So now that the dust has settled, is it racist?

>>9318751
no. conrad parodied colonialism. it's just that daft wogs like achebe are too stupid to understand.

The black guy on the boat who got hit by a spear was killed by other blacks so it's not racist

>>9318751
Races are just a social construct it's not possible to be racist.

didn't we just have this thread?

The only problem with Heart of Darkness is that it's now foundational to the literary canon of postcolonial critique and some people are (somewhat justifiably) pissed that the piece in question was written by and about a European man. There aren't even any indigenous characters of note, just some grotesque caricatures of pidgin speak; it's easy to imagine the Africans as part of the setpiece, since the book makes them so morbidly unintelligible to the (presumably Western) reader.

I think it's kind of unreasonable to use this to attack Heart of Darkness though, since Conrad was well ahead of his time in terms of his critiques of colonialism. His presentation isn't normative in this case, it's observational. There's really no escaping that, and yet it's probably amongst the least racist works to come out of 19th century Europe since it at least has the moral courage to call out the absurd inhumanity of contemporary imperialism.

I think the only meaningful critique I've seen with regards to Conrad's racial consciousness is that he seems more interested in the effect that the horrors of colonialism have on the perpetrators than on the victims - which doesn't detract from the book's worth, but does support those who question whether it should be centralized in discussion to the degree that it is.

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>>9318887
this is a good post.

>>9318851
/lit/ is really just the same 4 threads with small variation.