Teaching Heart of Darkness Now

Abstract

Why should we teach Heart of Darkness today? For decades, the question was not necessary. A longstanding fixture in the canon of greatest works written in the English language, the novella was read by high school and college students alike, and celebrated for its psychological depth and aesthetic complexity. Then came Chinua Achebe—who in 1975 called Conrad a “bloody racist”1 and offered passages to prove it. He spent the last thirty years of his life calling for the book to be struck from curricula—a call recently echoed by Michael Eric Dyson (New York Times Book Review, June 7, 2020). The passages that offended Achebe are all the more offensive in an age of George Floyd, all the more offensive to a generation increasingly sensitized to racial injustice. What else but offence—and pain—could be the response to a line that describes the humanity of Africans as a “remote kinship”...