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Architectures of the invisible hand : envisioning capital in Joseph Conrad’s Singapore
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Vandertop, Caitlin (2020) Architectures of the invisible hand : envisioning capital in Joseph Conrad’s Singapore. Textual Practice, 34 (1). pp. 127-145. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2018.1504818
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1504818
Abstract
In recent years, critical attention has shifted away from the subject of Conrad’s imperial politics and towards his representation of late nineteenth-century global capitalism, which extends panoramically from the business houses of London, Brussels and San Francisco to commodity frontiers as diverse as Malay tobacco plantations, African ivory lands and Latin American silver mines. This paper explores Conrad’s engagement with capitalism and its representability within his portrait of late nineteenth-century Singapore in the wake of a financial crisis. Drawing on Susan Buck-Morss’s ‘Envisioning Capital’, as well as Fredric Jameson’s essay on architecture and finance, ‘The Brick and the Balloon’, the paper reads Conrad’s proto-postmodern urban landscape and porous, ethereal architecture as evidence of the visual and representational difficulties generated within a major colonial ‘laboratory’ of liberal economics. Yet, by shifting in focus from the city to its outlying plantations, Conrad is seen to confront abstract capital with territory, ether with matter, and free-market narratives of the ‘invisible hand’ with the absent cause of racialized and indentured plantation labour.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Subjects: | D History General and Old World > DS Asia P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism P Language and Literature > PR English literature |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924 -- Criticism and interpretation, Globalization in literature, Singapore -- In literature, Modernism (Literature), Capitalism in literature | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Textual Practice | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Routledge Journals | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0950-236X | ||||||||
| Official Date: | 2020 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 34 | ||||||||
| Number: | 1 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 127-145 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1504818 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Publisher Statement: | This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Textual Practice on 02/08/2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1504818 | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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