Images of Dutchness: Popular Visual Culture, Early Cinema and the Emergence of a National Cliché

Front matter

SARAH DELLMANN

B Popular Visual Culture, Early Cinema and the Emergence of a National Cliché, 1800-1914

SAN E

Table Of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 9

ANALYSING IMAGES OF DUTCHNESS:

FROM STEREOTYPE TO NATIONAL CLICHE 31

CHAPTER 1 Analysing Images of Dutchness: From Stereotype to National Cliché

Dellmann, Sarah, Images of Dutchness. Popular Visual Culture, Early Cinema, and the Emergence of a National Cliché, 1800-1914. Amsterdam University Press, 2018

This chapter explains methods and approaches for the study of popular visual culture before 1914. The objective of the following study is to shed light on a semiotic process: the attribution of meaning to cultural artefacts, which result in supposed common knowledge and, as part of it, national clichés. The concepts “performative” and “performance” as well as “intermediality” are introduced as suitable approaches for investigating visual material in conjunction with its textual comments. The outlined research frame is designed to historicize the categories (Dutch, Dutchness, and the Netherlands), the visual content (the image-objects, motifs, and clichés), and the attributed meaning (textual comment performed at specific venues).

KEYWORDS visual culture - methods; media history - methods; stereotypes; intermediality; performativity

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This study investigates the role of visual media in the creation of supposed common knowledge about the Netherlands between c. 1800 and 1914. Two expressions will recur throughout the chapters: “supposed common knowledge” and “images of Dutchness”. As stated in the Introduction, the research question concerns itself with knowledge production, while the data to answer it are “images of Dutchness”. It is crucial to be aware of this distinction, as the analysis of the aesthetics and meanings of the images is not at the centre of the research question itself, but a means to answer it. In addition to these two expressions, a number of highly polysemic terms will be used as conceptual tools. This chapter defines the terminology, outlines the approach to the historical material, and situates this research in the field of history of Western popular visual culture.

Iuse the term “popular”, not qualitatively to distinguish between lowbrow and highbrow culture, but quantitatively as a synonym to “widely disseminated”; “media” to signify a technology and form of transmitting information; “text” and “word” exclusively for written and spoken words; “image” in reference to a material object (an artefact) whose visual information goes beyond the material of the carrier and what is perceived as an image; and “motif” to describe the visual content of these images.’ The term “image” therefore does not refer to mental representations (which I will refer to as “ideas”). I have chosen the formula “supposed common knowledge” over the more widely used term “stereotype” to better account for the implicit normative ideas regarding what people of a given community are expected to know. Furthermore, supposed common knowledge is not primarily linked to cognitive questions of representation. Supposed common knowledge is defined as a conceptual tool to describe a specific form of knowledge against the backdrop of the stereotype.

Images of the Netherlands and the Dutch appeared in various visual media (see Chapter 2). My corpus consists of images that were disseminated widely. All of these popular images came with textual comment and were shown to, performed for, and seen by audiences at various venues and in different countries. For the investigated period, I observed a relative stability and persistence of media and media formats, a relative stability and persistence of recurring motifs, and a relative instability of meaning attribution and textual comment. Neither motif nor aesthetics, neither attributed meaning nor appreciation, nor critique of the images differ significantly along the lines of place of production or nationality of the commenting person. A comparison of self-images with outsider’s images therefore appeared too simple. To describe the complexity of the “nationality” of images, the concept of Dutchness proved useful. In addition, I will use the concept of “Otherness” to analyse the descriptions of people and places. In order to better account for the various functions that word and image combinations can have, I will introduce the distinction “national-as-bracket” and “national-as-descriptor” in Chapter 4.

Despite technological differences between media and therefore differences in production methods and the material of carriers, the motifs resemble one another across different media and appear very stable and persistent during the investigated period, especially from c. 1870 onwards. Consequently, it seemed inadequate to present the research purely chronologically or to compare e.g. images of the Netherlands in film to images of the Netherlands in illustrated magazines.’ To describe the recurrence of motifs across media, I make use of the concept of transmediality (see below).

