< previous page | page_72 | next page > |
Page 72 the fair sex (who cannot help but be un-fair as a Mooress) must have been impossible for the critic to pass up. But the “well coloured” father of un-fair Zorayda is marked for the ethnographic inaccuracies of having facial hair on the side only and an unshaven head. Thus, even while generally commending the performances for their representations of the Other, these reviews of both Zanga and The Mountaineers affirm the impossibility of accounting fairly for racial Otherness in performance. But there was no other way. It was unspeakable for the Other to represent himself. Hence, despite the problem of anthropomorphic inaccuracies that this sort of representation contained, the English had to be happy with the black-faced non-Other/Self as the Other. But the interest in representing the racial Other in the colonial outpost was a very special one. In the discourse emanating from the staging of these Moorish characters, one can note both an affirmation and an elision of racial difference categorized through taxonomies and typologies. The eighteenth-century Dutch scientist Petrius Camper (1722–89) had done some comparative work on racial anatomy. The subtitle of the English translation of Camper’s Works claims that he based his work on “the natural difference of features of different persons of different countries and periods of life, and on beauty as exhibited in ancient sculpture; with a new method of sketching heads, natural features and portraits of individuals, with accuracy.”6 The first translation of Camper’s work had appeared in 1784, and a new edition was published in London in 1821. The pseudo-scientific field of craniology was also of interest in the colonies, and in 1821, the Calcutta Journal reproduced a report and a diagram that had been published by the Liverpool Mercury. This report presented a study of the shape of human skulls among various races of the world that was based on the Works of Camper. Structured as a hierarchy (Figure 1) moving from the primate to Homo sapiens, the diagram consists of a series of engravings showing the development of the human skull away from the apes. The order observed the following progres ![]() Figure 1 Physiognomy and the facial line, Calcutta Journal 1821. |
||
< previous page | page_72 | next page > |