Racist Conrad. So what?

Achebe is right in highlighting certain aspects of Conrad's work that appear to be racially derogatory, but to call him "a thoroughgoing racist" obscures aspects of the work that aim to resist received conceptions of the colonial enterprise. Conrad never set out to subvert racial stereotypes, but to expose what many Europeans back home never knew about Africa and the violence inflicted upon its people, To achieve this polemic, humanizing the colonized is not a pre-requisite; Conrad only needed to dehumanize the colonizer. It is his depiction of the ironic reversal of the civilized becoming savage, of the divergence between reality and interpretation, which infuses the work with its timeless power. I think the racist strand within HD does not render Conrad's work complicit with colonialism. Rather, it underscores the pervasiveness of colonial discourse in his day; how Conrad, for all his progressiveness, was still unable to fully transcend the thinking of his time.

Another irony: Achebe's essay is now perennially read alongside Conrad's work, but this is possible primarily because of Achebe’s professorship at a top liberal American college. Franz Fanon himself was educated in Lyon, in the homeland of his colonizers. Perhaps this highlights the ambivalent and contradictory relationship between the colonized bourgeosis public intellectual and structures of knowledge production belonging to the colonizer, and how the former leverages upon the latter in a kind of neocolonial bootstrapping that only reinforces Western authority, like an extension of Gramscian hegemony.