It feels as though most of the readings from my classes this semester have involved colonialism or post/neo-colonialism. Having read many texts that discuss the causes and effects of international imperialism prepared me well for the readings for two weeks ago.
J.J. Thomas's text, an excerpt from Froudacity, was relatively short but provided an introduction that could be taken as a theme to the colonial readings found after. Thomas suggests that the most important undertaking that minority ethnicities could involve themselves in is assimilation. He writes that there is hardly any other way to survive.
Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre provides minimal actual discussion of colonialism, except in regard to Mr. Rochester. Jane, an eighteen-year-old girl who has suffered under the impression that no one, not her adoptive family, not her boarding schools, and not Rochester, wants her, discovers that the man she is in love with has been married before. Rochester's first wife is a woman from the Caribbean. He claims she is crazy and still desires to marry Jane. Rochester represents the quintessential colonial Englishman; he is educated and wealthy, and in taking multiple women to be his, he seems to parallel the imperialistic point of view. Rochester's women are to him as multiple nations are to England (and to a lesser degree, France, Spain, and the Netherlands).
Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" confused me until we discussed it in class. I genuinely believed it to be a satyrical take on imperialism, but I suppose I will have to read Kipling's other work in order to put it into context. If the poem is taken as Kipling wrote it, very seriously, then he is truly a man writing for his times.
Joseph Chamberlain expands on Kipling's themes in the excerpt from The True Conception of Empire. He believes the white man must undo centuries of barbaric practices (in other words, those cultures and traditions of indigenous peoples). Those who are fortunate (i.e., white and wealthy) have a duty to help those who are less so - again, reiterating Kipling's idea that men who are endowed by God (white men) have a personal responsibility to save poor savages. I did not very much like Chamberlain's text, most likely because I took him more seriously than Kipling, initially.
In the excerpts from Haggard's She, we see nature personified as a terrifying force. The white men throughout the story cannot imagine why anyone would want to live in the conditions that are made real and live by nature, by the Queen. I have to agree quite vehemently. Putting the outbursts from nature into a personal context, I feel like we are quite lucky to experience none of the more major natural disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanos) living on the eastern seaboard. If I had to experience these violent renderings of Mother Earth regularly, I can assure you that I would not purposely seek them out simply for the goal of conquering a native people who live within these conditions and know how to handle them.
My favorite excerpt assigned to us was of course Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Although Conrad gets quite superfluous many times throughout the fictionalized account, his minutely detailed descriptions of the wilderness of Africa are incredibly passionate and intense. The madness of the wild, as portrayed to the white man who tries to conquer Africa, is depicted in one man - Mr. Kurtz. Here is a man who went almost entirely alone on an expedition to Africa with the intention of "normalizing" its natives. In the end, he goes completely mad and in his notes, he writes "Exterminate all the brutes." I think this excerpt was a perfect note to end our imperialism unit on, simply because we have studied now a trajectory of the mindset of the English in terms of their plans for conquering savage nations. We have seen how the white man believes it is his duty, personally and professionally, to travel to these foreign places and train their native peoples to become more like the English. From there the white man finally realizes (as Mr. Kurtz does) that this task is impossible, and that the only way to get out alive is to kill everyone.
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