An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Excerpt)
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Chinua Achebe first delivered this critique in the Second Chancellor’s Lecture at the University of Massachusetts on February 18, 1975. It was later published in the Massachusetts Review in 1977 and reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness (1988).
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Turning the Tide for African Literary Criticism: Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” as a Founding Text of Africana Studies
- First Online: 10 December 2020
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- Page Laws 5
Part of the book series: African Histories and Modernities ((AHAM))
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This chapter considers the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Achebe’s critical essay “An Image of Africa,” including issues of fairness toward Conrad, Achebe, and others, plus ways that Achebe’s essay informs the teaching of both authors today, in a debate that has carried forward.
Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem … Poets’ misinterpretations of poems are more drastic than critics’ misinterpretation or criticism, but this is only a difference in degree and not all in kind. There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry. Critics are more or less valuable than other critics only (precisely) as poets are more or less valuable than other poets. For just as a poet must be found by the opening in a precursor poet, so must the critic. The difference is that a critic has more parents. His precursors are poets and critics. —Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence , 1973 Conrad was a thorough-going racist. — Chinua Achebe , “An Image of Africa ,” 1978
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Laws, P. (2021). Turning the Tide for African Literary Criticism: Achebe’s “An Image of Africa” as a Founding Text of Africana Studies. In: Baloubi, D., Pinkston, C.R. (eds) Celebrating the 60th Anniversary of 'Things Fall Apart'. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50797-8_13
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Published : 10 December 2020
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- DOI: 10.1353/MAR.2016.0003
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An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
- Chinua Achebe
- Published 26 March 2016
- Art, History
- The Massachusetts Review
277 Citations
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Analysis Of “An Image Of Africa” Written By Chinua Achebe
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