Maggie's Farm

From Roger K on "post-colonial studies" at Harvard:

In the ambivalent world of the “not quite/not white,” on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvés of the colonial discourse—the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and the book loose [sic] their representational authority. Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body.

I first read those words back in the 1980s and knew instantly that its author was destined for academic stardom.

Indeed. I think the Prof must be talking about me, because I often feel like a "part-object of presence," don't you? I blame Brit imperialism for that, and my little bestiality issue would seem to confirm it.