Page 106 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

100 CULTURAL STUDIES

thinking among most. Of course, I am not so naive as to believe that most
professors will make this effort—many white professors (and even a few
professors ‘of colour’) see the topic of race sensitivity as exhausted, contentious,
tedious, tiresome and boring. However, in the aftermath of the O.J.Simpson trial,
the Million Man March and the anticipation of whether Colin Powell would
announce his candidacy, the rude intrusion and raw saliency of race thinking
were reminders that the discourse is as potent and explosive as ever.
Parenthetically, one might question why attention to gender issues in the
academy have not followed a similar course. But let me demonstrate this with a
seemingly innocuous anecdote.
The notion of body odour is culturally specific and the use of deodorant,
perfumed soaps and so forth are a rather recent phenomenon, although those of
us who were born or raised in the United States and under the age of 60 have
probably taken it for granted all our lives. In fact, as late as the 1950s, most
Americans did not take a shower on a daily basis whereas in the 1990s it is not
unusual for people to bathe twice a day.
In a course whose topic was visual representation and the production of
consumer culture, the professor, always careful to use correct terminology and
instead of saying ‘black’ made a point of saying African-American, told the
following story. A white woman, an American researcher, was working in Africa
and conversing with a black African woman. The African woman kept backing
away from the American, who in turn would make up for the distance by taking a
step towards her. After a few moments of this pursuit and retreat, the American
became self-conscious and suddenly asked, ‘Am I doing something to offend
you?’, whereupon the African immediately answered, ‘Well, quite frankly, you
smell like a corpse.’
This narrative is less amusing than it appears, particularly when it is offered in
a lecture by someone who has explicitly deferred any discussion of race (referred
to as ‘multiculturalism’) to one separate week in the semester. I was intrigued by
the fact that not one student in the large lecture hall laughed, although, frankly, I
did chuckle. Since the topic of anything but white Americans rarely came up in
this class, and the naturalization of whiteness was never interrogated, I suspect
that the students were uncertain how to respond without offending anybody—
indeed, they seem to be extraordinarily politically correct. The very fact that two
women, a white American and a black African, were juxtaposed racially and not
merely culturally, immediately signalled something serious, best left untouched,
and under these circumstances no reaction at all was preferable to a disrespectful
response.
The professor went on to explain that whereas in America saturating the body
in perfumed scents was a positive deterrent against body odour, in Africa this
was reserved for the dead. The not very subtle implication, of course, was that
the black African woman did not smell as ‘clean’ as her white American
counterpart. The professor’s conscious intention was to illustrate an example of
cultural difference which has personal, as well as commercial, significance. The