A city’s modern identity depends on excluding its own opposite

Evidence

Fanon’s writing captures the effect of colonial segregation by shifting between two vocabularies and two perspectives. Each zone is described using the language and viewpoint of those outside it. The colonisers’ town is seen through the eyes of those who have suffered colonisation, those to whom the settler is a person never seen in bare feet. The native town is described in terms of the fears and prejudices of the colonisers, who represent those whom they exclude as the negatives of their own self-image: the natives are crowded together like animals, they are crouching or kneeling like slaves, they are without sexual restraint. Describing the process of exclusion through the eyes of those who do the excluding imitates, in the very style of writing, something of its nature. The identity of the modern city is created by what is keeps out. Its modernity is something contingent upon the exclusion of its own opposite. In order to determine itself as the place of order, reason, propriety, cleanliness, civilisation and power, it must represent outside itself what is irrational, disordered, dirty, libidinous, barbarian and cowed. The city requires this ‘outside’ in order to present itself, in order to constitute its singular, uncorrupted identity. It is this technique of establishing one’s identity over and in terms of another that Edward Said has analysed, in a larger intellectual and political context, as ‘Orientalism’. It is in this larger sense that the native town ‘must be Oriental’. … To represent itself as modern, the city is dependent upon maintaining the barrier that keeps the other out. This dependence makes the outside, the Oriental, paradoxically an integral part of the modern city. The order of the city does not stop at the limit of the modern town, as Lyautey’s guests were led to think. The limit is something the city maintains within itself, by means of a continuous ordering that is the source of its own ordered identity. Yet it appears as the boundary of order itself. The city, in this analysis, can be taken to exemplify a paradox at work in the maintenance of any modern political order, any modern self-identity. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 515

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism framework and to general postcolonial theory of self-definition through othering — this is Mitchell’s direct engagement with that canon. — connects to: Every identity is contingent because its constitutive outside shadows its inside. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 96
• DEFINE: Lays out Mitchell’s reading of how the ‘outside’ is structurally internal to modern self-identity — a concise statement of a central poststructuralist insight.