Swinging Together to the Same Anchor? Cultural Contact, Colonialist Discourse and Salt Water Epistemologies in Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue
This paper analyses the relation between cultural contact, colonialist discourse and heterogeneous conceptions of the sea and its epistemological function in Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue (1920). Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the salt waters of the Malay Archipelago, Conrad’s novel revolves around the dealings of Captain Tom Lingard, who has made his life in the region, with the stranded yacht of a fellow Englishman. However, significant parts of the narrative focus on Lingard’s interaction with the Malay chief Hassim, who has been disposed of as the leader of his community and whose position Lingard sets out to restore. In my paper, I will first refer to Elleke Boehmer’s concept of colonialist discourse to discuss how, in its portrayal of the contact between Europeans, Malays and other indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago, Conrad’s novel draws on its marine setting to buy into an understanding of Western superiority typical of colonial literary texts. Subsequently, I turn to Lingard’s relation with Hassim, which, by contrast, is shaped by the connective quality of a sea on which “the white man’s brig and the brown man’s prau swung together to the same anchor”. In order to approach the apparent contradictions in The Rescue’s representation of cultural contact in the Malay Archipelago, I will draw on Epeli Hau‘ofa’s argument that waterways enable the transcendence of a colonial worldview based on borders in favor of an epistemology of linkages. In Conrad’s novel, the moments of interaction between Lingard and Hassim allow for an understanding of the sea connecting the various territories of the Malay Archipelago as a space that not only enables the spread of European colonialism and its concomitant dichotomies, but also gives rise to alternative discourses on (political) hegemony and (individual) resistance. Placing the saltwater environment at the heart of The Rescue in the theoretical framework of what Homi Bhabha defines as “the social antagonism of the colonial relation”, I will ultimately argue that its heterogeneous narrative formations allow the sea – and thus Conrad’s novel itself – to become a highly productive “in-between”, from where dominant modes of knowing the so-called ‘Other’ are not only constructed but also contested and reassembled.
