Former slave Olaudah Equiano presented both a moral and an economic case for abolition, in the latter sounding a great deal like Adam Smith. Religious groups such as the Providence Society presented a fiery moral case based on their interpretation of the scripture. One of the most important questions surrounding the abolition of the slave trade is this one: why did it happen? Was it the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment or the new economic fields that were opening up in India, or in the textile mills of Manchester, providing alternatives to British entrepreneurs and investors? CLR James argues in his book The Black Jacobins that, despite all the soliloquies in Parliament on the "immorality" of the slave trade, only economic necessity that brought about abolition.
Upon first reading Aphra Behn's work Oroonoko, one might get the impression that this is an early example of antislavery literature that became so popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the short biography of Behn from the Norton Anthology of British Literature, we learn that Behn's story had a great impact on those who fought against the slave- trade. Although the horrors of the slave trade are clearly brought forth, I do not feel Behn was using these images towards the antislavery cause. I think it is more likely that the images were merely devices used in her travel narrative of Oroonoko. To see any negative view of the slave-trade, the reader must turn to the perspective of Oroonoko.
The author notes that “Huck Finn can at one level be a book about shackles of racial oppression that are in the novel’s course, twisted open and forced partly back into place at various levels of plot and narration” (30). Through the essay the author intends to show the link between Huck and Jim, black and white, and establish the view of the society from that time. The author points out the struggle for Huck and Jim to understand the world around them and each other due to the world that surrounds them. For example it is very hard for Huck to go against the norms of white society of his time. Huck is a poorly educated young white boy full of ignorance.
This journey takes Rutherford into an enterprising passage of horror and self-discovery. The Middle Passage and The Book of Negroes are two novels written by African-American scholars, as they both clearly depict the social and psychological conflicts that result from the invasion of a self-contained African society by the white man and his culture. Thus, in this paper, I argue that post-colonial theory is a useful tool to analyze the dynamics of colonization, both in Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage. In particular, I investigate the novels depiction of truth and its betrayal according to the process of colonization from the perspective of the colonizer, the perspective of the colonized and the process of decolonization. The first step to utilize post-colonial criticism is to understand the impact of colonization through the perspectives of the colonizers.
Despite stemming from fairly neutral root words, they were manipulated specifically to provoke and hurt.” (1) This label was also given as a way to dehumanise black Americans as it places them in an inferior category within society and establishes the superiority of white Americans over them. In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, there are several accounts of different characters in the novel with different examples of the value of human life. In this essay I will explore and closely analyse the value of human life as detailed in the novel. Right at the beginning of the novel we can see how demeaning Tom and Huck are towards the “nigger” Jim. Tom comes up with the plan “… to tie Jim to the tree for fun.” (Twain 6) after he falls asleep during his stake out, after hearing a noise which was Huck and Tom trying to escape the house.
Boldly described as a “fateful event in the history of fiction” (Watt: 365), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness delves into Imperialism in the 1890s, loosely based on his experiences travelling through the Congo into the ‘heart’ of Africa. This essay will explore Ian Watt’s essay ‘Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness’ in relation to the veracity of his definitions of impressionism and symbolism, and his application of the definitions to the text. It will compare these with other understandings of impression and symbolism, and against Conrad’s own opinions of the writing techniques. In Watt’s assessment of the nature of Heart of Darkness, he uses the establishment of the narrative frame to dissect the novella’s plot, and provide the grounds from which to begin his critical essay. The act of placing the ‘story within a story’ is categorised by Watt to be a symbolic act, and the content of the ‘inner kernel’ of the story displays impressionistic elements (350).
Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, published an essay entitled, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”, making the claim that Joseph Conrad did not earn a place in the Western literary canon due to his blatant racist views and discrimination towards African history and culture. Achebe believes that Heart of Darkness, “set[s] Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest” (Achebe). Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness portrays racist views of the African culture, as seen through the descriptions of Africa, the African slaves, and Marlow’s views of the Africans. Heart of Darkness starts off on the Thames River, with Marlow recalling his journey to the Congo at a much younger age. Conrad describes the Thames as he states, “The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after
Racism in the Heart of Darkness Many literary critics and authors have said Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is full of racism and discrimination. Chinua Achebe calls the book, “an offensive and deplorable book” (Achebe, 345), while commenting on Conrad and his character, Marlow’s, blatant racism. Was Conrad really such a racist? Granted, Heart of Darkness was published in Britain in 1899, a time when white men in Europe were still discovering black men in Africa. The society of the time told these men that black men and women were not equal to white men or women.
But when we proceed to analyse the ascent of the slave trade in Africa, it goes without notice that this slave trade was facilitated by the native ruling groups of Africa itself to such an extent, that it was commonly known as the “black trade”. Rediker (2007) goes on to exemplify this with a study of the Asante group in the Gold Coast region in around 1680. The Asante were skilled at war, and would not be sold into slavery, which led to them becoming reliable players and valuable partners to the Europeans in the slave trade. Therefore, this tumultuous saga of enslavement and
From the ancient Greeks to the present, Edward Said has write about the European culture partially defined itself in opposite way of the Orient. (Said 1-2) In the early17th century English attitudes toward non-whites were mostly shaped by the government's policies or by exotic stories brought back by travelers overseas. This is pronounced well by Edward Said who, in his book on “Orientalism”, emphasized the idea of western attraction by the orient as being “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes.” (Said 1) The term “Moor” was resulting from the name of the country Mauritania but was used to refer to Africans, for non-whites or Muslims of any origin. North and West Africans living in Elizabethan England were commonly singled out for their unusual dress, behavior and customs and were commonly referred to as devils or villains. The literary tradition of portraying "black-faced" men as wicked has encompassed a time span from the Middle Ages, through and beyond the sixteenth century (Hunter 1967: 142).