Critical Essay | John McClure

John McClure

SOURCE: "Problematic Presence: The Colonial Other in Kipling and Conrad," in The Black Presence in English Literature, edited by David Dabydeen, Manchester University Press, 1985, pp. 154-67.

In the following essay, McClure compares Kipling and Conrad to explore the conflicting racist and anti-imperialism discourses that inform their fictional works.

Serious fiction, as M. M. Bakhtin tells us, dramatises the play of discourses, the competition between different ideologically loaded 'languages' each attempting to set its mark on the world, establish its definitions as authoritative. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Kipling and Conrad were writing some of the most impressive colonial fiction in English, the ethics of imperial expansion was being seriously debated. One issue in the debate was the status of the colonised peoples, the Indians about whom Kipling wrote, the Malays and Africans of Conrad's fiction. Social scientists, liberal humanitarians, missionaries, colonial administrators and planters—each group defined...
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