Whispers of Racism: Analyzing Critical Responses of Chinua Achebe and Edward Said to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Abstract

This paper explores how African people are viewed and presented in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and how this author is charged with racism by Chinua Achebe after fifty years of writing this much-debated text. It also clarifies Edward Said’s critical response to this novella which is considered as a defense of Conrad. Analysing both the responses of Said and Achebe, this research tends to assess Achebe’s allegation objectively and non-judgmentally situating the text more as a product of time than as an instance of racist tale. This paper presents an idea that the authors of postcolonial literature are literally driven to analyze the multi-layered aspects of race and racism that have accelerated a flow of postcolonial novels based on the concept of race, color, sex, and identity. However, this paper also suggests that the presence of race and racism in literary studies occur instinctively and effortlessly although the early responses to Heart of Darkness simply ignored that idea because the literary critics and scholars of that period hardly talked about racism.