Nietzsche in the Tropics: Colonialism and the Photographic Imagination

Abstract

The objective of this article is to highlight a tension within colonialism between the possibilities of individual pleasure, self-aggrandisement and experimentation on the one hand, and on the other, statist projects that privilege the racialised community of committed citizens, administrators and employees. Simultaneously examining Joseph Conrad’s ‘fictional’ Congo and M.V. Portman’s ‘real’ Andaman Islands, it argues that the tension produces an identifiable cultural and political entity: the rogue coloniser who appears to be revelling in, and to be infected by, the ‘sickness’ of his tropical environment. It further argues that this rogue entity—which is in fact normative within the colony—is deeply implicated in the modern tendency to ‘acquire’ the world by imagining it as a set of photographs.