Non-Western World Lit.
Lecture #1
The Tempest
Heart of Darkness
Chapter 1 of Loomba
The Tempest
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Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, was
overthrown, years ago, by his brother and
the King of Naples. These two stranded
him on a deserted island, with his only
progeny, Miranda. The play is about how
Prospero gets his revenge. But, it’s also
about how Miranda and Prospero interact
with the “natives,” those who inhabit the
island before them.
The Tempest
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Prospero and Miranda find two beings on the island
when they land, both of whom Prospero very quickly
enslaves. One is Ariel, a spirit, whose powers Prospero
uses throughout the play. The other is Caliban, an
indigenous inhabitant of the island, who initially
embraced Prospero and Miranda, showed them where
they could find food and water, helped them to establish
themselves, but then turned bitter when he realized their
disdain for him, their distaste for his appearance and
their dismissal of him because of the differences in their
“knowledges.”
(The island and their appearance 25-26, Prospero’s view
of things, 26, Miranda’s view of things 26, Caliban, again
26-27)
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Marlow and his friends sit on the deck of a ship docked
in the mouth of the Thames and Marlow tells the story of
his trip to Africa.
 One of the most famous quotes from the novel is this
one:
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the
taking it away from those who have a different
complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not
a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What
redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it, not
a sentimental pretence but an idea, and an unselfish
belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow
down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . .”
What do you think Marlow could intend by this “idea” ?
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Heart of Darkness
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Marlow describes how, as a young man, he decides that
he needs to see Africa, so he gets his aunt who has
connections in Belgium, to find him a commission. His
task is to steam down the Congo River to find Kurtz, an
agent for the company who has been very successful in
sending back ivory, but who has suddenly stopped.
Marlow encounters all kinds of bizarre behavior on his
way to Kurtz: inefficient officers of the company, people
who hold to westernized patterns of behavior in spite of
circumstances that make them untenable, dying natives,
abuse. At the end of his trip, he finds Kurtz, who has
“gone native.” He’s become the god-ruler of a group of
natives, setting himself up as deity-king. He’s quite ill,
and eventually dies.
Heart of Darkness
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Before he dies, though, he leaves Marlow with two
things. One is a treatise on the Suppression of Savage
Customs. In this treatise, Kurtz surmises that the
natives must look on whites as supernatural beings. He
continues, “By the simple exercise of our will we can
exert a power for good practically unbounded.” The
narrator is carried away by the beauty of Kurtz’s words,
his “burning, noble words. The manuscript concludes
with a postscript in Kurtz’s handwriting: “Exterminate all
the brutes!”
How does this connect with that famous line we looked
at earlier?
Heart of Darkness
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The second thing Kurtz leaves Marlow are some
haunting final words, “The horror, the horror.” We
discover that Kurtz participated in cannibalistic rites, that
he had “enemy natives beheaded and stuck their heads
on poles outside of his home base, that he had a native
lover. One critic wonders about the meaning of Kurtz’s
last words:
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Is Kurtz reforming in death and claiming that colonialism and the
exploitation accompanying it is horrible?
Or is he horrified at his own actions, his own descent into
savagism?
Or is he horrified at how his actions will be received back at
home?
Heart of Darkness
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At the end of the story, Marlow goes to meet Kurtz’s
“intended.” She asks him what Kurtz’s last words were
and Marlow can’t tell her; he lies and says that his last
word was her name.
To justify his lie, he writes, “It would have been to dark
– too dark altogether [to tell her the truth].”
How does this connect to that famous quote we looked
at in the beginning?
One of the critical questions critics ask of the novel is
what is the Heart of Darkness?

The heart of man, the heart of Africa, the evil of colonization?
Your Comments on the Text

Everybody read or summarize some part
of your response.
Main Points of Loomba Reading
1-19 Defining the Terms
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No matter what else happened in terms of
settlement or trade or war or restructuring
of cultural and economic conditions, all
types of colonialist movements produced
an economic imbalance in favor of the
colonizing nation. This imbalance was the
“midwife that assisted at the birth of
European capitalism.”
