New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

88 The New Imperialists
might be advised, however, to pause for a moment to consult Ignatieff ’s
source. Turning to Heart of Darkness, we quickly discover that Ignatieff
has performed a sleight of hand: he has misappropriated the authority of
Conrad’s famous exposé of colonialism and disingenuously enrolled it in
the imperial cause. 5 Attending to the details of this conjuring trick will
instruct us greatly in Ignatieff ’s strategies in defence of empire.
In the passage in question, Conrad presents his protagonist, Marlow,
as he recounts his gradual awakening to the madness of the colonialist
imaginary. “The conquest of the earth,” proclaims Marlow, “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 at
it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.” But what is this ostensibly
redeeming idea upon which Ignatieff so eagerly seizes? Marlow informs
us – in a passage Ignatieff conveniently drops from the discussion – that
it is “something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a
sacrifice to.” 6 Now, anyone passingly familiar with the literature of
African colonialism will recognize what Conrad is doing here. He is
instructing us that the colonial idea is a fetish, something before which
the worshipper bows down and delivers sacrifices. More than this, he is
reversing the poles of the imperial imagination, making fetishism a
practice of the colonizers, rather than the colonized. The fetishes attributed
to Africans by Christian missionaries, European travel-writers, and
colonial agents are thus repositioned as colonialist projections, parts of
the imperial psyche projected onto its victims. But why engage in such
projections? In order to resist the truth. As is well known, fetishism
crucially involves structures of denial. In place of real objects and
relations, the fetishist substitutes imaginary ones. 7 And where the
psychology of fetishism is concerned, what is denied is projected on to
“evil” Others. In the case of Western colonialists, practices of pillage and
terror are denied, only to be replaced in the imagination by uplifting
“ideas” – civilization, morality, progress – meant to redeem the imperial
cause. Simultaneously, the violence and terror whose reality is denied
are attributed to the “uncivilized” and “barbaric” colonized peoples
themselves
By attributing fetishism to the colonizers Conrad is thus concerned,
unlike Ignatieff, to demystify the imperial idea rather than to embrace it.
As his novel advances, the colonialist imaginary is shattered by the
overwhelming reality of imperialism’s unrelenting hunger for wealth,