This book analyses black Atlantic studies, colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory, providing paradigms for understanding imperial literature, Englishness and black transnationalism. Its concerns range from the metropolitan centre of Conrad's Heart of Darkness to fatherhood in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk; from the marketing of South African literature to cosmopolitanism in Achebe; and from utopian discourse in Parry to Jameson's theorisation of empire.
’, in Bunce , M. , Franks , S. and Paterson , C. (eds), Africa’s Media Image in the 21st Century: From the ‘Heart of Darkness’ to ‘Africa Rising’ ( London : Routledge ), pp. 129 – 31 . Barthes , R. ( 1977 ), Image/Music/Text ( New York : Hill and Wang ). Bunce , M. , Scott , M. and Wright , K. ( forthcoming ), ‘ Humanitarian Journalism ’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Journalism Studies ( Oxford : Oxford University Press
chapter1 21/12/04 11:07 am Page 21 1 Tale of the city: the imperial metropolis of Heart of Darkness Many decades ago, in Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire drew attention to the ‘boomerang effect’ of imperialism. His account suggests that the boomerang operates at two speeds. The fast boomerang returns as soon as it is dispatched: the brutal dehumanisation to which the colonised are subjected is immediately visited upon the coloniser, leading Césaire to the conclusion that ‘colonization … dehumanizes even the most civilized man: that the colonizer, who
attention from ‘the ordinary and particular to that which lets the ordinary and particular have their peculiar shape and meaning’: the world.21 There is no ‘content’ in a simple sense: truth reveals a world into which ‘content’ is put. This world, unveiled in an artwork, will vary from work to work: the world of a Greek temple is not the world of a Van Gogh 154 Readings painting nor the world of Ulysses, Midnight’s Children or Heart of Darkness. Yet, this understanding of truth as unveiling a world cannot be reduced to truth as correspondence, but opens and shapes a
Ayemenem’s own ‘Kurtz’ and called the ‘Heart of Darkness’, is said to signify ‘history’ (that is, ‘important’ European history) to the children precisely because they are locked out of it (GST 52–3).33 It is the same building that, in the novel’s present, has been converted into a five-star hotel with, on display, the restored house of Kerala’s first Marxist Chief Minister (GST 67, 125–7). Here, too, abbreviated Kathakali performances are held for tourists – performances which do, however, help the traditional players to make ends meet. Inadvertent and/or forced complicity
, vol. 2, pp. 257–67, vol. 6, pp. 198–203. Sean Callaghan, TRC Health Sector Hearing, available at www.justice. gov.za/trc/special/health/health01.htm (accessed 1 December 2012). John Liebenberg & Patricia Hayes, Bush of Ghosts: Life and War in Namibia, 1986–1990 (Fernwood: Umuzi/Random House, 2010), p. 247. Etienne van Heerden, ‘My Cuban’, in Mad Dog and Other Stories (Cape Town: New Africa Books, 1992), p. 74. Jacque Pauw, Into the Heart of Darkness: Confessions of Apartheid’s Assassins (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1997), p. 82; SWAPO, ‘SWATF/Koevoets not war
Modernist fascination with the formal studies of urban life . . . can be seen at its two extremes of ‘concept’ city, the radiant Utopia and the degenerate wasteland’.6 Furthermore, the location of these texts within Modernism is clearly signalled by their intertextual resonances. Waugh’s borrowing of his title from Eliot is echoed by further allusion in the text but the influence of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is also clearly evident. In the words of Jeffrey Heath: Tony’s relationship with Todd resembles that of Marlow and Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. But unlike Tony, Marlow
. 86. Ford Madox Ford in a letter to J. B. Pinker, 17 March 1913, in Richard Ludwig (ed.), Letters of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 56. In psychoanalytic terms, it is as though Lovell’s superego and id have been externalised and realised in appropriate surroundings. Crucial here are my earlier discussions of the fragmentation of modernism, and of the more common experience of the unresolved dissolutions of the self in modernist fiction (think of Heart of Darkness, say, or 180 Fragmenting modernism Prufrock, or Mansfield’s Bertha
”’ (p. 432), in an act which, tragically, has the greatest sexual potential of any yet witnessed.75 The final image of the book, caught up as it is with female symbolism, thus envelops it, becoming bigger than it, evoking Marlow’s interpretation of the ‘meaning of an episode’ in Conrad’s appropriately titled Heart of Darkness. Such meaning ‘was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze’.76 The incident elicits a complete understanding, to which Ford’s tale has brought the reader, of the containing
notion that this unit has a unitary consciousness. And, on occasion, this analysis creates an aestheticisation of space that obscures as much as it illuminates the operations of imperial cultures. That there were many material and figurative spaces within the imperial metropole needs further attention, and so does analysis of the features introduction 21/12/04 Introduction 11:04 am Page 7 7 that different European metropoles shared and did not share.22 In this light I foreground here the metropolitan narrative given by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Critical