Lect. dr.

Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com
 
UNIT 3
THE EMPIRE AND THE OTHER

I. THE CIVILIZING MISSION BEHIND VICTORIAN IMPERIALISM

To colonize = to establish political and cultural control over indigenous people of a certain geographical area
Colony = an area that is under the government of another country and occupied by settlers from that country
Colonization vs. Colonialism = the action of colonizing vs. the theory and policy of domination that advocates it
- assumption of the cultural, moral and racial superiority of the British nation
- native tribes did not have literature and did not rely on technological development
- African peoples had darker skin and different facial features + they were not Christian
- excuses for colonization: parental duty and responsibility to help less fortunate and backward
- reasons behind colonization: economic interests, imperialist expansion, racial domination, commercial profit
- “Europeans wanted gold and slaves...but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as
people who had done good things for the slaves” (V.S. Naipaul)

Edward Tylor, from Primitive Culture (1871)

By comparing the various stages of civilization among races known to history, with the aid of archaeological
inference from the remains of prehistoric tribes, it seems possible to judge in a rough way of an early general
condition of man, which from our point of view is to be regarded as a primitive condition. . . . This
hypothetical primitive condition corresponds in a considerable degree to that of modern savage tribes . . . [and]
the main tendency of culture from primaeval up to modern times has been from savagery towards civilization.

Joseph Chamberlain, from The True Conception of Empire (1897)

In carrying out this work of civilization we are fulfilling what I believe to be our national mission, and we are
finding scope for the exercise of these faculties and qualities which have made of us a great governing race. . .
There has been bloodshed, there has been loss of life among the native populations, loss of still more precious
lives among those who have been sent out to bring these countries into some kind of disciplined order, but it must
be remembered that that is the condition of the mission we have to fulfill. . . .you cannot destroy the practices
of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition, which for centuries have desolated the interior of Africa, without
the use of force . . . I am convinced that the conscience and the spirit of the country will rise to the height
of its obligations, and that we shall have the strength to fulfil the mission which our history and our national
character have imposed upon us.

Benjamin Kidd, from The Control of the Tropics (1898)

[W]e are dealing with peoples who represent the same stage in the history of the development of the race
that the child does in the history of the development of the individual. . . . [D]evelopment can only take place
under the influence of the white man, we are confronted with a larger issue than any mere question of commercial
policy or of national selfishness. . . . The people among whom [the white man] lives and works are often separated
from him by thousands of years of development.

Rudyard Kipling, first stanza of “The White Man's Burden” (1899)

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child
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 Lect. dr. Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com
 

- King Leopold II of Belgium was allowed to administer the Congo region and central Africa
- The Scramble for Africa (late C19 – beginning of WWI)

II. PRIMITIVISM BEYOND LANGUAGE

- primitivism = the interest and aesthetic response of twentieth century European artists to
tribal art from Africa and Oceania; art nègre became an inspiration for modernist artists
- French artist André Derain bought an African Fang mask in 1906 and showed it to Picasso
& Matisse; it became an object of interest for the group who took great inspiration from it.

“Gerald looked round the room . . . there were several negro statues, wood-carvings from
West Africa, strange and disturbing, the carved negroes looked almost like the foetus of a
human being. One was a woman sitting naked in a strange posture, and looking tortured,
her abdomen stuck out. . . she was sitting in child-birth, clutching the ends of the band
that hung from her neck, one in each hand, so that she could bear down, and help labour.
The strange, transfixed, rudimentary face of the woman again reminded Gerald of a Ancestral spirit mask 
carved in wood by the 
foetus, it was also rather wonderful, conveying the suggestion of the extreme of physical Fang people of Central 
sensation, beyond the limits of mental consciousness.” (D.H. Lawrence – Women in Love) Africa

- Gerald Crich asked whether it was obscene or whether it was really art, to which Rupert Birkin replied: “‘It
conveys a complete truth . . . the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it. . . There are centuries and
hundreds of centuries of development in a straight line, behind that carving; it is an awful pitch of culture, of a
definite sort.’/ ‘What culture?’ Gerald asked, in opposition. He hated the sheer African thing./ ‘Pure culture in
sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate PHYSICAL consciousness, mindless, utterly
sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme.’”

