An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achebe
Conrad, Achebe charged, was a thoroughgoing racist, and the canon had refused to see it.
In a lecture turned essay, Achebe reread Heart of Darkness not as an anti-imperial classic but as a work that dehumanizes Africans, reducing a continent to a foil for European anxiety. The charge forced literary studies to confront the racism inside a canonical text and inside its own habits of reading. It reset the entire debate over Conrad and helped open postcolonial criticism.
Its legacy. The essay is now taught alongside the novella it indicts.
- Author
- Chinua Achebe
- First published
- 1977
- Genre
- Literary criticism
- Theme
- Colonialism and Its Critics
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