Silent Geographies in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902)

Abstract

Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness—one of the most influential texts in postcolonial studies—when European imperialism was at its height, culminating with the scramble for Africa toward the end of the nineteenth century and the ensuing history of unhampered exploitation and atrocious crimes against native populations—against humanity. As Robert Harrison points out in one of the most gifted contemporary readings of the novella, the imperial history Conrad depicts (or partakes in) must be placed within the wider history of modernity and the human-world relation produced by modernity. Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, says Harrison, “at the threshold not only of a new century but also of a new epoch of planetary conquest, which had amassed unprecedented means for a totalized dominion over the earth” (Harrison, 1992, 142). As Harrison rightly points out, the means for “a totalized dominion over the earth” was not only technological but also a major shift in the human relation to the world instigated by the Enlightenment as fathered by Descartes. To Harrison, Descartes completed the invalidation of the significance of the body that had sped up since the Copernican revolution had revealed geo-centrism (i.e., Earth as the center of the universe) as “an illusion of the senses” (Harrison, 1992, 109).