RACE AND EMPIRE: A DECONSTRUCTIONIST READING OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS AND EDWARD MORGAN FORSTER’S A PASSAGE TO INDIA

Abstract

The emergence of deconstruction as literary theory and criticism in the 1960s changed the understanding and of the relationship between text and meaning creation and formation. In his own theory, Jacques Derrida argues that there are no self-sufficient units of meaning in a literary text, because individual words or sentences in a text can only properly be understood in terms of how they fit into the larger structure of the text and language itself. This article examines race and empire and their relations of binary opposition in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Edward Morgan Forster’s A Passage to India through deconstructionist approach. The study sees how these texts are racial and imperial in theme and to explore these themes in relations of binary oppositions like, light/dark, white/black, good/evil, and civilization/savagery as they represent racial ideology and self/other, colonizer/colonized and civilization/savagery as imperial ideology in Heart of Darkness and good/evil, white/ black, superior/inferior, civilization/savagery reflecting racial ideology and self/other, colonizer/colonized and west/east as imperial ideology in A Passage to India. In deconstructing the above major binary oppositions, the manifestations and conflicts of racial and imperial ideological paradigms; hence rendering both texts destabilizes themselves with the absence of determinate meaning.