October 2, 2008
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy, pgs. 1-130; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

In the Spivak handout, it seems Spivak’s contention with essentialism is that it ignores the many differences between individual people. When we “romanticize the oppressed” by viewing them as pure and innocent victims, we turn them into a single static entity. Consequently, we’re not really acknowledging them as human beings, since people are dynamic. Every person varies from the next, and each person changes throughout his or her lifetime. When we villainize a particular group, we’re doing the same thing—we dehumanize them. While we ignore the flaws of the oppressed by romanticizing them, we ignore the redeeming qualities of those we villainize.
Essentialism can also cause us to stereotype people as individuals. By creating a “villain” category, for instance, we come to see people who do things associated with “villainess” as purely evil. This seems to happen often in books and films. Pretty much any Disney movie demonstrates this. For instance, I cannot remember a single time in Aladin that we see any redeeming qualities in Jafar; nor does Scar in The Lion King ever portray qualities that would allow us as viewers to sympathize with him. The film Pan’s Labrynth demonstrates this excellently, as Captain Vidal is probably the most awful sadistic villain I’ve ever seen, torturing and killing just about anyone that contradicts him. He is never portrayed in a positive light. This bothers me because I think it is a fallacy to purport that anyone is “worthless,” so to speak, and because it exacerbates hatred.
In Roy’s novel Comrade Pillai attempts to villainize Chako to labor workers: “Whenever he referred to him in his speeches he was careful to strip him of any human attributes and present him as an abstract functionary in some larger scheme. ..A theoretical construct…He never referred to him by name, but always as “the Management” (Roy 115). Dehumanizing Chako offers a Pillai a convenient means turn the workers against Chako, who Pillai believed was undermining him. It is much easier turning them against Chako when Chako is a nameless idea of corruption, stripped of his any good qualities they could sympathize with or relate to.