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This episode will focus on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness and what it allows us to see in the relationship between colonial atrocity and its representation in literature. We will pay attention to the history of Leopold II’s exploitation of the Congo Free State from 1855-1908 and the ways in which Conrad’s novella depicts that exploitation in relation to various problems of literary representation. Conrad is famous for having depicted the Congo river as the site of primal impulses and longings, thus converting it into the location of various elusive epiphanies. And yet the problem of representation, couched by Conrad in terms of the contrast between narrative surfaces and their kernels, also allows Heart of Darkness to partially divest the historical Congo of the horror of its more sordid details and to render it the staging post of a different kind of crisis, namely, is the crisis of representation itself. We will also see that apart from exposing Leopold II’s hypocrisy in the Congo, Conrad also upturns the central terms of the masculine adventure narratives that were commonplace and highly popular in his day, replacing their self-assurance with doubt and existential malaise.
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Suggested Reading:
- Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” version revised for the 3rd Norton Critical edition of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1988. First published in 1977.
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 5th Norton Critical Edition, edited by Paul B. Armstrong (2017).
- Roger Casement, “The Congo Report,” in Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodas, The Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement’s Life and Times with a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings (1959)
- Adam Hoschsild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998).
- Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (1983)
- David Van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People, trans. Sam Garret (2014)
- Silverman, Debora L. "Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I." West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (2011): 139-181.
- Silverman, Debora L. "Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part II." West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 19, no. 2 (2012): 175-195.