Under the Western historian's eyes: Eileen Power and the early feminist encounter with colonialism

Abstract

Readers will recognise in my title a reworking of the title of Joseph Conrad's 1911 novel Under Western Eyes. This novel is not usually discussed together with Conrad's 'colonial novels'. It relates a European history and focuses on difference and similarities within what studies of colonialism classify as the West.2 In the novel the West's other is Russia. The 'western eyes', through which the story of a group of Russian revolutionaries and its labyrinthine relations with Czarist autocracy and international anarchism is filtered, are the eyes of a 'dense occidental'3 whom Conrad endows with the power to