Black and/or white? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
These Colombian women are members of a feminist and pacifist international organisation that has worked for peace and disarmament since 1915, WILPF continues to work to the end the longest armed conflict in the American continent.
Part of the information in the newspaper sheets used as "packing" in the LODE cargo that was created in Santa Fe de Antioquia in Colombia was published on April 24, 1992 which was 'Secretaries Day' in Colombia. A full page colour advertisement for Superley uses 64 images of women. Whether they are models, or secretaries, only one has dark skin, only six faces suggest a woman over 30 years old, the rest conform to a North American stereotype of "glamour". And this advert was published in a country where 10.6% of the population is Afro-Colombian.
There is a section in the Wikipedia article on Eurocentrism:
Eurocentrism in the beauty industry!
The article says:
Eurocentrism has affected the beauty realm globally. The beauty standard has become westernized and has influenced people throughout the globe. Many have altered their natural self to reflect this image. Many beauty and advertising companies have redirected their products to support this idea of Eurocentrism.
Is this an Americanization of the world?
This photograph of a group of young and beautiful Colombian women is a photograph of Americans. Latin Americans are Americans too. The persistent reference to citizens of the United States of America as "Americans" and the habit across much of the northern and eastern hemispheres to refer to Mexicans as Mexicans, Colombians as Colombians, Panamanians as Panamanians etc., but not to refer to these Americans as American, must be, for the majority of Americans, annoying, to say the least.
Then there is this United States of America based website which is all about the commodification of sexuality and the embodiment of this in an objectification that in this case is applied to, or imposed upon "Colombian women"!
This is what the website story starts with, a date in Colombia's history that marks independence from Spanish colonial rule.
Today, July 20th, marks the 201st anniversary of Colombia's independence from Spanish rule. Frustrated with their limited influence over their home country, the Colombian people rioted in protest of the unfair treatment. On July 20, 1810, specifically, a mob of Colombian citizens in Bogota, driven by an impassioned speech by leader José Acevedo y Gómez, surrounded the Viceroy ready to attack, forcing him to sign an act which permitted a local ruling council and eventually freedom.
Today, Colombians remember the victory with a sense of hope for a peaceful resolution to the violence and drug crimes that have continued to plague the country. They commemorate the day by celebrating their country's rich history, culture and people.
That's why, here in the states, we're recognizing the South American country's victory with our own tribute to their people; namely, their beautiful female population. If there's anything Colombians can always proudly laid claim to, it's their population of strikingly gorgeous ladies. Thus, let us celebrate the country's independence by saluting the 50 Hottest Colombian Women.
Shakira is No 1.
Jeymmy Vargas was the only black woman and 45th on this list of the 50 hottest Colombian women.
Vargas was the third Colombian and the first black woman to win Miss International in 2004.
Colombia is ethnically diverse, its people descending from the original native inhabitants, Spanish colonists, Africans originally brought to the country as slaves, and 20th-century immigrants from Europe and the Middle East, all contributing to a diverse cultural heritage.
Afro-Colombians make up 10.6% of the population, almost 5 million people, according to a projection of the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), most of whom are concentrated on the northwest Caribbean coast and the Pacific coast in such departments as Chocó, whose capital, Quibdó, is 95.3% Afro-Colombian as opposed to just 2.3% mestizo or white. Considerable numbers are also in Cali, Cartagena, and Barranquilla. Colombia is considered to have the fourth largest Black/African-descent population in the western hemisphere, following Haiti, Brazil and the USA.
Where are the other four black Colombian women?
The 2% representation of Afro-Colombians in the United States of America based website celebrating the relative "hotness" of 50 Colombian women clearly reflects the deep-level racial stereotyping present in this particular sector of the cultural environment within the USA. Is it the case that, visually, the physical appearance of Jeymmy Vargas corresponds to a North American stereotype of beauty and "glamour"? In other words, does she have a European "look", and if so then this correlates with the observation made in the LODE project of 1992 concerning the newspaper full-page advertisement where out of 64 images of secretaries only one had dark skin, and she too had the look of a European.
Looking "European", looking "white", & being black!
There are benefits to looking European in Colombia and across the world.
The "Americanization of the world"!