The most significant differences are found in the textual comments to the images. Textual comment is crucial in the process of attributing meaning to images. By understanding this process as performative (thus not fully determined by image or comment alone), I can account for the observation that the same motif - at times even the same image - can be commented on in several ways. Recurring patterns in meaning attribution can be distinguished from one another by assigning them to specific discourses. This gave reason to organize the analysis of the material according to discourses (anthropology, geography, and tourism) and not along the more commonly applied lines of chronology, origin, or medium. I provided motivation for this choice in the Introduction.

1.2 SUPPOSED COMMON KNOWLEDGE AND THE STEREOTYPE The Stereotype across the Disciplines

Generally, within the humanities, the phenomenon of recurring formulas or patterns in media is described in terms of the stereotype. In the key publication on the topic in the field of cinema studies, Film and Stereotype, Jorg Schweinitz (2011) traces the various uses of the term “stereotype” across the disciplines. In social psychology, the term “stereotype” refers to “standardized conceptions of people, primarily based on an individual’s belonging to a category” (Schweinitz 2011, 4). In this discipline, the formation of stereotypes

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34 | refers to mental and cognitive processes in order to analyse belief patterns and how these patterns influence attitudes on and perception of other groups of people (Cf. Schweinitz 2011, 5). The verbal articulation of stereotypes are also studied in (comparative) literature studies (Cf. Beller and Leerssen 2007). In linguistics, fixed lexeme connections are defined as verbal stereotypes. Patterns used in specific situations that are “conventionally used to say certain things” (Coulmas 1981, 3) are also named stereotypes.

Visual Expressions of the Stereotype

As these examples have shown, not all phenomena that are commonly designated by the term “stereotype” have a visual or textual component. For the study of visual expressions of stereotypes, I turn to its conceptualization in art history. In art history, the stereotype is used to “describe conventionally fixed and recurrent structural patterns of representation” (Schweinitz 2011, 21). According to art historian Arnold Hauser, artists need to deal creatively with this fact as long as they want to share and communicate: artistic representations need to make use of the already known and transform it, because something completely unrelated necessarily remains incomprehensible to the audience (cf. Hauser 1982, 21). Art historian Ernst H. Gombrich uses the terms “pattern” and “formula” to mark that he “understands stereotypes as particularly stable schemata of visual or artistic representation, which can be considered conventional within a given art-historical formation” (Schweinitz 2011, 23; referring to Gombrich 1983, 148). In his study Art and Illusion, Gombrich shows the strong impact of conventions in Western art that influence pictorial representations in visual representations of the external world. To Gombrich, the distinction between the stereotype as specific schema or convention either in the mind of the artist or in pattern books on the one side and the realizations in the individual works of art on the other is highly important to analyse various ways in which artists adapt stereotypes into clichés. In Gombrich’s conceptualization, the stereotype is very explicitly an idea, the abstract pattern behind the image but never the concrete, material image. The adaptation of a stereotype in e.g. a painting or a photograph results in a cliché, not a “stereotypical image”.

For my analysis, I will follow Gombrich’s distinction of “cliché” and “stereotype”: in this definition, the stereotype designates the mental concept, the cliché is the realization of this mental concept in an image (Cf. Gombrich 1983, 61) or, better, in images. Only through comparative analysis, so is my conviction, can one identify the recurrence of a motif and discern conventions in depiction.

Before recurring motifs can be understood as clichés, the stereotype that is expressed in the cliché needs to be reconstructed. The cliché is not equal to a single image or a recurring motif; it is only by relating the observed recurrence of motifs to a mental concept - the stereotype - that the recurring motifs can be understood as cliché to visualize the stereotype. In other words: it is only possible to understand the motif of an image as a cliché against the interpretative backdrop of the stereotype. Whereas “image” and “recurring motifs” describe material, visible phenomena, “cliché” and “stereotype” are cognitive concepts. These levels are, of course, only distinguishable in theory; in practice, both are related in a dynamic process: mental constructions are both manifested in and are based on material objects such as images.

