Rhetoric & Public Affairs

The tradition of postcolonial critique has long noted that the construction of an imperial identity of "alterity," the posture of moral superiority that serves to differentiate the imperialist from those under his or her control and thus legitimate the practice of expansion, is a significant characteristic of imperial discourse. For the most part, however, this critical practice has focused on the construct of alterity as a justification for imperial oppression on the basis of racialized images of subject populations. This essay approaches alterity as a property to be maintained by the imperial culture itself as crucial to its understanding of its own identity. Failure to maintain such an identity constitutes the ultimate "sin" of identity slippage, a "sin" that undermines the moral validity of empire. This argument is detailed through an analysis of Edmund D. Morel's book-length exposé of Belgian atrocities committed against the peoples of the Congo entitled King Leopold's Rule in Africa. Morel's text is not so much concerned with evoking reader pity for the plight of the Congolese as with inciting outrage over the subversion of imperialism by the Belgians' abandonment of their own imperial alterity.