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EXPERIENCE, EMPATHY AND STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISM 111

deliberately challenged by the duality of Jay Davidson’s physical presence. For two
personal accounts from phenotypically white African-American women who have
encountered raw racism from white liberals threatened by the rupture of their
schemes of racial order, see Derricote, 1993, and Piper, 1992:4–32. An interesting
anthropology of the production of representation in National Geographic magazine
was weakened by presupposing, instead of problematizing, the ‘whiteness’ of
white-skinned informants. Therefore no attention was given to considering the
responses of ‘white’ Americans who suspect, or suppress their suspicion of, a black
relative who crossed the colour line, and how this might have significantly affected
their responses to representations of dark-skinned Others (Lutz and Collins, 1993).
17 A Question of Color, dir. Kathe Sandler, PBS, 1992. In an interview with Pamela
Woolford (publisher and editor ot Jambalaya Magazine), Haile Grime discusses his
efforts to demystify stereotypes which the black community imposes on itself.
Describing the casting of light-skinned blacks in Sankofa and Ashes and Ember,
Grime says, ‘[T]he fact is that in the diaspora a mixing has taken place. For
example, when I did Ashes and Embers some Black people would see the movie
and they would say something to me about the white guy in the TV repair shop.
But he was actually a light-skinned Black man. And to me, these are very
important challenges I have to bring to my society in the way we play with
pigmentations’ (see Woolford, 1994, esp. pp. 97–8).
18 Emmanuel Levinas discusses the correlation of knowing and being in which
knowledge, a mode of thought which involves our material existence in a physical
world, is directly related to perception and as such refers back to an act of grasping
(Levinas, 1992:85). To know slides easily into the desire for mastery and it is this
tension that Sartre relates to conflict: ‘one must either transcend the Other or allow
oneself to be transcended by him’ (Sartre, 1956:555).
19 See Young (1990) for a discussion of Emmanuel Levinas in relation to Sartre, Levi-
Strauss and Derrida.
20 This theme is treated by Kovel (1970). See Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe (1993) for
their discussion of the theme of redemption and resurrection in post-colonial
African discourse inherited from Western epistemology.
21 Claude Levi-Strauss’s project has been to radically contest the eurocentric
sociologization of the Western subject and received its best articulation in his essay
‘History and dialectic’ (Levi-Strauss, 1966). For an excellent study of Claude Levi-
Strauss which situates his anthropology within the framework of his philosophical
approach, see Pace, 1983.
22 See Hannah Arendt’s discussion of a distinction between race-thinking and racism
in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958).
23 For instance, Hans Burgkmair’s painting ‘Exotic Tribe’ painted in 1508 presents a
family of ‘blackened whites’. V.Y.Mudimbe considers pictoral representations of
blacks and whites from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and demonstrates
that transformations in paintings and aesthetic distinctions parallel ‘a silent but
powerful epistemological configuration’. ‘Exotic Tribe’ brings together ‘two
representational activities: on the one hand, signs of an epistemological order
which, silently but imperatively, indicate the processes of integrating and
differentiating figures within the normative sameness; on the other hand, the
excellence of an exotic picture that creates a cultural distance, thanks to an