• 제목/요약/키워드: Civilizing Mission

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Science, Commerce, and Imperial Expansion in British Travel Literature: Hugh Clifford's and Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction

  • Kil, Hye Ryoung
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제57권6호
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    • pp.1151-1171
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    • 2011
  • Conrad's novels, specifically the Lingard Trilogy-Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Rescue-and Lord Jim, set in the Southeast Asian or Malay Archipelago can be considered travel literature that played a significant role in British imperial expansion. Conrad's Malay novels were based not only on his experience in the region during his commercial journey but also on information from earlier travel writings about the Malays and their customs, including James Brooke's journals. The English traders in Conrad's novels, namely Lingard and Jim, were partly modeled on Brooke, the White Rajah, who founded and ruled the English colony on the northwest of Borneo in the 1840s. The white traders in Conrad's novels, who act as enlightened rulers, represent the British commercial expansionism, which was obscured by the phenomenon of the civilizing mission in the late nineteenth century. On the other hand, the colonial official Clifford's tales and novels about British Malaya demonstrate the typical travel accounts of the late nineteenth century that stress the civilizing mission over commercial exploitation. The concept of the enlightening mission was rooted in evolutionary anthropological thinking, which developed as part of the natural history in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the development of natural history, stimulating British expansion in search of commercially exploitable resources and lands, enabled travel writing as the collection of natural knowledge to become a profitable business. In Conrad, the white characters are mainly traders acting as colonial rulers, while in Clifford, they are scientific rulers with their commercial interests rarely apparent. In sum, Conrad's novels reveal that the new imperialism of the civilizing mission is still a commercial one, which disturbs rather than contributes to the imperial expansion-in contrast to other travel literature such as Clifford's.

의료지리학: 개념적 역사와 역사적 전망 (Medical Geography: Its Conceptual History and Historical Vision)

  • 이종찬
    • 대한지리학회지
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    • 제48권2호
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    • pp.218-238
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    • 2013
  • 한국 지리학계에서 보건의료에 대한 지리학적 연구가 증가되고 있는 양상에 비추어 볼 때, 의료지리학이 개념적으로 어떻게 발달해왔는지에 대한 역사적인 인식이 요청된다. 이 글의 목적은 의료지리학의 개념적 역사를 탐구하고 향후 의료지리학의 역사적 전망을 제시하는 데 있다. 근대 의료지리학은 유럽이 열대 식민지를 통치하는 과정에서 필연적으로 직면하게 되었던 열대 질병을 통제하는 과정에서 의료지형학의 이름으로 형성되었다. 영국에서는 환경위생 개혁의 명분으로, 프랑스에서는 문명화 사명의 구호 아래, 독일에서는 지리의학의 개념으로 각각 발달해왔던 의료지리학은 20세기에 크게 질병 생태학과 의료체계의 두 가지 흐름으로 발달되었다. 본 논문은 질병의 지도에 함축된 권력의 의미를 강조하면서, 의료지리학, 보건지리학, 건강지리학의 공통 지점과 서로 다른 지향점을 제시하였다는 데 의의가 있다.

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The Crisis of British Imperialism in Southeast Asia: The (Mis)Representation of the Indigenous in Clifford and Conrad

  • Kil, Hye Ryoung
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제58권6호
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    • pp.1041-1061
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    • 2012
  • In the late nineteenth century, British colonial activities became aggressive and annexationist in the tropics, including the Southeast Asian Archipelago, which reflected the historical circumstances of both increasing resistance from the indigenous and severe competition among European powers. Interestingly, the change in English colonial policy toward an annexationist or imperialist vision adopted the motto of a civilizing mission, which was founded on the anthropological assumption that the white English were civilized, while the non-white indigenous were savage. The assumption developed into colonial discourse through systematic gathering of anthropological knowledge about the peripheries of the Empire. The knowledge system was flawed, which stressed the differences of the peripheral populations from the English and served as an inverted discourse on the Imperial Self rather than the description of the Other. Furthermore, the natives were heterogeneous, which rendered indistinct the racial and cultural differences between the English and the natives. Still, the aboriginals called Malays, who were comprised of many ethnic subgroups, needed to be deemed savage or inferior by the English in order to justify the English civilizing work or imperial ambition. Put differently, the representation of the English as civilized necessitated the (mis)representation of the natives as savage. In this context, Clifford's works contribute to systematic misrepresentation of the Malays, on which colonial discourse is founded, though not without self-contradiction. On the other hand, Conrad's novels that are set in the Malay Archipelago resort to a strategic misrepresentation that reveals the relativity of the discourse. Exploring the dilemma of denationalization to various degrees, Conrad's Malay texts problematize the (mis)representation of the indigenous as inferior, which is the basis of English claim to superiority.

반제국주의 속의 어둠 -『암흑의 핵심』에 나타난 인종주의 (Darkness at the Heart of Anti-Imperialism: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness)

  • 신문수
    • 영어영문학
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    • 제55권1호
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    • pp.61-82
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    • 2009
  • This paper aims to reexamine the issue of racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, especially in the light of Chinua Achebe's critique of the novella as a racist text entrenched with European prejudices of Africa and its people in his 1975 speech at the University of Massachusetts titled "An Image of Africa." While the novella's indictment of imperial exploitation has been noted from an early stage of its critical reception, its racism had hardly been discussed until Chinua Achebe posed it. Achebe offers the canonized status of the text as a modernist classic, "the most commonly prescribed novel in twentieth-century literature courses," as one reason for its obvious manifestations of racism being glossed over. One may add that Conrad's militant denunciation of imperialist enterprises as "a sordid farce," his seemingly radical stance against imperialism, serves as ideological constraints upon his readers, blinding them to its immanent racism. A closer look at the novella's attack on imperialism turns out to be contradictory, for it also shows such liberal-humanist ideas as the civilizing mission, the work ethic, and the superiority of civilized man, all of which served to prop up European imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century. This ideological contradiction also accounts for Conrad's racist attitude, which is betrayed in his portrayal of Africans as obscure, primitive. Euro-American imperialism has frequently justified itself by recourse to racism, but racism has not always been allied with imperialism. Some staunch racists such as Robert Knox and Arthur de Gobineau went against imperialism, and Conrad proves one of such cases whose critique of imperialism is voiced in ways that can be characterized as racist.