The Impacts of Colonialism on the Colonized and the Colonizer: A Study on E.M.Forster's A Passage to India and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (original) (raw)
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The Industrial Revolution was a time of great age throughout the world. It represented major change from 1760 to the period 1820-1840. The movement originated in Great Britain and affected everything from industrial manufacturing processes to the daily life of the average citizen. The main industry at the time was the textile industry. It had the most employees, output value, and invested capital. It was the first to take on new modern production methods. The effects caused by the industrial revolution which has mentioned above, can lead to another impact such as the emergence of where the industry must obtain the availability of raw materials, and the next impact is where the result of the raw material processess by the industry will be marketed. For colonialism itself, generally it is the direct and overall domination of one country by another on the basis of state power being in the hands of a foreign power. Spesifically colonialism has two objectives, they are political domination and the second one is to make possible the exploitation of colonized country. This research aims to find out the colonialisms traits of the characters perform in their respective position, and to reveal the impacts of colonialism on characters.
AFRICAN EXPERIENCES OF COLONIALISM: A STUDY OF JOSEPH CONRAD'S HEART OF DARKNESS
Imperialism and desire for expansion of empire across the globe by powerful empires caused the process of establishments of their colonies in the distant geographical spaces. It paved way to colonialism. It is a system of powerful colonial state to impose their hegemony over weaker countries. It initiated the large scale explorations of new continents. Colonialism came under the garb of trade and religion. The European powers like Rome,
Colonialism: The Rape of Minds and Nations
In 1972, the popular musical act War, wrote the following, "Don't you know that it's true, that for me and for you, the world is a ghetto." The song reached number seven on the Billboard charts. The lyrics resonated with the people. The irony of the band's name should not go unnoticed. Less than a hundred years before the nations of Europe viewed the world as their ghetto. In their quest for more resources, land, and wealth, they simply raped the minds and nations of those they viewed as inferior. In Niccolo Machiavelli's book The Prince, he wrote, "The end justifies the means." It appears European nations followed that creed by using whatever means necessary, including military force, 1 to extract everything they could from less powerful nations. Europe colonized wherever they could and made the world their ghetto.
The Praxis of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: An Outline
IJRAR - International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews, 2019
Postcolonial is a period of freedom and exemption from European colonial clutches and grasping. It is quite necessary to define the word 'colonialism' before understanding 'postcolonialism.' P K Nayar in his seminal book Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction projects light upon the etymology of the word as thus "The term 'colony' once meant something very different. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that the fourteenth-century term, 'colonye,' derived from the Latin 'colon-us,' meaning farmer, cultivator, planter, or settler in a new country, was used to describe the Roman settlements in the fourteenth century" (1-2). Colonialism is a gradual process of settling down Europeans in various corners of the world and considering themselves superior to those where they settled down. They migrated to non-European countries and started forming colonies and began to establish their own rules and regulation and imposed upon the colonized. Sometimes it was quite harsh and, most of the time, inhuman. The process of migration is continued since the existence of the earth and human beings kept on moving in quest of a better life and safe places. But the eighteenth and nineteenth-century scenario is extremely awful and consternation where the colonizers moved to exploit the colonized places and contaminated the previously established social cultures and introduce their own. Let's see what OED reads, "Colonialism is an alleged policy of exploitation of backward, or weak peoples by a large power." Colonialism is a derogatory word and it is a sort of stigma on colonizers. It is the second name of cruelty, oppression, exploitation, hate, servitude, racism and inequality. Colonization is dreadful for native races, cultures and spaces. Their intention at the beginning of these settlers was just to trade and later, seeing the gullible and hospitable nature of the people, their cunningness came out and they invited several people from their country and gradually tried to control and train the native people in their own way. They came to trade with the permission of local Nawabs and rulers, but with the passage of time, these traders conquered those local nawabs and rulers and became the ruler of those areas and started subjugating the people of the area. Colonialism brought destruction for the native knowledge, culture, art and understanding. Colonizers started to command the economy, politics and society as per their crafty intention. They introduced massive changes by demoralizing Indian values, customs and practices. Native people began to see their own customs and rituals with susceptible eyes in which they used to believe firmly. In India, they replace dhoti, kurta, turban, saree with shirts, pants, coats, ties and gowns. The products of colonialism are hybrid; they oscillate between their native culture and colonial culture. The colonization process started forcefully but later on it impacted on the mentality of the native people. They began to subjugate mentally, making the natives considered inferior, uncivilized, illiterate and so on. P K Nayar, quoting the most famous Orientalist scholar Edward Said, says, "Colonialism cannot be seen merely as a political or economic 'condition': it was a powerful cultural and epistemological conquest of the native populations" (Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction 3).
Colonialism and postcolonialism
Much of the history of international relations is characterized by the violent attempts of one community to subjugate another. In 1955, Aimé Césaire wrote of the "great historical tragedy" that befell Africa in its encounter with European colonialism, an encounter that led Césaire to conclude that "Europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in human history " (2000: 45). A range of important ethical issues emerges from a consideration of the past interaction between colonizing and colonized peoples, both in the African context and elsewhere in the world. This article first seeks to describe the key characteristics of colonialism as a system of domination and subjugation, before considering the legitimacy of contemporary judgments on the morality of historical colonialism. It then examines how the particular character of colonialism complicates arguments relating to the rectification of injustice. It concludes by asking what lessons those interested in ethics can learn from the diverse body of work produced by writers in the postcolonial tradition.
Colonial Gaze and Cultural Other: A Postcolonial Critique of Heart of Darkness
2016
The terms colonialism and imperialism are interrelated. Imperialism is a system of governance in which a strong metropolitan centre rules distant territories. Imperialism is maintained with a mixture of power, tyranny and desire for a make belief just world. Colonialism is a political and historical reality in which a country is subjugated and politically controlled by a more powerful country, exercising exploitation, hegemony and violence, both physical and epistemic. Colonialism is an outcome of imperialism in which an imperial nation implants colonies in distant continents or territories and rule them by proxies or representatives. It is a politically turbulent system which divides the world into the binary opposites: the colonizer and the colonized. Culture is appropriated to validate the supremacy of the colonizers in colonial political structures. This is accomplished through constructing the colonized as the cultural Other of the colonizer in discourses. Thus, colonialism was...
UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST REVIEW. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2022
Despite accusations of racism and of upholding colonialism, Heart of Darkness reveals the problematic nature of the imperial enterprise. The dichotomy between superior versus inferior / us versus them / self versus other, embedded in colonial discourse, becomes challenging when considering that the foray into the Dark Continent reveals more about the character of Europeans. The outward journey of exploration of the still partially unknown Africa is mirrored by an inward journey that reveals the degenerate nature of the European identity. The geographical journey is doubled by an anthropological one towards our earliest origins as well as a psychological one towards the primitive self.
Is Heart of Darkness A Critique of Colonialism?
2016
Joseph Conrad is a world renown author. We can relate Conrad and his work to colonialism and imperialism. One of his works that has received many critical views is Heart of Darkness (HOD). It has survived time and has become a classic of the English literature canon. The question that arises as we read this text is that “Is Conrad a critique of colonialism or does he support it?” To answer the question this essay will use the postcolonial lens to read the work. One of the theorists used to discuss Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness will be Edward Said and his famous work Orientalism. We will come to the conclusion as to whether the author defends colonialism or is a voice against it.