
Contents
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Empire's Elsewhere Empire's Elsewhere
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The Time Line of the Nineteenth Century: Racial Evolution and Imperial Degeneration The Time Line of the Nineteenth Century: Racial Evolution and Imperial Degeneration
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Freud, Fiction, and the Uncanny Freud, Fiction, and the Uncanny
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Conrad's Ghosts and Achebe's Arrow of God Conrad's Ghosts and Achebe's Arrow of God
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Fallen Nationalism in V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River Fallen Nationalism in V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River
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Changing the Canon: David Dabydeen's The Intended Changing the Canon: David Dabydeen's The Intended
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2 National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions: Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Postcolonial Novel
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Published:October 2009
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Abstract
This chapter explores the convergence of imperialism, nationalism, and psychoanalysis through a reading of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), a novella that shares with the Freudian uncanny an oscillating temporality which renders the present continuous with the past and the self coincident with the other. The convergence of these two fin-de-siècle fables of civilization and its discontents reveals the heart of the West, the soul of Europe expressed in two of its most powerful, most exported, subjectifying stories. But when explored in other places and other times, in conjunction with other narratives about the formation of society and self, their convergence exposes a more diffuse, polycentric, and differentiated zone. Conrad's discourse of British national imperialism is itself constantly invaded by the space and time of a global elsewhere; his literary descendants uncannily repeat this process in reverse, recasting England from its imperial peripheries. These rewritings of Heart of Darkness further describe the changing forms of both nations and novels, from the resistant realism of Achebe's portrait of a cultured and deeply historical precolonial Africa in Arrow of God (1964), to the mournfully introspective narration that marks Naipaul's nostalgia for a lost European imperialism in A Bend in the River (1979), to the narrative discontinuities through which Dabydeen chronicles a multiethnic, diasporic, and postimperial London in The Intended (1981).
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