Two definitions of
Imperialism and Colonialism
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Temporal:
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Colonialism: take over of territory, appropriation of material
resources, exploitation of labor and interference with cultural
and political structures.
Imperialism: the globalization of colonialism as an economic
and/or political system
Spatial:
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Imperialism: the origination of ideas from the metropolis, the
process leading to domination and control.
Colonialism: the result of the implementation of these ideas in
the colonies.
This makes sense of terms like “American Imperialism – because
you don’t need actual colonies to practice imperialist moves.
Postcolonialism – Some problems
with the “POST”
1.
2.
Is any country that has been colonized ever
POST colonial? Can a country escape the
legacy of colonialism?
How do we define POST temporally? Or, when
does POSTcolonialism begin? With the ending
of the American Revolution in 1776? With the
ending of the major liberation movements in
Africa in the 1970’s? Does current American,
Korean, Soviet, etc. imperialism, mean that
we’re still in a colonial age, not a postcolonial
one?
Problems of heterogeneous POSTs
1.
2.
3.
How does postcolonial South African independence
and the establishment of a white government differ
from postcolonial Kenyan independence and the
overthrow of a white government by indigenous
rebellion?
How is the postcolonial situation different in South
America and the Caribbean, where different racial and
ethnic populations “mixed,” than it is in Liberia, where
liberated American slaves began settling in 1822,
mixing with indigenous people and immigrants to
Liberia from other African countries?
How is a global term like postcolonialism supposed to
work to define both the white Canadian relationship to
the “mother country,” and the Indian outcasts’
relationship to that same “mother country?”
A Solution
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Perhaps the best way to define
postcolonial is not by focusing on the
POST, but by focusing on the relationship
between the colonized and the colonizer,
perhaps postcolonialism should be defined
as the struggle between the colonizer and
the colonized or as the struggle between
imperialist metropolitan centers and the
dominated or exploited outposts.
Some problems, too, with
Pre-colonial
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What does pre-colonial mean? Does it
mean untainted by colonial influences? Is
it possible to return to such a past? Why
are romanticizing and idealizing
tendencies in this direction dangerous?
Problems with the Pre-Colonial
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All societies change and always have. To focus on the
PRE, to speak of the possibility of the recovery of a precolonial state is simplify and essentialize in way that
negates and erases the complicated nature of precolonial societies. It implies that they wouldn’t have
evolved, wouldn’t have “modernized” in some way if left
untouched by the “civilized” West.
It is also possible to over simplify the definition of precolonial by focusing on COLONIAL. To say that cultures
can never be the same after they have been colonized,
to say that they can now only be defined in terms of the
colonial or from the perspective of the colonizer, erases
long and complex histories of places and people before
colonial incursions.
What a good postcolonial thinker
does well . . .
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The trick or key to being a postcolonial
scholar is to hold the generalizing terms of
theory in mind at the same time, and with
equal weight, as she or he holds the
particulars of each nation/peoples’
circumstances in mind.
Neither the theory nor the particular story
should subsume the other. We need both
to enable us to come to an understanding.
Theory/Practice
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When we apply the idea or the theory of oppression to
two very different situations, say the situation of an
African American woman from the U.S. and an African
woman living in Sudan today (who is subject to attack
and molestation by her Muslim neighbors), we get
similar theoretical stories of diasporic displacement,
discrimination and sexual abuse. However, the African
American is speaking as a citizen of one of the most
powerful countries in the world, from which she gains
many benefits in terms of education, social programs, a
fairly well-developed justice system, etc., whereas, the
African woman is faced with starvation, no systemic
enforced legal due process, little or no formal education,
no social programs or relief from government
intervention.
Postcolonial Methodology
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Theoretically, they tell the same story. In
terms of the particulars, however, very
little looks the same. Balancing the
multiplicity of stories with the unifying
nature of theoretical explanations is the
key to being a good postcolonial scholar.