Back in 1992, the Secretaries Day full-page advert in a Colombian newspaper was a particular example that LODE foregrounded in the LODE Artliner leaflet, and identified this phenomenon as being part of an "Americanization"of Colombia, and of an increasingly globalised world-wide culture .
For the intellectual giant Samir Amin, already mentioned in a section on the Re:LODE site World-as-Idea, it was a more fundamental "Americanization" of the world that troubled and concerned him deeply. As well as authoring The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, where he emphasized the extreme form taken by the ideology of contemporary capitalism, what he called the "liberal virus", he was also responsible for first using the term:
"Eurocentrism"
The abstract noun Eurocentrism (French eurocentrisme, earlier europocentrisme) as the term for an ideology was coined in the 1970s by the Egyptian Marxian economist Samir Amin, then director of the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Amin used the term in the context of a global, core-periphery or dependency model of capitalist development. English usage of Eurocentrism is recorded by 1979.
Eurocentrism as a term used by Samir Amin
The argument . . .
. . . as set out by Amin in Eurocentrism regarding "the impasse of capitalism":
Cultural life being the mode of organization for the utilization of use-values, the homogenization of these values by their submission to a generalized exchange-value tends to homogenize culture itself. The tendency toward homogenization is the necessary consequence not of the development of the forces of production, but of the capitalist content of this development. For the progress of forces of production in pre-capitalist societies did not imply the submission of use-value to exchange-value and, hence, was accompanied by a diversity of paths and methods of development. The capitalist mode implies the predominance of exchange-value and, hence, standardization. Capitalism's tendency to homogenize functions with an almost irresistible force at the level of industrial techniques of production, trends in consumption, lifestyle, and so on, with an attenuated power in the domains of ideology and politics. It has much less influence over language usage.
What position should be taken toward this tendency toward standardization? The historically irreversible , like the Gallicization of Occitania or the adoption of Coca-Cola by the Cuban people, cannot be regretted forever. But the question arises with respect to the future. Should the tendency of capitalism toward standardization be welcomed, the way progress of the forces of production is welcomed? Should it be defended, or at least never actively opposed, keeping in mind the reactionary character of the nineteenth-century movements that sought to destroy machinery? Is the only cause for regret that this process operates through the prism of class and is, as a result, ineffective? Should we conclude that socialism will move in the same direction, only more quickly and less painfully?
There have always been two co-existing responses to this question. In the first half of his life, Marx adopted a laudatory tone when describing the progress of the forces of production, the achievements of the bourgeoisie, and the tendency toward standardization that liberates people from the limited horizons of the village. But gradually doubts crept in, and the tone of his later writings is more varied. The dominant wing of the labour movement eulogised the “universal civilisation” under construction. A belief in the fusion of cultures (and even of languages) predominated in the Second International: think of Esperanto. This naive cosmopolitanism, effectively disproven by World War I, reappeared after the Second World War, when Americanization came to be seen as synonymous with progress or, at the very least, modernization.
However, any fundamental critique of capitalism requires a reappraisal of this mode of consumption and life, a product of the capitalist mode of production. Such a critique is not, moreover, as utopian as is often believed: the malaise from which Western civilisation suffers is ample testimony. For in fact, the tendency toward standardization implies a reinforcement of the adjustment of the superstructure to the demands of the capitalist infrastructure. This tendency diminishes the contradictions that drive the system forward and is, therefore reactionary. Spontaneous resistance to this standardization, thus, expresses a refusal to submit to the relationships of exploitation that underlie it.
Moreover, this tendency toward standardization collides with the limits imposed by unequal accumulation. This unequal accumulation accelerates tendencies toward homogenization at the centre, while it practically destroys them for the great mass of people at the periphery, who are unable to gain access to the modern mode of consumption, reserved for a small minority. For these people, who are often deprived of the elementary means of basic survival, the result is not simply malaise, but tragedy. Actually existing capitalism has , therefore, become a handicap to the progress of the forces of production on the world scale. For the mode of accumulation that it imposes on the periphery excludes the possibility of the periphery catching up. This is the major reason why capitalism has been objectively transcended on the world scale.