- the natives of Heart of Darkness are depicted in a fragmentary way that allows for no individuality, but only for
a black incomprehensible mass, whose description escapes rationality: they are “a burst of yells, a whirl of black
limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy
and motionless foliage”
- “we were cut off from comprehension of our surroundings” => this was the ‘unspeakable’ darkness and
‘unapproachable silence’ that Marlow was fascinated with

- French psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan describes on order called the Real = an existence that resists symbolization
of any kind; it is beyond signification and language and it represents the inexpressible, “the raw materiality of
things before they have gotten a name or a purpose” (Gregory Castle); Lacan stresses the impossibility of language
to describe the Real, because the necessity for words is based on the lack of the represented objects themselves

III. POSTCOLONIALISM
- critical theory that sprang in the second half of C20 and aimed to uncover the misdeeds of colonizers and their
stereotypization of colonized nations
- Edward Said’s famous study Orientalism (1978) – power relations strengthened through discourse, which has
the power to construct identities – the West justifies its colonial enterprise through the process of OTHERING
that is based on an antagonistic us vs. them relationship

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 Lect. dr. Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com
 
The West = the Self (central, civilized, superior, normal, subject, good, human, moral, active) -> progression
The Orient = the Other (margin, savage, inferior, abnormal, object, evil, inhuman, immoral, passive) -> stasis
- postcolonialism exposes the bias behind the simplistic polarity of colonialism – Homi Bhabha: mimicry,
ambivalence and hibridity

IV. JOSEPH CONRAD’S NOVELLA HEART OF DARKNESS (1902)

- Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalez Korzeniowski: sailor, fascination with Africa as a child, travelled to Congo
- symbolism, focus on the individual psyche
- selective omniscient narrator + framed story (story within story) = blurred boundaries
- What is questioned: National Victorian imperialist ethos and social-evolutionary thought, British optimism
with respect to progress – and ultimately human nature
- imperial expansion justified by a civilizing mission
- Marlow and his listeners are all English + reference to the river Thames enabling imperialism; “‘You English?’
he asked all smiles. ‘Are you?” and they both share Marlow’s English tobacco: “Now, that’s brotherly”.
According to Harold Bloom, “This act, mirroring the frequent sharing of tobacco on board the Nellie on the
Thames, seems to complete Marlow’s induction into the “gang of virtue.” He has unwittingly become . . . a
partisan” of their methods. (Bloom)

Kurtz was educated partly in England, half-English mother + admiration of English ideas - he told Marlow that
“his sympathies were in the right place” + the shadow of Kurtz confided in Marlow “because it could speak
English to me”; but the whole of Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz

- Conrad accused of racism by Nigerian critic Chinua Achebe in his essay “An Image of Africa” in which he
states that Heart of Darkness presents “the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and
therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by
triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting, peacefully "at the decline of day
after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks." But the actual story will take place on the
River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. . . . It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking
hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ It
conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative,
the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness.”

- in Heart of Darkness, the point of view is always that of the colonizer, Africa = the backdrop for the presentation
an exploration into the depth of the Western mind and its deterioration: “Can nobody see the preposterous and
perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? . .
. the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the
human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.” (Achebe)
- Africans are described collectively as group of savage people, with no individual identity (or name), a
homogeneous group who are more dead than alive: “Black shapes . . . They were dying slowly--it was very clear.
They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,-- nothing but black shadows of
disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. . . . lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on
unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.”

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 Lect. dr. Andreea Paris-Popa
aparispopa@gmail.com
 
- Modernist questioning/rejection of tradition (= the civilizing mission)
- Modernist distrust in progress and reason: is this civilization? profit as false idol, rapacious greed; Ian Watt:
“The extreme optimism of those advocates of progress, like Kurtz, who maintain a certain mid-Victorian faith in
the ultimate triumph of civilized values fails -“the attempt to make technological and evolutionary optimism a
functional substitute for…social and moral order.”
- hypocrisy behind the colonizing mission => “exterminate all the brutes”
- Modernist uncertainty, struggle and alienation

Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of ‘The Shadow’

- excluded, rejected, repressed urges and instincts that are considered blamable or punishable by society
- unrecognized, disowned, animalistic tendencies rejected by the ego (usually linked with violence and sexuality)
and hidden in the furthermost corner of the mind

- “True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my
hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity,
are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.
Perhaps!” (Conrad) –Nietzsche: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a
monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."

- critic Jonah Raskin, “T.S. Eliot read it as a work about evil, life's bleak hopelessness, and moral emptiness . . .
transforming the 'horror' which refers particularly to the Belgian Congo to a horror of life in general”
- moralist grounds: moral condemnation of imperialist practices "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured
the history of human conscience and geographical exploration" & “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means
the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a
pretty thing when you look into it too much” (Conrad)
- unescapable imperialist assumptions: NOT the “savages” were human just like the colonizers BUT the
colonizers just as “savage” as the natives: as Marxist critic Terry Eagleton put it, Conrad’s message “is that
Western civilization is at base as barbarous as African society – a viewpoint which disturbs imperialist
assumptions to the precise degree that it reinforces them”
- darkness of the skin, of the mind, of the unknown, of the colonizer’s soul
- “no corresponding sense of the ‘whiteness’ (or even ‘grayness’) of Arica emerges” (Sandia Shetty)
- the deep meaning of Heart of Darkness is its profound uncertainty of meaning (Terry Collits),
imperialism = “the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings” (Conrad)

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