THE CONCEPT OF “RACE”

According to the definition of the word in The American Heritage Dictionary of

the English Language, “race” means (among other things): “1. A local geographic or
global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically
transmitted physical characteristics. 2. A group of people united or classified together on
the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution: the German race. 3.
A genealogical line; a lineage. 4. Humans considered as a group.” The editors also added
a rather long usage note, whose concluding sentence casts doubt on the first meaning of
the word: “many cultural anthropologists now consider race to be more a social or mental
construct than an objective biological fact.” (“race”)
By contrast, the 1979 edition of Collins English Dictionary of the English
Language gives a much more straightforward and “biological” explanation of race: “a
group of people of common ancestry, distinguished from others by physical
characteristics, such as hair type, colour of the eyes and skin, stature etc. Principal races
are Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid.” (“race”)
If we approach race as a special kind of word, a cultural concept, a more adequate
way to define it would probably be to say that it is a mode of classification of human
beings on the basis of physical attributes or perceived bodily distinctions. Like all
identity-focused concepts, race relies on the binary opposition Self/Other or us vs. them,
with all their implied asymmetric relations. However, unlike localized or caste-based
systems (e.g. the distinction between Hellenes and Barbarians for the classical Greeks or
the caste system in Southeast Asia), race is a global framework because it applied to the
entire human population. It is essentialized, in the sense that it was perceived as natural,
real, unquestionable. Furthermore, its categories involve ranking, which means there is
an assumed hierarchy among different races; thus, the concept reinforces inequality
(Barnard and Spencer 462).
Ingrained within the semantic field of race, and the most problematic aspect of
the concept, lies the ideological formation of racism. Here is one of its many possible
definitions: “The belief that physical differences in turn validate the attribution of
additional characteristics which are not simply physical but denote the existence of, for
example, a determinate set of abilities, propensities or forms of behaviour, is associated
with the attitude of racism” (Edgar and Sedgwick 324)

Brief historical account of the concept

The concept appeared after the Europeans’ increasingly frequent and prolonged
contact with other populations, mainly as a result of their global expansion between the
15th and 18th centuries. Slavery and European ethnocentrism decidedly contributed to the
emergence of race as a concept.
The Enlightenment “rationalized” race, turning it into a purportedly natural and
scientific system of categorization. In 1795, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach identified five
human races: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan. Great
representatives of late Enlightenment such as Hegel and Thomas Jefferson even argued
for the innate intellectual, artistic, and ethical inferiority of non-Caucasian, especially
Africans (see Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion and Jefferson’s comments on the literary
achievements of African American woman poet Phillis Wheatley). The effort to rank the
categories of race really took off in the first half of the nineteenth century. The most
notorious example is Samuel Morton’s widely popularized “demonstration” of the
superiority of the Whites because of their allegedly larger brain size.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the semantic field of race also overlapped
with those of nation and ethnicity, thence the second meaning in the American Heritage
Dictionary entry. The concepts of race and nation in particular imbued each other with
their meanings partly because of the rise of nationalism, which essentialized nation and
sought to anchor it in the “natural” order that seemed to govern the idea of race. Thus,
phrases such as “English race”, “British race”, “Anglo-Saxon race”, and (toward the end
of the nineteenth century, after the U.S. had overtaken Britain as the most industrialized
nation in the world), even “Anglo-American race” entered the common usage.
The twentieth century witnessed the most tragic consequences of racist sentiments
but also the attack on the concept’s essentialist underpinnings and its involvement with
the reinforcement of inequality among human beings. From the 1950s onwards, race has
become an important analytical concept in the discourse of cultural criticism (see the
works of Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, David Hollinger, Etienne Balibar, and
Paul Gilroy among many others).
As for its present-day status, race appears to have retained some of its
classificatory function, as it is still in use by government institutions throughout the
English-speaking world; we are witnessing, however, a proliferation of races in “an
attempt to arrive at non-discriminatory descriptive categories for governmental purposes”
(Hartley 194). Cultural theorists and anthropologists seem to be divided on the relevance
of race. Some (like Paul Gilroy and Walter Benn Michaels) have projected a sort of
postracial humanism, while others (Balibar) identify the current practice of dismissing
race as a “neoracist” strategy to do away with a biological concept only to insist on the
constitutive role of “culture” for ethnic identification and classification. In the words of a
contemporary Asian American critic, we need to acquire “an understanding of race’s
material and historical relevance before its identitarian implications can be phased out”
(Li 116).
In conclusion, like all other concepts, race is constantly under reconstruction. Its
categories and its assumptions are reproduced in language, discourses, images, and other
cultural practices.

