White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture.

The original impetus for this book was a request to conduct research on a collection of images of Africa and Blacks for an exhibition first held at the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam in 1989-90. The book grew out of Pieterse's initial report, and it is a well written, lavishly illustrated addition to the study of the ways in which Africans and diasporic Blacks have been represented in Western cultures. In his introduction, Pieterse claims that what makes the book distinct is its focus on visual images. This is not entirely the case, for although enquiries into representations of 'otherness' have indeed been predominantly based on the analysis of written texts, one can point to studies such as Nicolas Monti's on African photography during the colonial period, Hugh Honour's on the image of Blacks in Western art, Dabydeen's on images of Blacks in eighteenth-century English art and McElroy's on such images in American art from the eighteenth through to the mid-twentieth century, not to mention various studies of representations of black people in film and television. What does make Pieterse's book relatively distinct is that it is concerned with popular representations of Blacks, rather than with such representations in anthropology or the fine art tradition. Images of Blacks in Western popular culture have received little critical attention, and in this respect Pieterse fills a considerable gap.

The book is a comparative historical analysis of visualized stereotypes of Blacks constructed by white people, generally with the consequence of producing and affirming the subordinate economic and cultural position of black people within particular societies as well as on the world stage. It ranges across the varieties of stereotypes as they have been deployed in different cultural contexts in Western Europe and North America, and it examines their historical contingency and relativity, the ways in which these simplistic images have changed from one period to another. The book is in three parts. The first concentrates on images of Africa, while the second looks at representations of Blacks in the West. These constitute the bulk of the text; the third part compares images of Blacks with those of other ethnic groups, explores the relations between stereotypes of class, gender and 'race', and offers a useful summary of the main analytical principles on which the book is based. The section on Africa traces the development of an 'imaginative geography' of the 'Dark Continent', and the processes of 'othering' which have operated in the racialized imagery of its peoples. Pieterse examines these processes at work in the historically specific discourses of slavery and abolitionism, missionary activity, exploration, colonialism and apartheid. Two chapters focus on the stereotypical confinement of black people to two social roles, apart from that of labourer. In both Europe and the United States, Blacks have been largely relegated to the occupations of service and entertainment (including sport as well as dance and music). Given the enormous consequences of the logic of exclusion and containment which lay behind these stereotypical roles, I would have liked to have seen more attention paid to them. These two chapters are fine so far as they go, but they are disappointingly short. No doubt the author was confined by his publisher's required word-length, but I continued to feel frustrated at the length of treatment given to the ideological use of Blacks in children's literature, and to the discursive construction of the sexuality of black men and black women. This means that certain points are rather too easily glided over, and at times the book takes on the texture of a panoramic survey rather than a critical interrogation. Yet despite this, the quality of the analysis is high. Much of what Pieterse has to say is acute in its perception, illuminating in its critical examination of the material of black memorabilia, and solidly supported by its empirical detail and scholarly reference.

Image-formation of outgroups is determined primarily by the historically conditioned dynamics of those involved in such formation, rather than by the characteristics of outgroups themselves. The ways in which subordinated outsiders are represented constitute a means of playing out tensions and contradictions in the internal relations of dominant groups and hegemonic cultures. It should almost be regarded as axiomatic in historical cultural analysis that representations of Blacks tell us more about white Europeans and Americans than about Blacks. Recognition of this is one of the real strengths of Pieterse's study. As he puts it, "images of Africa and of blacks in western cultures must be interpreted primarily in terms of what they say about those cultures, not in terms of what they say about Africa or blacks". At the same time, one should not underestimate the damaging consequences of the stereotypes of 'negritude' as being close to nature, deficient in the faculty of reason, naturally prone to indolence, and unpossessed of history. Indeed, it was being dispossessed of history which followed the primitivization of Africans. Throughout the period of European colonialism and imperialism, the image of Africa was the negative obverse of white cultural identities, and the polarization of Africans to a position of cultural and psychological inferiority obscured and distorted black self-images over two centuries and more. That is the pathology of cultural 'difference' which modernity has bequeathed to us, and black people today are still not free from the taint of being 'niggered'. As Pieterse puts it, "past fears and antagonisms are encoded in images and symbols" which "form part of our ambience and cultural baggage" in Western societies. He describes his book as a contribution to "a spring cleaning of intercultural images, of alienating images between cultures and 'races' which have long since outlived their relevance". As such, it performs its allotted task well.

Michael Picketing Loughborough University