Page 80 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

74 CULTURAL STUDIES

is constructed by way of stories from another time, another place, another
discursive space. This coupling of Asia and Africa, however, has a historical
structural basis within the classic global narrative of post-Second World War
development that has cast the Asian and African worlds as the vast testing
ground for Western economic and social development. From the neocolonial
point of view, what was the tragic duo of economic depravity in the past
becomes the misfortunate pair of sexually and medically underdeveloped worlds
in the 1980s and 1990s. In this context, one may say that the figure of ‘the
Asian’ is imagined as that of ‘the African’.
The New York Times article features a photograph of an Asian male AIDS
patient in an AIDS ward in Bangkok. The patient is lying in a hospital bed, his
body wasted and completely covered with tattoos. He looks at the camera,
caught in the ambivalent gaze of the foreign journalist. Once again, the AIDS
patient is unmistakably marked by the signs of danse macabre: extreme weight
loss, bedridden, swollen face, helpless, near death. But this image has more: a
body of Asian AIDS covered with tattoos. The tattoos provide the signifier of an
infectious environ; mystic orientalism is recorded as contamination. In this
double exoticism, we are reminded once again of the discursive folding of the
Asian on to the African through the horrified but ambivalent gaze.
This gaze directed at the Other is exactly what Franz Fanon remembers, in his
much quoted rendition of the highly charged racist scene:

My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recoloured, clad in
mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is
bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the
nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy
is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with
cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is
trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little
white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s
going to eat me up.
(Fanon, 1991:80)

In this Fanonian traumatic scene, the black subject caught in the white gaze
appears to be an ambivalent text of projection and introjection, what Homi
Bhabha calls ‘the masking and splitting of “official” and phantasmatic
knowledges’ (1992:327). Might we see the same psychic process at work in the
delivery of the image of the tattooed Asian man with AIDS? In the folding
together of the black and Asian objects in colonial discourse, the Fanonian
transfer may sound something like this, deceptio visus: Look, an Oriental AIDS
victim, he is contaminated, he is shivering…the colonial subject is trembling
because he thinks that the Oriental AIDS victim is quivering with a deadly raging
virus…‘he is going to eat me up’.