Bodies, racisms and assemblages

Abstract

The public display of mummified bodies in museums or other types of installations is not uncommon, something that, for various reasons, is the subject of justified controversy. The characteristic dichotomous model of the West has always understood things and people in an oppositional relationship. On the one hand, the world of inert matter and, on the other, the world of living beings. One of the interesting aspects of this distinction is that the body, understood as res extensa by Cartesianism, has remained between these two poles and easily assumes the category of object, as in the case of corpses or body fragments. Not infrequently, the exhibition of human remains has to do with the practice of racism. In this article, I use the Deleuzian notion of assemblage to analyze the centrality of the body in the problematic of racism. Throughout the text I pay special attention to the case of the dissected body of an African who, under the name of El Negro, was exhibited in a small naturalist museum in the Catalan town of Banyoles for most of the twentieth century. The case of El Negro, which in the 1990s received international media coverage until its removal from the museum and the return of the remains of the body to Botswana, can be understood within a tangled web of assemblages in which, in addition to racism, there are others such as the museum, local identity feelings and pan-Africanism.