"They wanted no excuse for being there": The Africanist Presence in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

Essay from the year 2022 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Colonial Gothic, language: English, abstract: When Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness in 1899, he was probably not expecting that this story keeps so many critics busy for so many years, even after his death in 1924. A huge wave of critics and also defending scholarly journals and books occurred after 1975. In this year the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe accused Conrad of being a racist who portrays such a poor image of Africa as it can be seen as "the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality" (Achebe). This triggered a wave of indignation and authors like Hunt Hawkins, Cedric Watts and Patrick Brantlinger who defended Conrad's work as a critic on imperialism in which Conrad presents the dreadful reality of colonialism in the Congo at a time in which xenophobia was the most popular understanding of racial differences. But as many authors have already recognized, the derogatory language, the focus on the outward appearance of blacks, and the use of confusing and definitely pejorative adjectives leaves an image of Africa that "can hardly be called flattering" (Hawkins). Unlike Chinua Achebe, who concentrated his critic on one specific work, Toni Morrison's critic in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) was addressed to many authors who included a real or fabricated Africanist presence in their work as a catalyst in the formation of American identity (cf. Morrison). Since it seems that nobody has aligned the representation of the black race in Heart of Darkness with Toni Morrison's work, I am trying to demonstrate that the Africanist presence was necessary for Joseph Conrad in order to hide his critical imperial stance in a way that it remains readable for the Victorian British audience. Since so many authors have already agreed to read Heart of Darkness as a critic on imperialism, I will not focus on demonstrating this critical stance. This is why I will analyze one paragraph in order to show how the racial superiority is conveyed in the story by constructing racial hierarchies before the general depictions of race in the Victorian British society is presented. In the end, I am trying to find signs of an Africanist presence, how Morrison defines it, in the story of Joseph Conrad and their impact on the protagonist and Kurtz.