Two types of studies that investigate visual expressions of the stereotype are dominant. They take either a deductive or an inductive approach. A deductive study of stereotypes investigates how mental concepts are visualized. Starting from a mental concept, these studies investigate which instances - in visual matter, motifs - figure as corresponding clichés. Once the cliché is identified, expressions of the stereotype can be traced via the appearance of the cliché in a body of images and texts. An example for such a research question is: “How are the mental concepts ‘the Dutch’ and ‘the Netherlands’ visualized? Which motifs are used to express the concepts ‘the Dutch’ and ‘the Netherlands’”? Here, the mental concept appears as the defining criterion for the classification. Such research can result in an inventory of motifs that illustrate a concept. In the case of continually recurring motifs, a cliché can be identified. A conclusion would state, e.g. that the concept “the Netherlands” is usually visualized by the motifs “windmill” and “clogs” and not by fast cars and evening gowns and that these motifs are found in the images A, B, and C. The motifs “windmill” and “clogs” can now be understood as clichés for the expression of the concept “the Netherlands”.

An inductive study of stereotypes starts at the other end. Departing from the observed phenomenon of a recurrence of motifs, it searches for corresponding mental concepts to subsequently identify the recurring motifs as clichés. A research question of the inductive approach is: “To what do these hundreds of images with the recurring motif of windmills next to a canal relate?” Then, different suggestions for the interpretation of the recurring motif are made. Is the motif a cliché to illustrate the mental concept of a windmill, waterways, or Dutch landscapes? In this approach, the recurring motif (not the cliché) is the criterion of classification. As a result, various semantic fields associated with the motif and the variety of mental concepts, that the motif of a windmill next to a canal can stand for, can be traced.3

Both approaches presuppose one element at their point of departure: either clichés are searched to represent the already-defined stereotype, or a

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36 | concept is searched to explain the phenomenon of recurring patterns of an already-defined motif. Both approaches elucidate different cognitive aspects in the coupling of concept and expression, generalized abstraction and concrete instances, stereotype and cliché. Although it is possible to use the concept of the stereotype in historical research, e.g. for diachronic studies on how visualizations of a concept change over time, it is neither possible to investigate the social, cultural, and historical dimensions in the process of coupling a concept to a limited number of expressions, nor to explain what the images mean or meant. Even when used to investigate aesthetics, the stereotype is defined as a cognitive entity and is not used to describe the (material) images. If scholars judge an image as stereotypical, this is most often the conclusion of an analysis of images that made use of other tools to analyse the meaning of a certain motif, e.g. Barthes’ concept of anchorage as outlined in his famous essay “Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes 1977); criteria from art history for the description of images, iconography, cultural traditions of symbols and allegories etc.

Research into stereotypes would possibly find that windmills and clogs often are present in images referring to the Netherlands — but, through these stereotypes, the question of what people got to know through these images, which attitudes about the Netherlands and the Dutch were broadly shared, cannot be fully answered. The conceptualization of the stereotype is not designed for investigating semiotic processes. Precisely this, the attribution of meaning to images of the Netherlands and the Dutch, is central to this thesis (see Introduction). I thus opted to approach my material through the concept “supposed common knowledge”. Rather than alternatives, I see that supposed common knowledge is a broader category that contains, but is not limited to, stereotypical thinking and its expression in clichés. As I will argue below, both forms of knowledge are reductive and incomplete, but, in contrast to the stereotype, supposed common knowledge does not exclusively rely on standardized forms and therefore accounts better for my research question.

Rediscovering historical, visual material and investigating the processes in which an image of the Netherlands eventually becomes an image of Dutchness requires another route for the research. I started by trying to consider (at least conceptually) all images that claim to inform about the Netherlands and the Dutch in a realist way and that circulated widely in the long nineteenth century. I then clustered recurring motifs and comments to subsequently derive patterns in the ways in which visual material functions in the knowledge production about the Netherlands and the Dutch. Although my corpus of about 3000 images is not suitable for absolute quantitative statements, I am convinced that it indicates a relative prominence of used motifs and ascribed meaning, which is telling about patterns.

I believe that there are two advantages in looking into a big corpus of images without limiting oneself to images that display clichés of (today’s) stereotypes of the Netherlands and the Dutch. For one reason, this approach is less likely to presuppose what one is about to find out: had I limited myself to images of windmills and people wearing clogs, I could have verified that this was a popular motif indeed. However, the gained knowledge would have been quite poor. Another reason for this conceptual openness was the possibility to include the “non-cliché images” in the generation of supposed common knowledge as well. I could trace which meanings were attributed to images of the Netherlands and the Dutch without the necessity to define beforehand if the image in question used a cliché. Furthermore, the openness led to my observation that, over the course of time, the motifs used for expressing the concepts “the Netherlands” and “the Dutch” became limited to a relatively small number that functioned as clichés. I could not have observed this if I had not considered the “non-cliché images” in my research.

