THE POWER OF LOVE: LITERATURE AND COLONIALISM
THE POWER OF LOVE: LITERATURE AND COLONIALISM

Summary/Abstract: This article examines how colonialism reshaped intimacy by imposing Victorian and Romantic ideals of monogamous, emotionally exclusive love onto societies whose marital systems emphasized kinship, reciprocity, and labor. Drawing on Mamdani and Goody, it shows how colonial authorities denigrated polygamy while instrumentalizing “customary law” for control. At the same time, European literature, from Conrad’s repressed treatment of sexuality to missionary and travel writing, reinforced the moral divide between “civilized” love and “barbaric” sexuality (Hawthorn; Pratt). Colonial encounters thus staged a collision of imaginaries - oral traditions valorizing kinship versus Romantic novels valorizing passion - making literature itself a colonial technology that not only judged but also reshaped both indigenous and European models of intimacy.

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