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Example research essay topic: Racism In Heart Of Darkness By Joseph Conrad - 2,153 words

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Racism in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Most discussion of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is centered on the immanent symbolic and psychological complexity of the novel and Conrad's unique linguistic style. The narration of a passage through holocaust usually is not at the front of our awareness. We are not interested in the history of the Congo, the fact that "as many as 6, 000, 000 persons may have been uprooted, tortured, and murdered through the forced labor system used to extract ivory and what reformers called "red rubber" from "the heart of darkness" (Brantlinger 365). Neither Conrad's attack on Belgian colonialism nor his parody of romantic colonial fiction is usually the focus and it now seems critical to consider Heart of Darkness in its social, historical, and literary context and to do so in a way that both highlights its anti-colonial stance and explores the ambiguities and contradictions in its treatment of Africa and Africans.

Of course, the attack on the developing imperial system in Africa is everywhere present in the novel. There is the corruption of the Trading Society, the forced labor and the grove of death, the depopulation of the countryside, the indiscriminate murder of the natives, the senseless firing into the bush, the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, corrupt administrators, and Kurtz himself. Attending to Heart of Darkness's portrayal of imperialist practices is primary to studying the novel in context, yet to read Heart of Darkness as a purely anti-colonial text leaves out the recent debate over Conrad's complicity in colonialist assumptions and philosophy. Bringing these more difficult matters into great consideration suggests ambiguities and equivocations not only in Conrad but in attitudes we may hold as well.

China Achebe's 1975 lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" and Frances B. Singh's 1978 essay "The Colonialistic Bias of Conrad's Heart of Darkness" initiated a still-running discussion in Conrad circles about the representation of Africans and the anti-colonial politics of the novel. In Achebe's words, there has long been a historical need to set up Africa as a foil for Europe; as "a place of negotiations at once remote and vaguely familiar in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest" (783). Achebe's argument first asserts that Conrad is himself a racist and is inseparable from his fictional protagonist; Marlow's antipathy toward "negroes" is identical to Conrad's in that both are equally afraid to acknowledge kinship between African and European cultures. Achebe then argues that Africa is an inappropriate backdrop for Western existential rumination, adding that the frequently asserted claim that Conrad's novel is about the breakdown of a Western mind, but simply happens to be set in Africa, is problematic because any Western representation of Africa is unavoidably a political statement. The moment Western literature represents Africa, it engages in a politicized discourse about slavery, colonization, and race.

Achebe believes that Conrad's condemnation of Belgian colonialism sidesteps admitting equality between white and black people, and portrays Africans as lacking the power of expression, devoid of recognizable humanity, in short, as cannibals who should stay in "their place. " Achebe argues that the peculiar power of Heart of Darkness is located in an appeal to a racist fear of equality: "Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the fascination it holds over the Western mind: "What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours... Ugly. " (254 cited in Abdelrahman 177). While Achebe calls Heart of Darkness "permanent literature, " something which is "read and taught and continuously evaluated by serious academics, " he maintains that it cannot be "great art" because it: "parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of humanity has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today... [it] celebrates the dehumanization [of Africans and]... depersonalizes a portion of the human race" (257 cited in Abdelrahman 178). More disturbing for Achebe than Conrad's novel per se is the way in which Achebe sees Heart of Darkness pointing to the pervasiveness of racism in Western thought. As a case in point, he discusses a highly detailed psychoanalytic biography of Conrad that doesn't even touch on Conrad's attitude toward black people, "Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad as absolutely normal" (259 cited in Abdelrahman 177).

In her essay Frances Singh maintains that even though Heart of Darkness may be "one of the most powerful indictments of colonialism ever written" its critique is profoundly compromised by in acceptance of nineteenth-century anthropology that considered African tribes "primitive" and "savage, " by a failure to distinguish between the metaphors of evil blackness and black skin, and by an endorsement of English colonialism over Belgian on the grounds of greater "efficiency. " Singh calls Marlow's sympathy for Africans "superficial": "He feels sorry for them when he sees them dying, but when he sees them healthy, practicing their customs, he feels nothing but abhorrence and loathing, like a good colonizer to whom such a feeling offers a perfect rationalization for his policies" (272 cited in Brown 14). She believes that Marlow's (and Conrad's) attitude toward the Africans reflects a colonialist ic bias: "He may sympathize with the plight of blacks, he may be disgusted by the effects of economic colonialism, but because he has no desire to understand or appreciate people of any culture other than his own, he is not emancipated from the mentality of a colonizer" (272 cited in Brown 14). Singh concludes that the limitations of Conrad's perspective reduce the significance of his work and, ironically, turn "a story that was meant to be a clear-cut attack on a vicious system into a partial apology for it" (280 cited in Brown 17). In the 1980 s articles and studies in response to Achebe and Singh appeared in rapid succession. "Third World" writers who sought to temper Achebe's views were soon published. In 1982 Conradiana devoted an issue to the discussion. As if to refute the charge that Conrad scholars had by their silence colluded in the alleged racism of the text, a long bibliography of writing on the general topic of Conrad and colonialism was included.

The issues raised by Achebe and Singh preceded Benita Parry's critical analysis, Conrad and Imperialism, and Patrick Brantlinger's significant work on nineteenth-century British attitudes toward Africans, and it seemed to inspire Bette London's feminist and Reynold Humphries' post structuralist discussions of Conrad. The significance of the debate is signalled by Robert Kimbrough 's radically revised 1988 Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness, which includes the Achebe and Singh essays and critical responses (Matin 259). It is Achebe's charge of racism that draws the attention of Conrad enthusiasts. Unfortunately, some of their comments are more reactive than thoughtful. J. M.