From the above follows that the cliché in my research plays a different role than it does in stereotype theory. The cliché is neither the starting point nor the result nor the central object of the research question. Clichés are visual expressions of the stereotype and, as such, they are part of supposed common knowledge about the Netherlands and the Dutch. Clichés can also be valuable evidence of assumptions of “what one supposedly knows”; however, there is something more to supposed common knowledge than stereotypes and clichés. To account for this “something more”, I will now outline differences between these two kinds of knowledge.

From Stereotype to Supposed Common Knowledge

Supposed common knowledge and the stereotype have in common that they are reductive and simplifying. This notwithstanding, there is a difference in the way the reduction of complexity is achieved. The stereotype is a systematic, highly organized form of knowledge, as the attributions “formulaic”, “schematic”, and “composite” imply. This stands in sharp contrast to the cumulative and fuzzy character of what people at a given time in a given community believe or (are supposed to) know. The reduction of complexity into supposed common knowledge is not organized formulaically i.e. not systematically. Although supposed common knowledge is the result of a non-organized selection process, this kind of knowledge does not invite readers/viewers to evaluate its content critically. Everyone can contribute to supposed common knowledge: the scholar of ethnography as much as the neighbour who returns from her holidays or even someone who hears something on the radio. Person-

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38 | al experiences and scholarly research; anecdotes and historical facts; eclectic information on villages, cities, and buildings; on weather, landscape, and customs all feed into “what everyone knows”. No graspable authority assembled this corpus of statements and bits of information. These statements are not necessarily coherent, nor are they exclusive. If “everyone knows” that the Dutch are a nation of fishermen, it is nonetheless possible to admire their diplomatic tradition. Supposed common knowledge about people and places is implicitly or explicitly tied to claims of truth, and thus visual representations of realism and authenticity — stereotypes do not necessarily make this claim. In addition, supposed common knowledge offers the individual an easy way to make statements without questioning or taking responsibility for the things said. An individual can answer the question “how do you know that the Dutch wear wooden shoes?” with “because everyone knows it” or with reference to “common sense”. Thereby, a statement is confirmed by repeating a presupposed content by reference to a norm (reiterating both the body of knowledge and its attribution) - without further justification or arguments. The normative implication of supposed common knowledge opens the statements made in its name to interrogation from an ethical perspective; this dimension is absent in the concept of the stereotype.

By definition, supposed common knowledge belongs to the realm of the popular. The fact that something is supposed to be known commonly requires relatively invariant and fixed forms - if not, one’s own knowledge would not be convergent with everyone else’s. Supposed common knowledge and the stereotype thus share that both draw on “fixed forms”, which are “repeatedly reproduced” and as a result “very persistent” (Cf. Schweinitz 2011, 26). However, the degree of both fixity and persistency of supposed common knowledge cannot be as high as in the stereotype. The absence of systematization in supposed common knowledge allows the inclusion or exclusion of details as one sees fit (which ensures its functionality to divergent discourses and for a wide range of communicative aims) without being marked or perceived as an adaptation.

The concepts of stereotype and supposed common knowledge differ strongly in their relation to truth. As Schweinitz rightly points out, criticizing the stereotype for not representing the world in its complex variety misses the point as the stereotype by definition is a kind of schema, thus reductive and formulaic (Cf. Schweinitz 2011, 36-39).5 As outlined above, supposed common knowledge is not systematically reductive or schematic; the question whether its statements are true or false therefore becomes more intricate. In the course of my research, I rarely came across a statement about the Netherlands and the Dutch that is explicitly false — there are people who wear wooden shoes, there are windmills, some people do paint their houses in colourful varnish, and cheese actually is produced in the Netherlands. The problem here is not so much one of true versus distorted or false representation, but one of synecdoche / pars pro toto. The focus of attention then lies on the question of which bits of information and which statements are supposed to be “commonly known”. Consequently, this research inquires the status of the (always) partial knowledge in relation to claims of comprehensiveness. Supposed common knowledge and the stereotype share the aspect of being established by convention, but the established conventions are situated on different levels. Supposed common knowledge is not the result of conventionalized cognitive processes but of conventionalized social and cultural practices that result in statements about a certain topic that members among a given community are supposed to know.

