Postcolonial Discourse: 'The Raw and the Cooked VOLUME (original) (raw)
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Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) are two entirely different stories written almost exactly 100 years apart, in a global environment that had monumentally changed from days of telegraph lines and horse-drawn carriages to high speed internet and gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles. Despite their aforementioned differences Conrad’s and Krog’s literary works are very much alike as they depict white colonial powers oppressing native black populations for financial gain while brutalizing and terrorizing the indigenous black peoples in hopes of instilling fear and maintaining unlimited control. In history it is a fait accompli that the more things change the more they stay the same and that history will usually repeat itself somehow and somewhere. For the purpose of this paper we will examine how King Leopold II’s 19th century white colonial power in Central Africa’s Congo Free State and apartheid’s 20th century white colonial power in South Africa under its first Prime Minister Dr. D.F. Malan featured similar antagonists, protagonists and literary dualities.
Oppression and Resistance in Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Postcolonial Study
Studies in Indian Place Names, 2020
This paper aims to analyze the themes of oppression and resistance in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) by tracing forms of oppression and resistance depicted through the novella. The purpose of this paper is to approach oppression of Conrad's Heart of Darkness from postcolonial study. It traces European colonialism in Africa. It depicted the people who affected and suffered from European colonization. This paper deals with postcolonial criticism that focuses on the oppression of the colonizers over colonized people. Conrad showed his readers the realities of colonialism and how it affects the oppressed as well as the oppressors.
Heart of darkness : A Post Colonial Study
Postcolonial literature consists predominantly of works written over the last few decades, there are still many discussions concerning the status of authors who wrote at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of these, one of the most frequently discussed is, of course, Joseph Conrad, whom most contemporary scholars see as being one of the first postcolonial writers — someone who criticized the sometimes ruthless and pointless colonial expansion of European empires and the concept of the “White Man’s Burden.” The works which attract particular attention are, of course, those which relate to Conrad’s African experience: An Outpost of Progress and the excellent, albeit over exploited novella Heart of Darkness.