Post-Colonial
http://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/discourseov.html
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Intro.html
Emory University introduction to Post-colonial Criticism
http://www.countryreports.org/
History of the Congo
http://www.stfrancis.edu/content/en/student/kurtzweb/darkness.htm
Heart of Darkness, an African Perspective
Example Essay: “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe
Quite simply it is the desire -- one might indeed say the need -- in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.
This need is not new; which should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to look at this phenomenon dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor the competence to embark on the exercise with the tools of the social and biological sciences but more simply in the manner of a novelist responding to one famous book of European fiction: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , which better than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and need which I have just referred to. Of course there are whole libraries of books devoted to the same purpose but most of them are so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls automatically into a different class -- permanent literature -- read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has numbered it "among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language." I will return to this critical opinion in due course because it may seriously modify my earlier suppositions about who may or may not be guilty in some of the matters I will now raise.
Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting, peacefully "at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks." But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that "Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world."
Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too "has been one of the dark places of the earth." It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.
--From An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe
Questions to answer in your Congo Diary
1. What is colonialism? Name three colonial powers and list some of their colonies.
2. What was the scramble for Africa? What European countries were involved? What African countries became colonized?
3. What country colonized the Congo? Why was this country interested in the Congo?
4. Describe three ways life for the native Congolese changed under this occupation.
5. What is a post-colonial critic and how might he or she understand or read a text?
6. As a post-colonial critic, what might you look for in Heart of Darkness?
7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Intro.html
Emory University introduction to Post-colonial Criticism
http://www.countryreports.org/
History of the Congo
http://www.stfrancis.edu/content/en/student/kurtzweb/darkness.htm
Heart of Darkness, an African Perspective
Example Essay: “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe
Quite simply it is the desire -- one might indeed say the need -- in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.
This need is not new; which should relieve us all of considerable responsibility and perhaps make us even willing to look at this phenomenon dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor the competence to embark on the exercise with the tools of the social and biological sciences but more simply in the manner of a novelist responding to one famous book of European fiction: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , which better than any other work that I know displays that Western desire and need which I have just referred to. Of course there are whole libraries of books devoted to the same purpose but most of them are so obvious and so crude that few people worry about them today. Conrad, on the other hand, is undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain. His contribution therefore falls automatically into a different class -- permanent literature -- read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has numbered it "among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language." I will return to this critical opinion in due course because it may seriously modify my earlier suppositions about who may or may not be guilty in some of the matters I will now raise.
Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other world," the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the River Thames, tranquil, resting, peacefully "at the decline of day after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks." But the actual story will take place on the River Congo, the very antithesis of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River Emeritus. It has rendered no service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that "Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world."
Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too "has been one of the dark places of the earth." It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in daylight and at peace. But if it were to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the terrible risk of hearing grotesque echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an avenging recrudescence of the mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.
--From An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” by Chinua Achebe
Questions to answer in your Congo Diary
1. What is colonialism? Name three colonial powers and list some of their colonies.
2. What was the scramble for Africa? What European countries were involved? What African countries became colonized?
3. What country colonized the Congo? Why was this country interested in the Congo?
4. Describe three ways life for the native Congolese changed under this occupation.
5. What is a post-colonial critic and how might he or she understand or read a text?
6. As a post-colonial critic, what might you look for in Heart of Darkness?
7. What do you think are the strengths of this approach? The weaknesses?