Imperial Fetishism: Prester John Among the Natives

Abstract

Taking as its focus stories of India’s legendary ruler, Prester John, this chapter suggests something of the social and psychic relays between the utopic imaginary of twelfth-century colonialism in India and the geopolitical crisis of twentieth-century imperialism in Africa. Condensed in the twelfth-century version of the legend of Prester John, and some of its important late medieval and early modern incarnations, is a narrative of Western European political failure that gets displaced, or redeployed, across the material body of the fetish. And, I suggest, condensed in John Buchan’s Prester John, his 1910 colonialist story for boys, is the failure of turn-of-the-century liberal humanism, a failure that gets played out through a process of reduction, where the aggressivities of imperialism become partially neutralized in the material fetish. In both cases, Prester John stages the pathologization of power relations, indeed, in such an urgent way that, “magically,” fetishism helps evacuate violence and inequality from the social scene.Yet while fetishism works dialectically to control violence, by formally re coding it, at the same time it perpetuates the violent project of imperialism. In the case of both medieval and modern colonial narratives around Prester John, I am interested in linking perverse strategies to survival in the face of the breakdown of culturally sanctioned identities (political and personal) as well as attending to the ways in which fetishism immerses the subject in the political field.

This chapter discusses the colonialist Utopia of Prester John in terms of the revolutionary potency of fetishism.