Saturday, October 12, 2019
Colonialism and Imperialism - A Post-colonial Study of Heart of Darknes
A Post-colonial Study of Heart of Darkness à à à à In this paper, Joseph Conradââ¬â¢s Heart of Darkness will be examined by using a recent movement, Post-colonial Study that mainly focuses on the relationship between the Self and the Other, always intertwined together in considering oneââ¬â¢ identity.à à The Other is commonly identified with the margin, which has been oppressed or ignored by Eurocentric, male-dominated history.à à Conrad is also conscious of the Other's interrelated status with the Self, but his main concern is the Self, not the Other, even though he deals with the natives.à à As Edward W. Said indicates in his Orientalism, the Orient (or the Other) has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.1à à For Conrad, the Other becomes meaningful only so far as it gives some insight or information for the construction of Eurocentric self-image. à à à à à à In Heart of Darkness, the story is set in the Congo, the literal battleground for colonial exploitation.à à Marlow perceives natives along stereotyped Western lines, even though he also manifests a sense of sympathy towards suffering natives.à à The natives cannot be understood or seen represented from their point of view.à à The colonial aspects in Heart of Darkness begin to be explored through Marlowââ¬â¢ perspective of history.à à Seeing history as cyclic, Marlow juxtaposes the Roman invasion with that of the present British imperial project.à à According to Marlow, when Romans had first come to Britain, they might have felt the same way the British did in Africa: "the Romans first came here . . . darkness was here yesterday . . . savages, precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink " (9-10). ... ...lism, Racism, or Impressionism?â⬠Criticism (Fall, 1985) Burden, Robert. Heart of Darkness. London: Macmillan, 1991. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. ed. Robert Kimbrough. 3rd. edition. New York: Norton, 1988. Lionnet, Francoise. Autobiographical Voices. Cornell UP, 1988. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. ------------ The World, the Text, and the Critic. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983 ------------ Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966) Shaffer, Brian. ââ¬Å". Rebabarizing Civilization: Conradââ¬â¢s African Fiction and Spencerian Sociology,â⬠PMLA 108 (1993): 45-58 Thomas, Brook. "Preserving and Keeping Order by Killing Time in Heart of Darkness," in Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross Murfin, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989)
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