Nevertheless, whatever opinion one may have of this model of society and its internal contradictions, it retains great force. It has a powerful attraction in the West and japan, not only for the ruleing classes, but also for the workers, testifying to the hegemony of capitalist ideology over the society as a whole. The bourgeoisies of the Third World know no other goal; they imitate the Western model of consumption, while the schools in these countries reproduce the models of organization of labour that accompany Western technologies. But the peoples of the periphery have been victims of this expanding process of the homogenization of aspirations and values. The prodigious intensification of communication by the media, now global in scope, has both qualitatively and qualitatively modified the contradiction generated by the unequal expansion of capitalism. Yearning for access to Western models of consumption has come to penetrate large numbers of the popular masses. At the same time, capitalism has revealed itself to be ever more incapable of satisfying this yearning. Societies that have liberated themselves from submission to the demands of the global expansion of capitalism must deal with this new contradiction, which is only one expression of the conflict between the socialist and capitalist tendencies.
The impasse is, therefore not only ideological. It is real, the impasse of capitalism, and incapable of completing the work that it has placed on the agenda of history. The crisis of social thought, in its principal dimension, is above all a crisis of bourgeois thought, which refuses to recognzse that capitalism is not the “end of history.” the definitive and eternal expression of rationality. But this crisis is also an expression of the limits of Marxism, which, underestimating the dimensions of the inequality immanent in the worldwide expansion of capitalism, has devised a strategy of a socialist response to these contradictions that has proven to be impossible.
In order to truly understand this contradiction, the most explosive contradiction capitalism has engendered, the centres/peripheries polarization must be placed at the heart of the analysis and not at its margin.
But after a whole series of concessions, the forces of the Left and of socialism in the West have finally given up on giving the imperialist dimension of capitalist expansion the central place that it must occupy both in critical analysis and in the development of progressive strategies. In so doing, they have been won over to bourgeois ideology in its most essential aspects. (pages 207-209)
De-linking
Samir Amin had his ideas about ways for humanity to emancipate itself from the order of things that leads to grotesque states of inequality. Perhaps this quote from an obituary succinctly states Amin's view:
In his view, imperialism, and the monopolisation of resources, finance and knowledge by the classes that dominated in the developed nations, had condemned the ‘bourgeois’ nationalist project to failure. An alternative was required. The emancipation of the Third World depended on its delinking from imperialism, and finally on the overthrow of the latter.
European exceptionalism?
The Wikipedia page on Eurocentrism has a section following on from the origins of the Terminology with the heading European exceptionalism. One of the features of European colonialism and the conquest, domination and exploitation of the world, its peoples and its resources, was, and is, the need for a set of narrative structures to help explain why it was that Europe, exceptionally, had been given the special destiny to run the rest of the planet. These narratives include a set of assumptions concerning superiority, prejudice and racism, and yet are evident in discourses across the globe:
During the European colonial era, encyclopedias often sought to give a rationale for the predominance of European rule during the colonial period by referring to a special position taken by Europe compared to the other continents. Thus, Johann Heinrich Zedler, in 1741, wrote that;
"even though Europe is the smallest of the world's four continents, it has for various reasons a position that places it before all others.... Its inhabitants have excellent customs, they are courteous and erudite in both sciences and crafts".
The Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (Conversations-Lexicon) of 1847 still has an ostensibly Eurocentric approach and claims about Europe that;
"its geographical situation and its cultural and political significance is clearly the most important of the five continents, over which it has gained a most influential government both in material and even more so in cultural aspects".
European exceptionalism thus grew out of the Great Divergence of the Early Modern period, due to the combined effects of the Scientific Revolution, the Commercial Revolution, and the rise of colonial empires, the Industrial Revolution and a Second European colonization wave.
A great divergence?
European exceptionalism is widely reflected in popular genres of literature, especially literature for young adults (for example, Rudyard Kipling's Kim) and adventure literature in general. Portrayal of European colonialism in such literature has been analysed in terms of Eurocentrism in retrospect, such as presenting idealised and often exaggeratedly masculine Western heroes, who conquered 'savage' peoples in the remaining so-called 'dark spaces' of the globe.
Thinly disguised racist narratives were part of the necessary ideological structure to maintain the European colonialist and capitalistic system of exploitation of the peoples of the whole world, but one short story, one novella in particular, creates a sort of cultural collision between truth and fiction, reality and denial. This is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Heart of Darkness
European exceptionalism leads to . . .
. . . exceptional European brutality!
