The obsession with Blackness: An epistemological inquiry into racial knowledge and racism in Britain

Abstract

This article examines the persistence of racism in Britain not only as a historical legacy but also through its continuing operation as a system of knowledge. Drawing on social constructivist theory and Foucault’s account of power and knowledge, it conceptualises racism as an epistemic system that classifies and assigns value to human difference. Using Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1860) as a case study, this article examines how racial assumptions were translated into authoritative knowledge through literary representation within imperial cultural and institutional frameworks. Trollope’s authority as an imperial traveller and Victorian author allowed racial hierarchy to circulate as credible observation rather than explicit ideology. While racism cannot be viewed as a linear trajectory from past to present, the analysis suggests how systems of knowledge enable racial domination to adapt across changing contexts while preserving its hierarchical logic. Racism therefore functions as a living system of power, sustaining hierarchies of belonging that position some groups as rational, civilised and authoritative and others as deficient or outside the boundaries of social recognition.