The Heathen Inside: Darkness, Abjection, and the Colonial Discourse :: Essays Papers

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 and Kitson read Romantic texts as reflections of historical reality and as complex, ambivalent responses to colonial and imperial discourse. With the aim of returning Romantic texts to "material, colonial processes," I will read Byron's poem "Darkness" through the lens of Julia Kristeva's conception of abjection. My a bject reading of "Darkness" will then explicate the relationship between the poem and the larger process of British colonialism and imperialism. I will first read "Darkness" for instances of abjection through the lens of Julia Kristeva's 1982 essay, "Approaching Abjection." I will then conclude by addressing the question of how an abject reading of "Darkness" helps to elucidate the complex interplay between Romanticism and British colonial and imperial discourse. Kristeva divides her 1982 essay, "Approaching Abjection," into three main sections. In the first section, "Neither Subject nor Object," Kristeva explains that the abject cannot be defined as either part of the self or as any other definable, tangible person or thing. For Kristeva, the abject seems to "come from an outside or an exorbitant inside" and is "unassimilable" (Kristeva 125). The self ("I") rejects the abject because it comes from outside of the self and is foreign, strange, and beyond reason. Furthermore, abjection is paradoxical in that it has a capacity to both seduce and disgust the self. As Kristeva says, "a pole of attraction and repulsion" (Kristeva 125) characterizes the relationship between the self and the abject. Kristeva also describes abjection as a collection of "effects and thoughts" (Kristeva 125) that escapes meaning and elicits a violent reaction from the self. Meaning collapses around the abject because it is neither subject nor object, neither self nor ot her, both repulsive and attractive: "Not me. Not that. But not nothing either. A 'something' that I do not recognize as a thing" (Kristeva 126).