Having conceptualized supposed common knowledge this way enables me to pose questions about the process of linking objects with cultural and historical meanings as well as questions about how “everyone” is addressed to make sense of and relate to the images and statements.

1.3 NATIONALITY, NATIONALISM, NATIONNESS: THE NETHERLANDS, DUTCH, DUTCHNESS

Alongside concepts to investigate the meaning of images, as discussed above, analytical concepts for the discussion of the “nationality of images” are required.

What is Dutch or what makes something or someone Dutch is not a question first asked in the age of postmodernity; it has been asked (and answered) in various ways and with different intentions ever since the national became an important category of difference in the early nineteenth century (see Chapters 3 and 4). Debates about possible meanings of Dutchness have a history, too. What is Dutch concerning cultural heritage was of great importance to the intellectual elite in the Netherlands as early as the first half of the nineteenth century. Joep Leerssen shows in De bronnen van het vaderland. Taal, literatuur en de afbakening van Nederland 1806-1890 (2006) how many efforts were taken in attempts to firmly root the Netherlands and the Dutch in a cultural tradition that is older than these national categories themselves. Leerssen particularly investigates the role of literature critiques in the creation of a cultural national tradition. With the tale of Reynard the fox, Leerssen illustrates how cultural heritage retrospectively has become nationalized by historiographers and confronts the conflicting claims of German, Belgium, Dutch, and French intellectuals who interpret this tale as part of “their” national cultural heritage (Cf. Leerssen 2006).

In addition to the question of “national identity” of cultural heritage,

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40 | many Dutch intellectuals of the nineteenth century pondered which qualities are or should be related to “Dutch identity”. Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) defined the Dutch as a spiritual unity of (orthodox) Protestants; consequently, he saw the Dutch nation as a Protestant nation with Calvinism as its core (Cf. Kuiper 1993). In the second half of the nineteenth century, liberals claimed to embody the “‘typically’ Dutch spirit of the Golden Age” and thereby the “essence of national tradition” (te Velde 1993, 62), too. Decades later, Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) drew on this tradition to define the Dutch first and foremost as burgerlijk (Cf. te Velde 1993). The affiliation of the province of Limburg is another case in point: in 1866, Limburg was fully separated from Prussia and joined the United Provinces of the Netherlands. At that time, the local political elite defined themselves not as essentially Dutch; their anti-Prussian feelings were at least as important as Dutch national sentiments (Cf. op den Camp 1993, 86). Only when the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 threatened the sovereignty of Limburg did the Limburg elite emphasize their belonging to the United Provinces of the Netherlands. Despite differences in landscape, language, religion, and history, the Limburgers felt that they were best off within the Dutch state and its tradition of “toleration of cultural differences” (op den Camp 1993, 103).

This selection of definitions of Dutchness already shows that the question “what is Dutch” can be posed with various intentions. The multiple answers prove that so-called Dutch attitudes and qualities never have been defined in a univocal or consensual way. The search for a generally accepted and encompassing definition of Dutchness is as old as it has proved to be unachievable. However, it is not possible to abandon the categories “Dutchness” and “Dutch (national) identity” altogether in a study on “images of Dutchness”; not least because parts of the various answers to the question of “what Dutch is” fed into the fuzzy, eclectic, and cumulative body of supposed common knowledge. I thus suggest rephrasing the question to inquire about Dutchness. Instead of trying to define Dutchness and then discuss whether an image represents Dutchness correctly, desirably, adequately or not, I will ask which definitions of Dutchness are offered and which function a particular construction of Dutchness fulfils.

