Enlightenment and the ‘heart of darkness’: (neo)imperialism in the Congo, and elsewhere

Abstract

This article approaches the current state of qualitative inquiry by constructing an allegory of neo‐imperialism. It is based substantively on a history and contemporary anthro‐politics of the Congo and in particular the city of Kisangani; metaphorically on Conrad’s unsettling deployment of that same place as ‘the heart of darkness’; and ironically on homologies between certain kinds of quantitative (and sometimes qualitative) inquiry that currently seek to colonize and civilize unruly educational discourses. Overall it draws on postmodernist/poststructuralist theoretical and narrative strategies, and on philosophies of difference, in order to explore novel ways of thinking and telling the Other to the Same.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the following MMU colleagues for advice, criticism, suggestions and help: Jo Frankham, Maggie MacLure, Cathie Pearce, Matthew Pearson, Heather Piper. Thanks are also offered to two anonymous reviewers, and to Johannes Fabian for permission to reproduce the paintings of Tshibumba.

Notes

1. The two‐volume account of Stanley’s precolonial activities in the Congo region was an account of empire, of course, but much more an act of empire: ‘the words of enterprise and of action, it is hoped, will move many a man out of the 325,000,000 of Europe to be up and doing’ (1884/1885, vol. 1, p. viii).

2. Fabian identifies ‘memory work’ as ‘work carried out as remembering and forgetting’ (Fabian, 2003, p. 490), drawing also on his study of Tshibumba, the Zairean street artist whose pictorial history of Zaire from Portuguese incursion to the 1980s featured in his remarkable Remembering the present (1996; Stronach et al., 2007). In ‘postmodern’ Kisangani, the memorialization of the modern ceases.

3. One reviewer wanted the racist nature of Conrad’s classic to be foregrounded, offering as a model Davis’s recent recanting concerning its use (2006). But the neo‐imperialism allegorized here would regard such a reduction of the debate to a consideration of the rights and wrongs of any canonical entry as another instance of the Letter to the Intended going astray (see Station 7). A racist text in a US college curriculum is one thing, an ongoing genocide another. Of course, it is the point of this piece that they are allegorically related, that the ambiguities in Conrad’s text address a chasm and provoke a certain mimesis of relation, but a resolution that ‘politically corrects’ a canon ignores a myriad of other homologies that sustain the oppressive relation. The ‘heart of darkness’ is not corrected by such excisions, as I take Conrad to have also implied.

4. See Chitnis et al. (2000). They report but do not support that claim of origins.

5. The Rwandan genocide amounted to between half a million and a million people. It was belatedly recognized as such, though still dominated in Western public consciousness by similar though far less substantial events in the former Yugoslavia. The UK press expressed particular horror that genocide could happen in Europe. Yet Europe has a strong claim to be both the home and heart of genocide from the fifteenth to the twenty‐first century (Lindquist, 1997).