This bigotry, he suggests, laid foundations for the "us vs. them" theme that would become key to Western thought. With the dominance of Christianity well in place and the ushering in of Enlightenment thought, science and biology played a crucial role to the maintenance of hierarchal structures in 18th century Europe. French ethnological discourse gave rise to biological determinism, an ideology that would find its way to the Caribbean and North America as maritime
masquerade. While many of the performances I examine occur in places that are less official than the state- subsidized theater, they are therefore no less ritualized. The performances of “race” in a country whose history embodies racism’s worst excesses and where, after the Holocaust, the very race was excised from public language and political analysis. Ethnic drag reveals what this linguistic break conceals, namely the continuities, permutations, and contradictions of racial feelings. As a figure of substitution