A European miracle?
The European miracle, a term coined by Eric Jones in 1981, refers to this surprising rise of Europe during the Early Modern period. During the 15th to 18th centuries, a great divergence took place, comprising the European Renaissance, age of discovery, the formation of the colonial empires, the Age of Reason, and the associated leap forward in technology and the development of capitalism and early industrialisation. The result was that by the 19th century, European powers dominated world trade and world politics.
Again, the notion of a European miracle says more about the European world view than the realities represented. It is often the omissions, and the selections, that reveal more of this constructed perception of things than what is presented, represented and discussed. Looking at what has been dismissed, or is being dismissed, and why, is often significantly more revealing as to the character of a dominating eurocentric ideology.
In a Guardian article by Stephen Bates the quoted dismissals of Hochschild's exposé of the Belgian colonialist instigation of "The horror!" in the Congo is at least questionable, and at most, a blatant abdication of responsibility to acknowledge the facts of "The horror!":
Under the headline 'a scandalous book', members of the Royal Belgian Union for Overseas Territories claim: 'There is nothing that could compare with the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, or the deliberate massacres of the Indian, Tasmanian and Aboriginal populations. A black legend has been created by polemicists and British and American journalists feeding off the imaginations of novelists and the re-writers of history.' Professor Jean Stengers, a leading historian of the period, says: 'Terrible things happened, but Hochschild is exaggerating. It is absurd to say so many millions died. I don't attach so much significance to his book. In two or three years' time, it will be forgotten.'
Leopold's British biographer, Barbara Emerson, agrees: 'I think it is a very shoddy piece of work. Leopold did not start genocide. He was greedy for money and chose not to interest himself when things got out of control. Part of Belgian society is still very defensive. People with Congo connections say we were not so awful as that, we reformed the Congo and had a decent administration there.' Stengers acknowledges that the population of the Congo shrank dramatically in the 30 years after Leopold took over, though exact figures are hard to establish since no one knows how many inhabited the vast jungles in the 1880s.
Eurocentrism, and its discourses, is a way of dominating the exchange of ideas to show the superiority of one perspective and how much power it holds over different social groups.
History of the concept
Following on from the European Exceptionalism section of the Wikipedia article on Eurocentrism we come to a section on the History of the Concept that begins with Anti-colonialism:
Even in the 19th century, anti-colonial movements had developed claims about national traditions and values that were set against those of Europe. Orientalism developed in the late 18th century as a disproportionate Western interest in and idealization of Eastern cultures.
In Orientalism, a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, the author discusses Orientalism, defined as;
the West's patronizing representations of "The East"—the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. According to Said, orientalism (the Western scholarship about the Eastern World) is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.
According to Said, in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab élites indicate they are imperial satraps ("satrap" is used metaphorically in modern literature to refer to world leaders or governors who are heavily influenced by larger world superpowers or hegemonies) and act as their surrogates who have internalized the romanticized "Arab Culture" created by French, British and, later, American Orientalists; the examples include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land.
The critical application of post-structuralism in the scholarship of Orientalism influenced the development of literary theory, cultural criticism, and the field of Middle Eastern studies, especially regarding how academics practice their intellectual enquiry when examining, describing, and explaining the Middle East. The scope of Said's scholarship established Orientalism as a foundation text in the field of post-colonial culture studies, which examines the denotations and connotations of Orientalism, and the history of a country's post-colonial period.
As a public intellectual, Edward Said debated Orientalism with historians and scholars of area studies, notably, the historian Bernard Lewis, who described the thesis of Orientalism as "anti-Western". For subsequent editions of Orientalism, Said wrote an "Afterword" (1995) and a "Preface" (2003) addressing criticisms of the content, substance, and style of the work as cultural criticism.
The Wikipedia article on Eurocentrism that deals with Anti-colonialism continues:
By the early 20th century, some historians, such as Arnold J. Toynbee, were attempting to construct multifocal models of world civilizations. Toynbee also drew attention in Europe to non-European historians, such as the medieval Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun. He also established links with Asian thinkers, such as through his dialogues with Daisaku Ikeda of Soka Gakkai International.
Samir Amin is referenced at the end of this section:
The explicit concept of Eurocentrism is a product of the period of decolonisation in the 1960s to 1970s. Its original context is the core-periphery or dependency model of capitalist development of Marxian economics (Amin 1974, 1988).
