Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad: defense of a colonialist utopia or criticism of the imperial system of his time?

Abstract

When we think about the confrontation between the dominated object and its relationship with the colonizer, especially in the nineteenth century, we find in the novel by Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness, a interesting literary corpus, in which this paper will concentrate the analysis. If we agree with the statement of Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, that the East is created from the West, the Conrad’s book demonstrate how this creation occurs when this civilizing process is brutal and baffling. The review proposal in this article is not define concepts as nation, culture or social identity, using a literary text. What we propose is a dialogue between the analysis that the post-colonial theorist Edward Said about the process of colonization and a literary representation, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, that describes the process known as colonization.