Rhetorics of disgust and love in the Belgian colonization of the Congo
Date
2010
Authors
Kiser, Karyn Elaine, author
Sloane, Sarah, advisor
Sorensen, Leif, committee member
Anderson, Karrin, committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Abstract
As colonial and postcolonial studies insist, the Western legacy of colonization has had— and continues to have—a profound impact on the composition of subject positions and the subsequent distribution of power in Western civilization. Connected to the colonizer/colonized binary produced through colonial involvement is the reason/emotion binary; Western concepts of civilization and primitivism are closely related to the reason/emotion binary as reason and emotional restraint have historically been markers of civilization while the Western notion of the primitive includes emotional excess to the point of animality. Given this link between reason, emotion, and colonization, recent emotion studies scholarship that seeks to unpack the reason/emotion binary has much to offer colonial studies. One such emotion theorist is Sara Ahmed, who in The Cultural Politics of Emotion investigates the manner in which emotion produces and sustains social meaning to construct subjectivities. The intersection of this scholarship and colonial studies, then, lies in emotion’s role in composing colonial subjectivities. My aim in this thesis is to explore that intersection, investigating how emotion operates as an organizing principle within the colonizer/colonized binary and, more specifically, in the historical moment of Belgium’s King Leopold II and his campaign for Belgian colonial involvement in Africa. My focus throughout this research rests on rhetorics of disgust and love, two seemingly incompatible emotions. In traditional conceptions, the former involves a strong bodily revulsion and the latter an equally strong affection and desire. However, within Ahmed's framework of relational emotions and sustained affective investments, disgust and love operate similarly to identify objects of emotion and, in so doing, allow for emerging subjects. Close attention to these emotions in colonial texts from Belgium’s Congo Free State offer s new and instructive ways of understanding the intersecting relationships within this discourse. Despite Leopold’s international notoriety in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries, through a series of complex historical and political phenomena, the story of the founding of the Congo Free State and its aftermath has been largely erased from the Western historical narrative. In the interests of exploring the largely untold story of the Congo, this thesis is a close textual reading of historical documents from Leopold, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and the lawyer Henry Wellington Waek, which support colonization, as well as documents from Congo Reform Association leader E. D. Morel. My ultimate goal in analyzing these texts is to offer insights into rhetorics of disgust and love beyond the immediate historical situation while at the same time drawing long overdue attention to this colonial circumstance.
Description
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Print version deaccessioned 2022.
Print version deaccessioned 2022.
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Subject
Rhetoric -- Political aspects -- Congo (Democratic Republic)
Belgians -- Colonization -- Congo (Democratic Republic)