Wanting to Be Special

Tom Nairn

• The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science by Marek Kohn
  Cape, 311 pp, £17.99, September 1995, ISBN 0 224 03958 X

Writing in the London Review of Books in 1994 (8 September) I was incautious enough to make some remarks about alternatives to Eurocentrism that history might have generated. For example Progress, like Homo sapiens himself, might have erupted out of Africa rather than from the areas north of it. In which case, instead of indulging in what Edward Said calls Orientalism, there might well be present-day pallid-skin observers – ‘fulminating over Septentrionalist delusions about colourlessness: the vacant brain-pans supposed natural to the pigmentally-challenged, with their slime-grey eyes, ratty hair and squeaky-voiced irrationality’. Or again, industrialisation might conceivably have emerged in primarily Chinese shape – from the human Middle Kingdom or heartland, rather than the remote archipelago-coast of Europe. Had this happened, there would today be critics on both sides of the 2000 AD development gap (no doubt differently dated) contorted with guilt and indignation over the romantic delusions of Occidentalism.