White Rajas, Native Princes and Savage Pirates:Lord Jimand the Cult of White Sovereignty

Abstract

This article reads Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900) as an ironic but also nostalgic reimagining of the first of the white rajas, James Brooke. This figurehead of informal imperial expansion was idolized in England, as archival documents reveal, for his charismatic bestowal of the rule of law in Borneo. As this article argues, however, Brooke achieved sovereignty through his personal defiance of law in an example of what Carl Schmitt terms the ‘sovereign exception’. Understood in this context, the novel's refrain, that Jim is ‘one of us’, gestures both to a Hobbesian model of representational sovereignty and to the absolute inapplicability of this model in a colonial context. As an individual embodiment of colonial hegemony, Jim governs with not only the consent but also the ostensible worship of the governed, in a fantasy of ecstatic submission by colonized people that effaces the violence at the heart of imperial conquest. Yet the novel's eroticized descriptions of Jim recall the worship it attributes to ...