, the pilgrimage yee make.

56.

Run not on head as all the worlde were youres,

Nor thrust them backe that cannot bide a shocke:
Who striues for place his owne decay procures:
Who alway brawles is sure to catch a knocke:
Who beardes a king, his head is neere the blocke:
But who doth stand in feare and worldly dreede,
Ere mischiefe coms had neede to take good heede.

57.

I hauing hap, did make account of none,

But such as fed my humour good or bad:
To fawning dogs, sometimes I gaue a bone,
And flong some scrapps to such as nothing had:
But in my hands still kept the golden gad,
That seru’d my turne and laught the rest to skorne,
As for himselfe was cardnall Wolsey borne.

58.

No, no, good men, wee liue not for ourselues,

Though each one catch as mutch as hee may get:
Wee ought to looke to those that diggs and delues,
That alwayes dwell and liue in endles det,
Yf in such sort wee would our compas set,
Wee should haue loue where now but hate wee finde,
And hedstrong will, with cruell hollow minde.

59.

I thought nothing of duty, loue, or feare,

I snatcht vp all and alwayes sought to clime:
I punisht all and would with no man beare:
I sought for all and so could take the time:
I plide the prince, whiles fortune was in prime,
I fild the bags and gold in hoorde I heapt,
Thought not on those that thresht the corne I reapt.

60.
So all I lost and all I gat was nought,
And all by pride and pompe lay in the dust:
I aske you all what man aliue had thought,
That in this world had beene so litle trust:
Why, all thinges heare with time decline they must:
Than all is vaine so all not worth a flye,
Yf all shall thinke that all are borne to dye.

61.

Yf all bee bace, and of so small a count,

Why doe wee all in folly so abound?
Why doe the meane and mighty seeke to mount,
Beyonde all hope where is no surety found,
And where the wheele is alwayes turning round?
The case is plaine if all bee vnderstood,
Wee are so vaine wee knowe not what is good.

62.

Yet some will say, when they haue heapes of golde,

With flocks of friends, and seruaunts at theyr call,
They liue like gods in pleasure treble folde,
And haue no cause to finde no fault at all:
O blinde conceite, these gloryes are but small,
And as for friends, they change their mindes so mych,
They stay not long with neither poore nor rich.

63.

With hope of friends our selues wee do deceaue,

With feare of foes we threatned are with sleepe:
But friends speake fayre yet men alone they leaue
To sinke or swim, to mourne, to laugh, or weepe:
Yet whan for smiles, the snake begins to creepe,
As world falls out these dayes in compasse iust,
Wee knowe not howe the friend or foe to trust.
 64.

Both can betray the truest man aliue,

Both are to doubt in matters of greate weight,
Both will somtime for goodes and honour striue,
Both seemeth playne, yet both can shewe great sleight:
Both stoups full lowe, yet both can looke on height,
And best of both, not worth a cracked crowne:
Yet least of both, may loase a walled towne.

65.

Talke not of friends, the name thereof is nought,

Then trust no foes, if frendes theire credit loes:
If foes and frendes of on bare earth were wrought,
Blame nere of both though both one nature shoes:
Grace passeth kinde where grace and vertue floes,
But where grace wantes make foes and frends alike,
The on drawes sworde the other sure will strike.

66.

I prou’d that true by tryall twenty times,

When Wolsey stoode on top of fortune’s wheele.
But such as to the height of ladder climes,
Knowe not what led lies hanging on theire heele
Tell mee my mates that heauy fortune feele,
Yf rising vp, breede not a gyddy brayne,
And faling downe, bee not a greuous payne.

67.

I tolde you how from Cawood I was led,

And so fell sicke, when I arested was:
What needeth nowe more wordes heere in bee sed?
I knewe full well I must to pryson passe,
And sawe my state as brittell as a glasse:
So gaue vp ghost, and bad the worlde farewell,
 Wherein, God wot, I could no longer dwell.[2004]

68.

Thus vnto dust and ashes I returnde,

When blase of life and vital breath went out,
Like glowing cole that is to sinders burnde:
All fleshe and bloud so ende, you neede not doubt:
But when the bruite of this was blowne about,
The worlde was glad, the cardnall was in graue,
This is of worlde, lo, all the hope we haue.

69.

Full many a yeare the world lookt for my fall,

And whan I fell, I made as great a cracke,
As doth an oake, or mighty tottring wall,
That whirling winde doth bring to ruin and wracke:
Now babling world wil talke behinde my backe:
A thousand things to my reproache and shame,
So will it to of others do the same.

70.

But what of that? the best is wee are gone,

And worst of all when wee our tales haue tolde,
Our open plagues will warning bee to none,
Men are by hap and courage made so bolde:
They thinke all is theyr owne they haue in holde:
Well let them say and think what thing they please,
This weltring world both flowes and ebs like seas.

qd. Tho. Churchyard.[2005]

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