Chapter 2 - Architectures of Free Trade in Conrad’s Singapore

Summary

This chapter turns to the city as imagined in literary impressionism from the early twentieth century, reflecting on the spectral, ethereal landscape of Singapore as it appears in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. In Conrad’s writing, the neoclassical buildings housing the banks and corporations appear superimposed, rendering Singapore’s grand and solid modernity strangely superficial and insubstantial. As scholars have argued, this works to unsettle the city’s colonial identity as a triumph of modernity and order over primeval jungle, making Conrad’s Singapore an archetypal ‘unreal city’ and a crucial location for the development of urban impressionism. This chapter shows how Conrad not only stages the breakdown of colonial progress but also engages critically with the British laissez-faire discourses framing the city’s foundational identity as a free port. In this way, a connection opens up between his experiments with narrative agency and the city’s own colonial identity as the product of the ‘invisible hand’ of market forces.