An Image of Africa
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot." --"An Image of Africa" (1975) by Chinua Achebe |
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An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is the published (and amended) version of the second Chancellor’s Lecture given by Chinua Achebe at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in February 1975. The text is considered to be part of the Postcolonial critical movement, which advocates considering the viewpoints of non-Westernized nations, as well as peoples coping with the effects of colonialism.
In An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Achebe attacks Joseph Conrad’s text as racist. According to Achebe, Conrad refuses to bestow "human expression" on Africans, even depriving them of language. Africa itself is rendered as "the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization", "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."
The essay
Achebe moves beyond the text of Conrad's Heart of Darkness in advancing his argument. Achebe quotes a passage from Conrad, as Conrad recalls his first encounter with an African in his own life:
A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.
The Nigerian author concludes that "...Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts. Sometimes his fixation on blackness is equally interesting..."
Achebe asserts that while Conrad was not himself responsible for the xenophobic “image of Africa” that appears in Heart of Darkness, his novel continues to perpetuate the damaging stereotypes of black peoples by its inclusion in the literary canon of the modern Western world. His searing critique is sometimes taught side-by-side with Conrad’s work, and is regularly included in critical editions of the text.
The question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot.
See also
Pages linking in
Outline of critical theory, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, Kurtz (Heart of Darkness), Chinua Achebe, Jungle, Things Fall Apart, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, Apocalypse Now Redux, No Longer at Ease, Civil Peace, Anthills of the Savannah, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, Chike and the River, The Massachusetts Review, International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, Apocalypse Now, Charles Marlow, Vengeful Creditor, Dead Men's Path, Spec Ops: The Line, Penguin Great Ideas, Hopes and Impediments, Postcolonial literature, There Was a Country
