SOURCE: Ogede, Ode S. “Phantoms Mistaken for a Human Face: Race and the Construction of the African Woman's Identity in Joseph's Conrad's Heart of Darkness.” The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders (1999): 127-38.

In the following essay, Ogede argues that Conrad's representation of African women in Heart of Darkness perpetuates standard European myths about Africa.

“A study of the so-called arbitrariness of the sign, of the ways in which concepts divide reality arbitrarily, and of the relation between a sign, such as blackness, and its referent, such as absence,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written, “can help us to engage in more sophisticated readings of black texts. But it can also help to explain the figuration of blackness in Western texts” (Black Literature and Literary Theory 7). The principle set forth by Gates in this excerpt can be usefully applied to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness...