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"An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's ''Heart of Darkness''" is the published and amended version of the second Chancellor’s Lecture given by Chinua Achebe at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in February 1975. The essay was included in his 1988 collection, ''Hopes and Impediments''. The text is considered to be part of the Postcolonial critical movement, which advocates to Europeans the consideration of the viewpoints of non-European nations, as well as peoples coping with the effects of colonialism. In "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ''Heart of Darkness''", Achebe accuses Joseph Conrad of being "a thoroughgoing racist" for depicting Africa as "the other world". ==The essay== According to Achebe, Conrad refuses to bestow "human expression" on Africans, even depriving them of language. Africa itself is rendered as "a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest". Conrad, he says, portrays Africa as " 'the other world', the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization", which Achebe attributes to Conrad's "residue of antipathy to black people". Achebe moves beyond the text of Conrad's ''Heart of Darkness'' in advancing his argument. Achebe quotes a passage from Conrad, as Conrad recalls his first encounter with an African in his own life: A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. Achebe concludes that "...Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate love of that word itself should be of interest to psychoanalysts. Sometimes his fixation on blackness is equally interesting..." Achebe asserts that while Conrad was not himself responsible for the xenophobic "image of Africa" that appears in ''Heart of Darkness'', his novel continues to perpetuate the damaging stereotypes of black peoples by its inclusion in the literary canon of the modern Western world. His searing critique is sometimes taught side-by-side with Conrad’s work, and is regularly included in critical editions of the text. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「An Image of Africa」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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