You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In recent years there has been a great deal of work that invites us to explore the psychology fueling European imperialism and the racist attitudes that accompanied it. In the years after World War II, post-colonial writers have portrayed European imperialists as psychically empty and lost, clinging desperately to the pedestals of grandiosity they had built for themselves. As early as 1963, Albert Memmi, in Colonized and Colonizer, painted the European ruler in North Africa as a person at home nowhere, deeply conflicted in the role of colonial master, knowing within himself that the superiority he claimed was a sham (58). Ngugi wa Thiong'o has portrayed the English in Kenya as similarly displaced, alienated from home and god, sustained only by their ability to dominate others (76). More recently West Indian writer Jamaica Kincaid has described the imperialist as one who may have “fashioned for himself a body of steel,” but whose hard shell conceals an interior that is dead and decaying (76).
Also fairly recently, students of imperialist literature have found evidence that it was not only a desire for material gain which drove Europeans to dominate other peoples both literally and imaginatively. This literature, which reveals the psychological landscapes of those wielding or imagining imperial power, often, as Sara Suleri writes in The Rhetoric of English India, “reorganizes the materiality of colonialism into a narrative of perpetual longing and perpetual loss” (10). Elleke Boehmer, in Colonial and Post-colonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, shows that even as the European imperialist rejects the native, “he also requires the native's presence in order to experience to the full his own being” (63). And Patrick Brantlinger, in Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, has explored the way in which deeds of empire, as portrayed in nineteenth-century adventure literature, provides a world of opportunity for “white heroes, usually free from the complexities