Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (review)

Abstract

More than 25 years have passed since Chinua Achebe called Joseph Conrad a "bloody racist," and the scholarly world has yet to recover. Scarcely a year goes by without another earnest attempt to soften or rebut Achebe's charges, generally by the judicious invocation of historical context. Achebe himself has stood by the offending comment, even as an entire industry of postcolonial studies has grown up to reiterate the claim in more theoretically polite terms. Achebe's essay, "An Image of Africa," has by now attained a canonical status of its own, being regularly anthologized and invoked whenever discussion turns to Conrad's 1899 novella. Whatever one's ultimate judgment of "Heart of Darkness" itself, Achebe's remark had the decided merit of restoring what Edward Said calls the "worldliness" of the text--its powerful, messy, disturbed and even harrowing implication in the shameful violence of European imperialism. Expelled from the hushed precincts of the modernist pantheon, Conrad's text--despite, or perhaps thanks to, Achebe's intervention--retains an actuality that other masterpieces from the turn of the last century can only envy.