The Heathen Inside: Abjection, And The Colonial Discours

The Heathen Inside: "Darkness," Abjection, and the Colonial Discourse

In Romanticism and Colonialism, Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson argue that few scholars explicate the relationship between Romantic texts, British colonialism, and imperialism. Fulford and Kitson point out that the "Romantic period is a watershed in colonial history," marking the inception of a British empire based on the political philosophy of the "white man's burden" (3). By reading Romantic texts in the historical and political context of colonialism and imperialism, Fulford and Kitson hope to return Romantic texts "to the context of material, colonial processes contemporaneous with their imagined versions of colonized people and places" (9). In other words, Fulford

All characteristics of and reactions to the abject as discussed above remain true for abjection of the self. Yet according to Kristeva, the abject is made more horrible in the abjection of the self. Kristeva says abjection "is felt at maximum force" when "the subject finds the impossible in himself: when he finds the impossible in his very being, discovering that he is nothing other than abject" (Kristeva 128). The subject expends considerable energy rejecting the abject, which he or she feels to be unclean, ambiguous, and strange. The abject may even consume and destroy the subject by its very unassimilable nature. However, the subject eventually confronts the strange, horrifying truth that the subject is the abject, and the horrible nature of the abject is actually present in the self. Thus, when the self rejects the unclean and the ambiguous, the self actually rejects itself. Kristeva says that there is "nothing like the abjection of the self for demonstrating that all abjection is in fact a recognition of the fundamental lack of all being, meaning, language and desire" (Kristeva 128). When, in abjection, the self rejects itself, the self also realizes the limits of constructed webs of meaning. If abjection pulls the self towards the place where meaning collapses, and the self actually is the abject, then meaning, language, and order also collapse around the self. Language, existence and meaning collapse when the self can no longer distinguish between itself and the abject -- when the horrible is found to be a part of the