Robertson asks, "What can it be but a form of political jingoism that pushes Achebe into this anti-creative stance" and makes him "so perniciously wrong about a fellow writer and truth-teller?" (107 cited in Matin 262). He believes Achebe "undermines his credibility and spoils the magnificent contribution he has made as a novelist. " Reinhardt Kuesgen describes Achebe's judgement of the novella as "obviously erroneous" (28) and hopes that "modern literary scholarship will reduce the need for Achebe's aggressiveness" (32 cited in Matin 268). Ian Watt emphasizes that unlike "many modern anthropologists and their followers" we should join Conrad's moral rejection of African cannibalism. Some Conrad scholars take Achebe's condemnation of Conrad's racism as an accusation from which the great artist must be exonerated. They argue that Conrad may have used racist expressions or held racist ideas but that he was less racist than his contemporaries. They assume that unlike those deluded or "racist" nineteenth-century contemporaries of Conrad, today's critics can make their judgments objectively.

This effort to excuse, apologize, or explain for Conrad because his understanding was "limited by his time" still avoids directly confronting the questions Achebe and Singh raise about the text and misses their broader point that the issue is not just Heart of Darkness, but the possible existence of pervasive racist and colonialist perspectives in a broader context. What is at stake is not really Conrad himself or the essential guilt or innocence of his text, but the way we understand Heart of Darkness and our own society. The responses of the "Third World" writers are more to the point. They are willing to entertain Achebe's fundamental argument, but hesitate to go as far as Achebe does in criticizing the text. Peter Nazareth claims that rather than narrating the "us" of the West and the "them" of Africa, Heart of Darkness equivocates on cultural identity and "erodes the solid walls of personality" (179 cited in Brown 14). While sharing the concern about Western attitudes toward the "Third World, " Wilson Harris believes Achebe's judgment of Heart of Darkness misses Conrad's "crucial parody of the proprieties of established order that mask corruption in all societies" (265 cited in Brown 18). (Nonetheless, Harris believes that Conrad failed to move beyond a purely nihilistic viewpoint and thus can be read as supporting liberal complacency. ) C.

P. Sarvan argues that the emphasis in Conrad "is on continuity, on persistence through time and peoples, and therefore on the fundamental oneness of man and his nature" (283 cited in Matin 277). While Nazareth, Harris, and Sarvan do not dismiss Achebe's charges, they do read Conrad with a view to what he reveals about a trans historic, universal "human nature. " Their humanist perspective is attractive, though while it should not be dismissed, it is not unproblematic. In attempting to define a universal human nature one needs to ask, whose definition of "human nature" is called upon to serve for everyone else? It is pertinent to recall We Soyinka's warning to beware the neocolonial wolf who comes dressed in the sheep's clothing of "universality" (cited in Matin 280). Without traveling further into the complex and interesting arguments that arise in the discussion, it is evident that to charge one of the established "great works" with "racism" is, in the academic context at least, to commit a serious act.

At times, defenders of Conrad reveal more about the institutionalization of Conrad as an object of study than about nineteenth- or twentieth-century colonialism or racial philosophy. Underlying some responses to Achebe appears to be the anxiety that if Conrad's writing is indeed racist, Heart of Darkness would somehow be less worthy of analysis and the Conrad scholar would be therefore reduced in stature. Yet, why should this be so? The intellectual complexity and artistic sophistication of the novel, and particularly its evident attack on colonialism, make understanding possible racism in the work all the more urgent.

In The Political Unconscious, Jameson argues that: " The restoration of the meaning of the greatest cultural monuments cannot be separated from a passionate and partisan assessment of everything that is oppressive in them and that knows complicity with privilege and class domination" (299 cited in Abdelrahman 178). To cease paying attention to a text, or to minimize its importance, because it is "racist" is to suggest that racism is not an important object of investigation, that literature is to be uncritically venerated, and that the authority of the literature scholar or teacher emanates from the superficial truth of the literary text. If we are willing to entertain the arguments of Achebe and Singh we may want to examine Heart of Darkness in order to explore colonialist and racist ways of knowing and to pursue possibilities for overcoming them. Toward this end we may need more than the text itself. Other depictions of Africans, both contemporaneous with Conrad and from our own time, would be relevant. A study of the novel from a critical postcolonial perspective ought to draw connections between literature and broader discourse.

We may want to ask about why Heart of Darkness in particular has such a revered place, and what it signifies, that to accuse it of racism should bring a covey of Conradophiles down on your head. Works Cited Abdelrahman, Fda. "Said and Achebe: Writers at the Crossroads of Culture. " All: Journal of Comparative Poetics (2005): 177. Achebe, China. "An Image of Africa. " Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782 - 94. Brantlinger, Patrick. "Heart of Darkness: Anti-imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?" Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 27. 4 (1985): 363 - 85. Brown, Tony C. "Cultural Psychosis on the Frontier: The Work of the Darkness in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. " Studies in the Novel 32. 1 (2000): 14.

Matin, A. Michael. "We Aren't German Slaves Here, Thank God: Conrad's Transposed Nationalism and British Literature of Espionage and Invasion. " Journal of Modern Literature 21. 2 (1998): 251 - 280.


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Research essay sample on Racism In Heart Of Darkness By Joseph Conrad

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