The excluded other is an integral part of the city’s own identity

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Nonracialism, then, like the emperor’s clothes, is what the state wears to represent itself to the world, how it looks. Joseph’s technicolor dreamcoat, not the high priest’s uniform of any one subgroup or sect. The cloak of national citizenship should be for all to see, for any citizen to take on. At home, in private, one can assume any sectarian uniform, in concert or competition with others, so long as the multi-colored public cover of national unity is respected, indeed embraced, particular identities no matter. Liberal democracy’s nonracialism accordingly is the inversion, the turning inside out, of apartheid’s absolutizing of identity politics. A reversible coat leaves the original on the inside. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1620 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Every identity is contingent because its constitutive outside shadows its inside. — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 96; A city’s modern identity depends on excluding its own opposite — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 515; Identity is constituted through exclusion of what it is not (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern identity is constituted through the exclusion of its own opposite #corroborates (0.95)
• A city’s modern identity depends on excluding its own opposite #corroborates (0.92) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 515
• Liberal universal citizenship can leave excluded identity intact beneath its surface #complicates (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1620