In order to account for various functionalities of questions concerning the “nationality” of cultural products, a more elaborate understanding of the national is indispensable. This need increases when products are disseminated and produced for an international market. Popular images of the Netherlands and the Dutch are produced by manufactures based in various countries. What is, then, the nationality of a film showing a coastal town in the Netherlands, taken by a Belgian cameraman for a French production company, distributed all over the world? What is the nationality of an image taken in a British studio, showing a woman with props and clothes that are associated with the Netherlands, reprinted in a German illustrated magazine? Confronted with similar questions in her study of early films on America’s West, Nanna Verhoeff designed three layers of the national: nationality, nationalism, and nationness. According to her definition, the national refers to the origin of the product in question — e.g. the site of the headquarters of the production company. The second layer, the nationalist, refers to questions of cultural ownership and/or belonging - e.g. the place of the filmed sites. With cultural products becoming available on an increasingly international market, the demand for recognizable distinctions between national products has increased, too. The third layer, nationness, is linked to this demand. Verhoeff defines nationness as a “bundle of features that cater to a recognizable taste that becomes fashionable” (Verhoeff 2006, 160). Nationness implies both recognizable images and a recognizable style of these images that, in the case of early film, is often associated with the nationality of the production company. Despite all efforts, the content of the category of nationness itself is never fully defined and remains in constant transition. Verhoeff observes that early Pathé films about America’s West “foreground an unstable ‘nationness’ that draws attention to the impossibility of pinning them [the films] down in terms of nationality” (Verhoeff 2006, 172).

This impossibility of pinning down internationally distributed images in terms of nationality also applies to popular images of the Netherlands and the Dutch before the invention of cinema and in nonfiction genres. In the Netherlands as well as in its neighbouring countries and in North America, the nationality (i.e. the origin) of images that circulated massively was foremost British, French, and German (see Chapter 2). Nationalism and nationness of images are not determined as easily as nationality. A certain motif may be claimed or discarded to express cultural belonging, and fashions change over time as well. Looking into textual comments on the image gives insight into the meanings that an image came to stand in for; the meaning is, to a large extent, external to the images themselves.

Nations and Their Others

In the course of the nineteenth century, aspects that were seen as characteristic of a nation were often defined against their (assumed) difference to others. The terms “The Other” and “Otherness” (with capital O), contrasted to the “self”, are employed in different disciplines of the humanities.° For my research, I will follow the application of these terms as outlined in postcolonial studies, as, in that field of study, these terms are used to investigate the

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42 | production of knowledge about people and places. In postcolonial studies, Otherness is the result of the ways in which the colonizers explain, imagine, and allocate the people in the colonies as radically different from themselves. One key publication in this field of study is Homi Bhabha’s essay collection The Location of Culture (Bhabha 1994a). In his famous essay “The Other Question. Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism” (Bhabha 1994b), Bhabha proposes a shift in the (functionality of) analysis of colonial discourse. Instead of discussing whether texts use aesthetics that are ethically acceptable or not, he asks which positions of collective identities are (re-)constructed.

My reading of colonial discourse suggests that the point of intervention should shift from the ready recognition of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse. To judge the stereotypical image’ on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace it, which is only possible by engaging with its effectivity; with the repertoire of positions of power and resistance, domination and dependence that constructs colonial identification subject (both colonizer and colonized). [...] In order to understand the productivity of colonial power it is crucial to construct its regime to truth, not to subject its representations to a normalizing judgment. (Bhabha 1994b, 67 original emphasis)

In the following section of the essay, Bhabha emphasizes the function of knowledge production in colonial discourse (Cf. Bhabha 1994b, 70). This knowledge “employs a system of representation, a regime of truth, that is structurally similar to realism” (Bhabha 1994b, 71). This allusion to realism makes the content of knowledge appear true, which, in turn, facilitates the acceptance of the meaning that is ascribed to the perceived differences, not as an interpretation, but as reality. Bhabha quotes a passage of Edward Said’s Orientalism:

[Alnyone employing orientalism, which is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities, and regions deemed to be Oriental, will designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply, to be, reality. (Said 2003, 72; quoted in Bhabha 1994b, 71)

Orientalist discourse, just as colonial discourse in general, produces knowledge in the rhetoric of realism resulting in ideas of reality and truth about the colonies for the Western or European reader. As Bhabha, Said, and other postcolonial scholars have argued, the people and places described in colonial discourse are constructed as opposed, i.e. as Other, to the European white male. Differences, not similarities, are emphasized. The perceived differences of “the Other” are neither meaningless nor neutral. While the European colonizers conceive of themselves as the norm (and get away with it because the drastic asymmetry in power is in their favour) they define the peoples in the colonies as “Others”, as deviants from the norm. Colonial discourse thereby positions the white man on top of a social hierarchy (i.e. as “normal”) with the peoples in the colonies on the bottom, as Others. The ascribed Otherness then served the European conqueror as proof of their superiority and as justification for colonialization.