ABSTRACT
In December 1993, a newly made-for-cable television movie of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was aired on Home Box Office, ostensibly because this novel, first published in 1899, is a “classic” of the English literary canon and presumably one which deals with “universal” themes. Miller sees this novel as a continuation of the classical tradition in European literature and art, for example, in France, ranging from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Sade and Celine. Perhaps needless to say, V. S. Naipaul represents the epitome of contemporary colonialist discourse (Achebe calls him “this modern Conrad,” 1989:28) parroted by an ex-colonial subject, and his critical writing is an excellent example of subaltern “colonialist criticism.” And the “place” is, of course, both specific in time and space: the remote past, and in “savage” Africa. But the construction of a mythical past/or Africa from, as it were, an external consciousness, is also evident in anthropology.
