2010 Summer. ; Includes bibliographic references (pages 88-90). ; Covers not scanned. ; Print version deaccessioned 2022. ; As colonial and postcolonial studies insist, the Western legacy of colonization has had— and continues to have—a profound impact on the composition of subject positions and the subsequent distribution of power in Western civilization. Connected to the colonizer/colonized binary produced through colonial involvement is the reason/emotion binary; Western concepts of civilization and primitivism are closely related to the reason/emotion binary as reason and emotional restraint have historically been markers of civilization while the Western notion of the primitive includes emotional excess to the point of animality. Given this link between reason, emotion, and colonization, recent emotion studies scholarship that seeks to unpack the reason/emotion binary has much to offer colonial studies. One such emotion theorist is Sara Ahmed, who in The Cultural Politics of Emotion investigates the manner in which emotion produces and sustains social meaning to construct subjectivities. The intersection of this scholarship and colonial studies, then, lies in emotion’s role in composing colonial subjectivities. My aim in this thesis is to explore that intersection, investigating how emotion operates as an organizing principle within the colonizer/colonized binary and, more specifically, in the historical moment of Belgium’s King Leopold II and his campaign for Belgian colonial involvement in Africa. My focus throughout this research rests on rhetorics of disgust and love, two seemingly incompatible emotions. In traditional conceptions, the former involves a strong bodily revulsion and the latter an equally strong affection and desire. However, within Ahmed's framework of relational emotions and sustained affective investments, disgust and love operate similarly to identify objects of emotion and, in so doing, allow for emerging subjects. Close attention to these emotions in colonial texts from Belgium’s ...