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- W2046118212 abstract "White Skin, White Masks:Joseph Conrad and the Face(s) of Imperial Manhood Jesse Oak Taylor (bio) “They were men enough to face the darkness.”1 Marlow’s description of the Romans he imagines making their way up a river through a barbaric, death-filled land at the end of the world (that is, the Thames) appears to crystallize the imperatives of imperial manhood. The triangulation of masculinity, race, and empire evident throughout Conrad’s oeuvre remains a tangled and even inscrutable problem for critics despite the reams of criticism devoted to Conrad, and especially to Heart of Darkness. In this essay, I will attempt to shed light on the corporate bodies of empire by examining the fetishization of the white male face. As Michael Taussig puts it, the face is at once, “both mask and window to the soul” (“Face” 227, emphasis original). I will argue that the white man’s face becomes the primary currency of the imperial endeavor, an active participant in both the violence of the imperial encounter and the obfuscating magic whereby the commodities of empire are imaginatively cleansed of the violence that enabled their extraction. The power of unmasking will be a central element of this discussion. It is all well and good to argue that the white man’s face is a mask. What is perhaps more troubling (both intellectually and ethically) is the persistent power of that mask even after it has been revealed as such. Unmasking accentuates the performative power of the mask rather than collapsing it. Performance is often misleadingly understood to be about the disguising of reality, rather than the reality of the disguise. The same is true for the idea of construction (social or otherwise), as though being constructed rendered an entity somehow less real. Commodity fetishism is often misconstrued for similar reasons. As Elaine Freedgood has argued, rather than being an effective obscuring of the conditions of production, the fetishization of commodities often hinges on some knowledge of those conditions of production on the part of the consumer, knowledge to which advertising [End Page 191] often appeals directly (96–99). Performance and construction produce the real rather than depicting or representing it, something that Conrad, ever attentive to the rivets of the world, well understood. The commodity fetish and the mask share a paradoxical structure, whereby their true signifying power, the real magic of their existence, occurs only when they are exposed as (to borrow a word that Marlow can’t abide) lies. By evoking Frantz Fanon in the title of an essay focusing on white men, I am not attempting to equate the perpetrators and victims of colonial violence (as will, I think, become clear). Rather, I am trying to suggest that the position of the “white man” in the colonial system is an abstraction that can never be naturalized. Thus, the inferiority complex diagnosed by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks is also at work in the white men who attempt to wear the white mask, and may indeed help to explain some of their perversities and most violent excesses, as when Marlow asserts that his predecessor’s beating of an African chieftain was an effort at “asserting his self respect” (61 emphasis added). Imperial violence often exceeds any utility or purpose to the point that it impedes the broader imperial project rather than furthering it. Furthermore, massacres from Amritsar to Kandahar, the skull-adorned gardens of officers in the Congo, and the perverse theatrics of Abu Ghraib need to be understood as an endemic feature of empire rather than exceptional acts by rogue agents. I do not intend this argument to exculpate any individual, but rather to distribute responsibility for such violence throughout the broader systems and corporate entities that render it inevitable. Masculinity, especially that of the white male in a colonial context, is an apt venue in which to take up this inquiry because it foregrounds the disconnection between the corporate body of empire and the individual bodies that inhabit and construct it. The image of the white man is foundational to the mythology of empire, and therein lies the rub. The “white man” (singular) is presented as a unified entity..." @default.
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- W2046118212 date "2014-01-01" @default.
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- W2046118212 title "White Skin, White Masks: Joseph Conrad and the Face(s) of Imperial Manhood" @default.
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- W2046118212 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/cnd.2014.0009" @default.
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