LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 16:7 July 2016
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Post Modernism and Post-colonialism in
Joseph Conrad’s Selected Novels

G. Sankar and S. P. Suresh Kumar


Abstract

Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) is one of those authors who considered the people of colonized countries as savages, barbarians and uncivilized that must be under the colonization and control of the civilized and superior countries like England. Among his works, Heart of Darkness (1899)—which is about a sea voyage upward the famous African Congo River toward the Congo Free State—is narrated by the first-person point of view narrator and protagonist named Marlow showing the intention and thoughts of the author about a colonized country. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to study the notion and concept of post-colonialism through the lights of the critics like Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak and Achebe on Joseph Conrad’s novel named Heart of Darkness. As many other discourses, through the history literature paid one of its most important attentions to show and reveal such mentioned post-colonial characteristics and influences as well. Thus, an actual reader of literature can comprehend the fact that some authors are to be considered as defenders of colonizer countries while some others are on the opposite side and are the defenders of the colonized countries. The first group are called the agents of imperialism while the second group are the defendant of the colonized people.

Keywords: Post-colonialism, Agent of Imperialism, Colonized Identity, Heart of Darkness.

Introduction

Being introduced as a controversial type of literary theory, post-colonialism deals with the literary canon created about the societies which on one occasion were under the colonization of the European imperial powers such as The Great Britain, Spain and France as well as the literary canon of decolonised notions. Pramod K. Nayar in The Postcolonial Studies Dictionary (2015) defines post-colonialism as:
Initially written with a ‘-’ between ‘post’ and ‘colonialism’ as a signifier of chronology, the term was originally meant to convey a historical-material change in the political status of a country: ‘after colonialism.’ But with the 1980s it became identified with a way of reading and interpretation, a theory and a methodology, that examines the nature of Euro-American nations’ conquest, domination and exploitation of countries and cultures in South America, Asia, Africa and regions like Canada and Australia. This domination mode of postcolonial inquiry tracks both historically (the period of European empires) and in the contemporary (neocolonialism). Postcolonialism is the academic-cultural component of the condition of postcoloniality. It represents a theoretical approach on the part of the formerly colonized, the subaltern and the historically oppressed, in literary-cultural studies informed by a particular political stance, using the prism of race and the historical context of colonialism, to analyze texts, even as it seeks to produce critical commentary that serves an act of cultural resistance to the domination of Euro-American epistemic and interpretive schemes.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

G. Sankar
Assistant Professor
Department of English
PSG College of Technology
Coimbatore 641 004
Tamilnadu
India
sankarliterature@gmail.com

S. P. Suresh Kumar
Head & Associate Professor
Department of English
PSG College of Technology
Coimbatore 641 004
Tamilnadu
India
sankarliterature@gmail.com
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