Discourses of racial purity served as colonial disciplinary power

Evidence

The discourse of purity becomes one of the means through which disciplinary power was imposed upon Caribbean society. Under colonialism, rituals of white purity, as symbolic capital, were at the critical core of the self-representations of the colonial administrative elite. This was contrasted with the hybridized practices of the white Creole. The difference assumed institutional expression even in the arena of political representation and administration. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3225

Categorization

• XREF: Chimes with the reader’s sacrificial/libidinal-politics work (Dido, immolation) and with purity-as-social-construction literature more broadly.