SOURCE: Hampson, Robert. “‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘The Speech that Cannot be Silenced’.” English 29, no. 163 (spring 1990): 15-32.

In the following essay, Hampson investigates the role of racism in Heart of Darkness.

James Clifford, in an insightful essay on Conrad and Malinowski, at one point observes:

It would be interesting to analyze systematically how, out of the heteroglot encounters of fieldwork, ethnographers construct texts whose prevailing language comes to override, represent, or translate other languages.¹

As Clifford notes, behind this observation lies Talal Asad's conception of ‘a persistent, structured inequality of languages’ within the process of ‘cultural translation’. In Asad's own words:

The anthropological enterprise of cultural translation may be vitiated by the fact that there are asymmetrical tendencies and pressures in the languages of dominated and dominant societies.²

Elsewhere in the same essay, Clifford refers, in passing, to ‘the many complexities in the staging and valuing of different...