Conrad and Masculinity

Masculinity, ‘Race’ and Empire 23
interracial sexuality but of its results, the decline of the population.
Interracial marriages were seen as exactly parallel to the barrenness
of the prostitute; if they produced children at all, these children
were weak and doomed. 31
However, Stoler, while agreeing that métissage (‘racial mixing’) was a
focal point of debate by the mid-nineteenth century and was seen as
a source of degeneration and decay, also notes that in the Dutch East
Indies of the 1880s ‘concubinage’ (informal but stable liaisons
between European men and Asian women) was encouraged by the
Dutch East Indies Company on pragmatic grounds which included a
theory that the children of mixed marriages were stronger and healthier.
32 Conrad’s Malay fiction both symbolizes miscegenation as
danger and corruption and represents marriages between European
men and Asian women as fairly unremarkable. The point here is to
note both the variability of practice and the ability of imperial ideology
to embrace contradictions, contradictions which nevertheless
were liable to impose a strain. Thus Stoler suggests that concubinage
both reinforced racial hierarchies and rendered them problematic. 33
While drawing on various of the models which I have outlined, I
shall also borrow Fredric Jameson’s terms ‘ideological’ and ‘Utopian’,
as discussed in the Introduction. Identifying the ‘twin negative and
positive features of a given phenomenon’ (PU, 235), they assist a
reading of the ways in which desire and fantasy generate structures
exceeding the binaries of ideology. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity is
similarly helpful for such a reading because it involves a sense of
subjectivity itself as fractured. On the basis of the distinction between
the ‘I’ that speaks and the ‘I’ that is spoken about, he posits the existence
of a ‘Third Space’, which renders meaning and reference
ambivalent, destroys the ‘mirror of representation in which cultural
knowledge is customarily revealed’ and so ‘challenges our sense of the
historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force,
authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition
of the People’. 34 Part of his argument is that, because our
subjectivity or identity always operates in language, which is neither
transparent nor fully under our control, cultural identity is never fixed
or unified. This is particularly useful for reading masculinity in relation
to cultural identity and its phantasmagoric shadow, race, because
it is an argument based on the structure of identity in general, applicable
to gender identity as well as cultural identity. It leads Bhabha to
a vision of ‘an international culture, based not on the exoticism of