A Dual Perspective

In 1975, the celebrated Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe shook the world of English literature with a declaration: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is irredeemably racist. Granted, the 1899 work condemns colonial violence in the Congo Free State, then under the control of King Leopold II of Belgium. But according to Achebe, Conrad portrays Africans as a frenzied mob and the continent “as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity.” To demonstrate the corrupting effects of colonialism on Europeans, the Polish English author reduces Black people to symbols of primitivism.

At the time, Achebe’s critique was met with ambivalence. These days, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ” reads as an antecedent to widespread conversations about cultural appropriation and the politics of representation. One could say an uneasy truce emerged in academia. Though Achebe was not successful in “cancelling” Heart of...