Page 211 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

the marginalized subjects of the postcolonial world. Spivak is aware of the difficulty
of being a privileged academic in the USA speaking for/about the silenced subjects
of the world so that the reflexive examination of the conditions of her own voice
188 is also a theme of her work.
• Associated concepts Cultural politics, deconstruction, subaltern, subjectivity,
subject position.
• Tradition(s) Feminism, Marxism, postcolonial theory, poststructuralism.
• Reading Spivak, G. (1993) ‘Can the Subulatern Speak?’, in P. Williams and L.
Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.

Stereotype A stereotype is a vivid but simple representation that reduces persons to
a set of exaggerated, usually negative, character traits and is thus a form of
representation that essentializes others through the operation of power. That is, a
stereotype suggests that a given category has inherent and universal characteristics
and that furthermore these characteristics represent all that such a person is or can
be. A stereotype commonly takes the form of a conventionalized idea constructed
according to a rigid formula into a hackneyed image that typecasts people.
Stereotyping commonly involves the attribution of negative traits to people who
are different from us, a process that points to the operation of power in
stereotyping. In particular it highlights the role of stereotyping in the exclusion of
‘difference’ from the social, symbolic and moral order since stereotypes commonly
relate to those who have been excluded from the ‘normal’ order of things.
Stereotyping thus simultaneously establishes who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’.
In Britain and the United States the more obvious racial stereotypes echo
colonial and slave history respectively. A central component of British imperial
representations of black people was the theme of non-Christian savages who
required civilizing by British missionaries and adventurers. In more recent times
the imagery of black youth as dope-smoking muggers and/or urban rioters has
come to the fore. As Gilroy has argued, hedonism, evasion of work and the
criminality of black culture are becoming closely entwined motifs of British media
stereotypes.
American plantation stereotypes also partake in the binary of white civilization
and black ‘naturalness’ or ‘primitivism’ so that African Americans have often been
represented as naturally incapable of the refinements of white civilization, being by
nature lazy and best fitted for subordination to white people. Many contemporary
representations of race on US television continue to stereotypically associate black
people, specifically young men, with crime and social problems. Thus, a common
portrayal of African Americans in newscasts is as criminals connected to guns and
violence. In particular, poor black people are constructed as a ‘menace to society’
having moved beyond the limits of acceptable behaviour through their association
with crime, violence, drugs, gangs and teenage pregnancy.
Links Essentialism, gender, Orientalism, Other, postcolonial theory, race, representation