Heart of Darkness, by Polish author Joseph Conrad, was written in a period of great imperial expansion, when unrelenting and undeterred eurocentricity was the dominant ideology. Conrad uses many different techniques to both challenge and reinforce this underlying view of white superiority. The Europeans saw themselves as superior due to their advanced technology and their religion, which, naturally, was the 'only' religion used by 'civilised people'.
             Although it is true that Conrad naturalises and centres many ideologies of the late nineteenth century, he essentially attacks the exploitation of Africans inflicted by the European colonisers, challenging and criticising imperialist practices and their negative effects upon Africa and its people. Conrad achieves this by exposing the colonisers sinister and ulterior motives of economic gain behind the moral facade of bringing 'light' [civilisation] to the 'Dark Continent. By doing this, he rejects the traditional symbolic associations of the dichotomous light and dark imagery with 'civilisation' and 'savagery'. This presents to the reader imagery of death and waste, which was brought forth by European imperialist ventures, and the representations of Africans and Africa as the victims of the "merry dance of death and trade" (p.17).
             Heart of Darkness condemns the idea of economic exploitation of Africa and Africans by representing the colonialist experience in terms of death and decay. For example, the text depicts the African setting in which the Europeans exist as "a scene of inhabited devastation" (p.19). This is further reinforced by the representation of the cart as "dead as the carcass of some animal" (p.19) and the "objectless blasting [which] was the only work going on" (p.19). By defining the colonisers in Africa in terms of impotence, frustration of male energy and moral decay, Conrad distances the text from the naturalised...