Milieu, infection and colonial health

Stoler quotes Paul Rainbow’s argument that “the concern about milieu permeating French colonial thinking on education, health, labor, and sex in the late nineteenth century can only be understood in terms of the scientific episteme on which it relied” (535). This stood out for me for two reasons: the notion of milieu that Stoler discusses several times in the reading, and the “episteme”/metaphor of infection that permeates colonial discourse.

On one level, the colony is presented as a source of infection for the metropolitan centre in terms of physical health. Contemporary medical accounts warned of health dangers to Europeans who “stayed in the tropics too long” (Stoler 536); this is reflected in Burmese Days with Flory’s illness that “finished” his youth (68) and the creepy doctor who measured Marlow’s cranium in Heart of Darkness. Infection also carries to another level of heritage and blood, hence the anxiety over metis (literally mixed blood) that Stoler examines.

Besides carrying uncomfortable overtones of feudalism (where the right to rule is carried in the blood/endowed by superior divine force), this literal, quasi-empirical way of looking at the effect of the colony on the colonizer is problematic for me because of how it subsequently becomes a metaphor and epistemological mode that shapes the discourse and perception of colonizer and colonized alike. Imperialism becomes, in every sense of the word, a malaise that plagues colonial relations and thought: notice how for Flory “what poisoned everything…was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived” (Orwell 68). The framework of infection shapes the milieu in which colonialism functions and the colonizer’s response: preventing infection by purifying the milieu/environment, as Flory does by replacing the source of infection (May) with the totem of the pure white woman. This is partly why the portrayal of both women in Orwell’s text (barring the complications of authorial irony) disturbs me on an instinctive level.