The Heathen Inside: Darkness, Abjection, and the Colonial Discourse :: Essays Papers

The Heathen Inside Darkness, Abjection, and the Colonial DiscourseIn wild-eyedism and Colonialism, Tim Fulford and motherfucker J. Kitson argue that few scholars explicate the relationship between Romantic texts, British colonialism, and imperialism. Fulford and Kitson point out that the Romantic period is a watershed in colonial history, marking the inception of a British empire based on the political philosophy of the white mans burden (3). By reading Romantic texts in the historical and political context of colonialism and imperialism, Fulford and Kitson hope to return Romantic texts to the context of material, colonial makees contemporaneous with their imagined versions of colonized people and places (9). In other words, Fulford and Kitson read Romantic texts as reflections of historical reality and as complex, ambivalent responses to colonial and imperial discourse. With the aim of returning Romantic texts to material, colonial processes, I will read Byrons meter Darkness t hrough the lens of Julia Kristevas conception of debasement. My abject reading of Darkness will then explicate the relationship between the poem and the larger process of British colonialism and imperialism. I will first read Darkness for instances of abjection through the lens of Julia Kristevas 1982 essay, Approaching Abjection. I will then conclude by addressing the question of how an abject reading of Darkness helps to elucidate the complex interplay between Romanticism and British colonial and imperial discourse. Kristeva divides her 1982 essay, Approaching Abjection, into three main sections. In the first section, Neither Subject nor Object, Kristeva explains that the abject cannot be defined as either part of the egotism or as any other definable, distinct person or thing. For Kristeva, the abject seems to come from an outside or an exorbitant inside and is unassimilable (Kristeva 125). The self (I) rejects the abject because it comes from outside of the self and is foreig n, strange, and beyond reason. Furthermore, abjection is paradoxical in that it has a capacity to both seduce and disgust the self. As Kristeva says, a pole of attraction and repulsion (Kristeva 125) characterizes the relationship between the self and the abject. Kristeva also describes abjection as a collection of effects and thoughts (Kristeva 125) that escapes meaning and elicits a violent reaction from the self. Meaning collapses around the abject because it is neither report nor object, neither self nor other, both repulsive and attractive Not me. Not that. But not nothing either. A something that I do not confess as a thing (Kristeva 126).