In the history of the life sciences, the great chain of being leading from "lower" to "higher" life forms has played a crucial part in the discursive construction of race as an object of knowledge and of racism as a living force. After World War II and the partial removal of explicit racism from evolutionary biology and physical anthropology, a good deal of racist and colonialist discourse remained projected onto the screen of "man's closest relatives," the anthropoid apes.26 It is impossible to picture the entwined hands of a white woman and an African ape without evoking the history of racist inconography in biology and in European and American popular culture. The animal hand is metonymically the individual chimpanzee, all threatened species, the third world, peoples of color, Africa, the ecologically endangered earth—all firmly in the realm of Nature, all represented in the leathery hand folding around that of the white girl-woman under the Gulf sun logo shining on the Seven Sisters' commitment to science and nature. The spontaneous gesture of touch in the wilds of Tanzania authorizes a whole doctrine of representation. Jane, as Dr. Goodall, is empowered to speak for the chimpanzees. Science speaks for nature. Authorized by unforced touch, the dynamics of representation take over, ushering in the reign of freedom and communication. This is the structure of depoliticizing expert discourse, so critical to the mythic political structures of the "modern" world and to the mythic political despair of much "post­ modernism," so undermined by fears about the breakdown of representation.27 Unfor­ tunately, representation, fraudulent or not, is a very resilient practice. 309


back