The Representation of the African ‘Other’ in Melville’s Moby-Dick and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Fadhila SIDI- SAID BOUTOUCHENT

Résumé


This paper intends to propose a re-reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and explore the authors’ discourse in relation to ‘Africanism’ where the black African is portrayed as the ‘Other’. Toni Morrison introduces the term Africanism as: “The denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreading that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people” (Morrison, 1992: 6). Africanism is, then, the way the West constructs Africa. The latter is seen as a place of passivity, full of monolithic blackness, populated with black savage people who need saving because of their savagery and depravity. The purpose of this work is to explore to what extent do the two authors’ perceptions of the African ‘Other’ resemble and\or differ from those that the general ideologies of their times circulated.


Texte intégral :

PDF

Références


ACHEBE, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in The Massachusetts Review, 18:4, pp.782-94 (winter, 1977).

ALTHUSSER, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

CONRAD, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

- Almayer’s Folly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

- The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1963.

…………………….. . “Letters to R. Cunninghame Graham, dated February 8, 1899” in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 2, 1898-1902, London: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

COLLITS, Terry. Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire. New York: Routledge, 2005.

HOLQUIST, Michael. Dialogism. New York: Routledge, 2002.

HOWARD, Leon. Herman Melville: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

MELVILLE, Herman. Moby-Dick. London: Penguin, 1994.

MORRISON, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Harvard University Press, 1992.

PETERS, G. John. The Introduction to Joseph Conrad. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

SUNDQUIST, Eric J. Empire and Slavery in American Literature: 1820-1865. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.


Renvois

  • Il n'y a présentement aucun renvoi.