Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad - Robert Hampson (essay date spring 1990)
Robert Hampson (essay date spring 1990)
SOURCE: Hampson, Robert. “‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘The Speech that Cannot be Silenced’.” English 29, no. 163 (spring 1990): 15-32.
[In the following essay, Hampson investigates the role of racism in Heart of Darkness.]
James Clifford, in an insightful essay on Conrad and Malinowski, at one point observes:
It would be interesting to analyze systematically how, out of the heteroglot encounters of fieldwork, ethnographers construct texts whose prevailing language comes to override, represent, or translate other languages.1
As Clifford notes, behind this observation lies Talal Asad's conception of ‘a persistent, structured inequality of languages’ within the process of ‘cultural translation’. In Asad's own words:
The anthropological enterprise of cultural translation may be vitiated by the fact that there are...
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