Anyway I think maybe I've wandered off into the weeds here thanks to my own immense frustration/morbid fascination with a certain sort of narrative. And I think maybe it's all too easy to wander into the weeds when what you're talking about is this very solipsistic style of superficially-critical storytelling, which is uneasy about imperialism only insofar as it threatens to harm imperialists or imperialistic societies. Which - if not already intended that way to begin with! - is certainly incredibly easy to co-opt into the service and defense of empire (Doing An Imperialism Made Our Soldiers Sad -> therefore you must uncritically valorize them, because condemnation of imperialism adds to their suffering you monster). It's hard to talk about without feeling like you're falling into a similar trap of being endlessly curious about the inner lives of imperialists - even if that curiosity takes the form of "wanting to put their fucked up psychology under a microscope" - at the expense of focusing on their victims.

But at the same time I do think that a complete critique of imperialism mentions (as Césaire does) the way it tends to rot the people and societies that practice it from within. And I do find it fascinating that amidst all the contorted cognitive dissonance of Conrad et al, they still express something along those lines. And this is only one of the many reasons that Discourse On Colonialism lives in my head rent-free