Conrad's Maw: The Buried Histories of Costaguana

Abstract

Abstract: This essay examines how the legacy of slavery in Joseph Conrad's Nostromo affects narrative temporality and, consequently, the novel's conception of imperial history and extractive futurity. I argue that Sulaco's attempts to forget the San Tomé mine's reliance on the labor of enslaved persons during the era of the Spanish empire results in an ahistorical proto-nationalist mythmaking. Consequently, Sulaco's attempts to declare independence from the Republic of Costaguana subordinate the province even more deeply to imperial capital, trading a pale semblance of self-determination for a massive expansion of the local resource extraction operation guarded by the American military. Through these events, Emilia Gould, the mine chief's wife, emerges as the figure who most profoundly understands the connection between the mined silver ore and the imperial world system in which the province's people and the mine uneasily coexist. In a novel notably devoid of reproductive futurity or eros of almost any kind, the Occidental Republic of Sulaco exploits Emilia Gould's imperial femininity by casting her as the mother figure of the new nation.