A section on the debates concerning Eurocentrism since 1990s follows:
Eurocentrism has been a particularly important concept in development studies. Brohman (1995) argued that Eurocentrism "perpetuated intellectual dependence on a restricted group of prestigious Western academic institutions that determine the subject matter and methods of research".
In treatises on historical or contemporary Eurocentrism that appeared since the 1990s, Eurocentrism is mostly cast in terms of dualisms such as civilized/barbaric or advanced/backward, developed/undeveloped, core/periphery, implying "evolutionary schemas through which societies inevitably progress", with a remnant of an "underlying presumption of a superior white Western self as referent of analysis" .
Eurocentrism and the dualistic properties that it labels on non-European countries, cultures and persons have often been criticized in the political discourse of the 1990s and 2000s, particularly in the greater context of political correctness, race in the United States and affirmative action. In the 1990s, there was a trend of criticizing various geographic terms current in the English language as Eurocentric, such as the traditional division of Eurasia into Europe and Asia or the term Middle East. Eric Sheppard, in 2005, argued that contemporary Marxism itself has Eurocentric traits (in spite of "Eurocentrism" originating in the vocabulary of Marxian economics), because it supposes that the third world must go through a stage of capitalism before "progressive social formations can be envisioned". (See Note below)
There has been some debate on whether historical Eurocentrism qualifies as "just another ethnocentrism", as it is found in most of the world's cultures, especially in cultures with imperial aspirations, as in the Sinocentrism in China; in the Empire of Japan (c. 1868-1945), or during the American Century. James M. Blaut (2000) argued that Eurocentrism went beyond other ethnocentrisms, as the scale of European colonial expansion was historically unprecedented and resulted in the formation of a "colonizer's model of the world".
Note: For Samir Amin it is "De-linking" (see above) that leads to the possibility of a "development" capable of creating the necessary conditions for social, economic and political emancipation. It is the right-wing liberal virus of economic and political policies, and ideology of contemporary capitalism, enforced through militant actions, diplomacy and war, that is the real problem.
The next section is called Race and politics in the United States and has links to the main articles: Race and ethnicity in the United States and Racism in the United States.
The terms Afrocentrism vs. Eurocentrism have come to play a role in the 2000s to 2010s in the context of the political discourse on race in the United States and critical whiteness studies, aiming to expose white supremacism and white privilege.
Afrocentrist scholars, such as Molefi Asante, have argued that there is a prevalence of Eurocentric thought in the processing of much of academia on African affairs.
On the other hand, in an article, 'Eurocentrism and Academic Imperialism' by Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, from the University of Tehran, states that Eurocentric thought exists in almost all aspects of academia in many parts of the world, especially in the humanities.
Edgar Alfred Bowring states that in the West, self-regard, self-congratulation and denigration of the ‘Other’ run more deeply and those tendencies have infected more aspects of their thinking, laws and policy than anywhere else. Luke Clossey and Nicholas Guyatt have measured the degree of Eurocentrism in the research programs of top history departments.
In Southern Europe and Latin America, a number of academic proposals to offer alternatives to the Eurocentric perspective have emerged, such as the project of the Epistemologies of the South by Portuguese scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos and those of the Subaltern Studies groups in India and Latin America (the Modernity/Coloniality Group of Anibal Quijano, Edgardo Lander, Enrique Dussel, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Ramón Grosfoguel, and others).
Is there a thread running through this, the suggestion of a critique regarding the place of academia and its centres, along with its historic role in serving to maintain the ideology and interests of actually existing capitalism through privileging the eurocentric discourses over those located at the peripheries?
See Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent"
William Blake had this idea too in his Preface to his printed and illuminated work Milton.
Following the Race and politics in the United States the Wikipedia Eurocentrism article presents the ideas of four individual thinkers who have to some extent shaped the debate about European perceptions, mis-perceptions, understandings and mis-understandings.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Max Weber (1864-1920)
Andre Gunder Frank (1929 – 2005)
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975)
Returning to Eurocentrism in the beauty industry, we begin to return full circle to the LODE cargo in Colombia, and it begins with two so-called doll experiments.
The doll experiments
Fade to white . . .
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