and Nina and Taminah and Mrs Almayer

This chapter unpicks the structural dominance of whiteness and heteropatriarchy in Conrad scholarship, whereby his works her understood to be exclusively organised around the relationships, (repressed) emotions, and existential angst of white male characters. The chapter presents Almayer’s Folly in terms of the powerful women of colour – and crucially the relationships between them – at their centre. Moving Conrad scholarship away from reading female characters in relation to the immovable, singular, muse-like ‘pivot’, the chapter turns to the maternal bonds between Nina Almayer and her mother, as well as the queer dissonances of Taminah’s extreme emotions towards her putative heterosexual romantic rival, Nina. The chapter also details each of these characters’ respective dualistic relationships with whiteness, colonialism, and power, from Taminah’s enslavement to Mrs Almayer’s denigration to Nina’s racialization.