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The Concept of Orientalist Writings With Special Reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India



Author(s)

Arivarasy Muthulingam

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DOI:10.17265/2328-2177/2016.07.004

University of Jaffna, Jaffna, Sri Lanka

This paper aims to analyse Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India from Orientalist perspective. The term “Orientalism” became a watermark with Edward Said as an intellectual term. According to Said, Orientalism generates a series of stereotypical dichotomy between the masculine “West” and the feminine “East”. Said’s project is to show how knowledge of Europe about the non-Europeans was part of the process of maintaining power over them. Both novels Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India deal with the socially and culturally subordinate groups regarding the definition of subjectivity and the production of knowledge. These novels produce its representation of the Orient in terms of unchangeable stereotypes and reductive categories. But from Orientalist view, in Heart of Darkness, Africa is personified in a way to resist against the subjugation of European countries. Forster in A Passage to India shows how colonialism creates a false illusion that the west is “self” and the East is “other”. Analytical and comparative methods are planned to be used. The qualitative methodology of the research will be carried out through texts, journals, articles and informal interviews. The objective is to pinpoint that both these novels are resistant readings against the imperial politics from Edward Said’s Orientalist perspective. Said confirms it as a strategy of resistance that makes the colonized natives on the very terrain of imperial language and discourse.

power, subjectivity, resistant, truth