Second Time's a Charm

“Heart of Darkness and Racism” by Hunt Hawkins, 365-375

-My Author’s points mostly come from analyzing other critiques on Conrad rather than his own interpretation of the book, which I feel takes away from Hawkins’s points.
-The controversy of race has ironically given new life to the study of Conrad.
-Hawkins agrees with Achebe argues reading it carefully, but not banning
it.

Elements of Racism
-Realizes that none of the Africans have names, and none get more than a few sentences besides Kurtz’s mistress.
-Conrad is influenced by the temporal evolution writings of the time. The evidence is Marlow’s “traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.”

Expansionism/Imperialism
-Conrad opposed European expansion on grounds of the hypocrisy of the “civilizing mission” and opposition to the conquest of the Earth.
-It is ironic that they Europeans are civilizing the Africans when the Africans show restraint.
-Conrad also argues that as Europe moves into Africa they could slide backwards in the evolutionary scale, this argument is effective against imperialism, but is it s racist argument assuming Africans are at the bottom of the evolutionary scale.
-Conrad argues that the Africans do not corrupt Kurtz, but that Kurtz corrupts himself because unlike Kurtz, Marlow resists exploiting the Africans.
-These arguments come from Darwin’s The Descent of Man.

Conrad Himself
-Unlike Twain and Doyle, Conrad did not ever donate more of himself to the Congo after “witnessing” horrors there, maybe because he didn’t actually see the horrors himself.
-Conrad may seem racist now, but he was a lot less racist than his colleagues, so maybe to get others to agree with him he did not want to be so absolutely radical.
-Conrad would be proud that Heart of Darkness helped expose the horrors in the Congo, as it is now synonymous with alarming atrocities.