▻http://www.academia.edu/12503888/The_End_of_Innocence_Debating_Colonialism_in_Switzerland_in_Patricia_Purts
The New Heart of Darkness?
‘From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came.’
With these words, James Baldwin commences his essay Stranger in the Village, a concussive reflection on racism in the mid-20th century. The text draws on his experiences in the Swiss Alpine village of Leukerbad, where he had spent time in the early 1950s escaping from the hectic life in Paris to work on his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. In his text, first published in
Harper’s Magazine in 1953, Baldwin describes how he encounters blatant and manifest racism in this ‘white wilderness’ . The children in the alleys call himNeger!’ (‘Negro!’) , the villagers constantly comment upon and touch his hair and skin . They do not believe that he is American, because ‘black men come from Africa’ ; they treat him like an exotic curiosity and accuse him of stealing wood . Baldwin contrasts the barefaced racism of this village with the reality in the United States, where white people could not claim that ‘black men do not exist’ . In what constitutes a vibrant and sagacious contri-bution to whiteness studies avant la lettre, Baldwin analyses how ‘the idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization […] and therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders’ . He concludes that white identity formation relies on the constitutive exclu-sion of non-whites and therefore on the jealous policing of the borders of civilization. However, despite the cruelty of the segregationist system in the United States at the time, the American model contains a sparkle of hope and the germ of a different future for Baldwin. Even though white people refuse to share their sense of humanity with blacks, they cannot maintain a notion of blacks as strangers. The interracial drama in America, states Baldwin, ‘has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too’ .This insight is worked out against the foil of the Swiss Alpine village, where ‘white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger’ At first sight, Leukerbad seems to serve only as a counter-image to the United States and thus as a mere tool for Baldwin’s diagnosis of North American society. But there is more to his depiction of post-World War II Swiss village life than initially meets the eye. The African American nov-elist explains that, in this setting, the issue of race ‘was a problem that remained comfortingly abstract: in effect, the black man, as a man, did not exist for Europe’ . Why does he use the example of a Swiss village in order to provide this insight? For many European places, especially urban imperial metropoles such as London, Paris or Brussels, his diagnosis of an all-white European society would have been hardly applicable. In contrast, Leukerbad’s population seemed to incorporate an ideal type of European colonial world-view: they behaved as if black people were unknown stran-gers and, indeed, non-human. At the same time, they seemed to have fully incorporated the sense of white supremacy that works as a collectively shared value in colonial Europe.