Representations of “race” in Heart of Darkness

A literary text may of course represent the concept of race, but this is not to say
that the word as such must feature in the text at all. What matters is the semantic field of
the concept, a rather loose category, admittedly, but easily identifiable by its constitutive
elements. In the case of race, besides the featuring of interracial contacts and relations in
the setting, the narrator’s comments or a character’s thoughts and attitudes, the writer’s
tone, instances of irony, and certain symbols may concur in disclosing an understanding
of race, of its premises, assumptions, and associated stereotypes. Furthermore, it might
often be that the semantic field of a concept is not revealed independently, but in its
overlapping with the meanings of one or several other concepts.
In Conrad’s novel, the word appears only once, in the anonymous narrator’s self-
gratulatory recount of the glorious fate of the British Empire: “The old river …, after ages
of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity
of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth” (32). Here, race is virtually
synonymous with nation, and the Thames could be interpreted as a symbol of national
identity and empire. But there are of course other representations of race in the novel. For
example, in just one sentence mouthed by Marlowe, Conrad represents the marriage
between two concepts: empire and race as well as the concurrence of their associated
ideological formations, imperialism and racism: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly
means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter
noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (34). Its blunt
pragmatism notwithstanding, this statement encapsulates the key constituents of the
semantic field of race at the end of the nineteenth century: classification of humans based
on inherited physical characteristics, us/them dichotomy and, inferred also from the
slightly derogatory tone, unequal power relations between two distinct racial groups.
The first encounter with Africans at the Company’s station (see part 1, pt. 4 in the
Study Questions) also features the overlapping of race and (colonial) empire: the six
black prisoners are not enemies, but “criminals” under the law of empire, which is for
them (according to Marlowe) nothing more than “an insoluble mystery from the sea”
(43). Here, the representation of racial difference seems to point to an abysmal cultural
misunderstanding and to the utter impossibility of dialog, and, consequently, to the
futility of the colonialist project. Unfortunately, this representation of racial difference is
not predicated on mutuality (the two races are not partners in mutual misunderstanding),
but on the Eurocentric assumption that the African “primitives” are not only eons away
from the “civilized” white people, but also completely subdued by the Europeans’ power.
On the other hand, the acculturated black guardian awakens feelings of disgust at both his
eagerness to conform with the petty role the white authorities assigned to him and his
presumptuousness in taking Marlowe for a “partner” in his effort to enforce the rulers’
law.
The other Africans at the Company’s station, i.e. those who toil as slaves for the
Europeans, are images of death, waste, and exhaustion, consistent with the first glimpses
of decaying machinery (the boiler “willowing” in the grass, the capsized railway-truck
etc.). For all the feeble sympathy the young man with the white worsted around his neck
appears to awaken in him, for Marlowe, he does not seem to amount to something more
than a piece of the setting, barely human, barely animate to boot.
Later on in the novel, the representations of race feature the Africans not as
inhuman, but as worlds apart from the more advanced prototype of European men,
Marlowe, Kurtz, and all who belong to “the gang of virtue”. The black men’s humanity,
itself the object of a horrific realization, is only acknowledged through the primeval and
dark connection/kinship of these superior specimens of the white race with the primitive,
savage Africans. Similarly, the portrayal of the cannibals aboard the steamship, although
clearly a positive one, in comparison with that of the manager and the pilgrims, does little
to challenge the unequal power relations that underlay the meaning of race in the period
in which Conrad wrote his masterpiece. Even the helmsman, the only African for whom
Marlowe seems to have felt some attachment, is missed not as a friend, but as “an
instrument”. The only reason for Marlowe’s belated appreciation is that “he had done
something, he had steered” (78). In other words, despite all his deficiencies, the
helmsman is redeemed in Marlowe’s eyes generally because he participated in the work-
focused, work-revering logic of European civilization (the word “work” plays an
important part in the economy of the text), and specifically because he acted (albeit from
a subordinate position) on the only meaningful endeavor, the only one sanctioned by the
ethos of white civilization (the “sacred fire”, the “idea”), i.e. the search and rescue of
Kurtz from the heart of darkness. Also significantly, the other reason for which the
helmsman has confessedly remained lodged in Marlowe’s memory is the expression on
his face when he received his fatal wound, a look of “intimate profundity” that the white
man perceived as “a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment” (79).
We can see now that Conrad’s racial paradigm does not simply juxtapose white
and black, but it complicates the narrative’s representation of race by introducing
distinctions among classes of individuals within the same racial group. Thus, if we take
the pilgrims, the manager, and their ilk as the point of reference, all the Africans in the
story with the exception of “the reclaimed” (the guard from the Company’s station and
the manager’s insolent servant) appear in a positive, albeit not quite sympathetic, light.
However, this narrative is emphatically concerned with absolutes, and, in pitting western
values and ideals as embodied by men like Kurtz and Marlowe against the essence of
primordial darkness, the black (and silenced) characters become little more than elements
of setting in a drama of unshared humanity.

WORKS CITED
Barnard, Alan and Jonathan Spencer, eds. Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural
Anthropology. London: Routledge, 1996.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Stories. Gene M. Moore ed. Hertfordshire,
UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1999.
Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick. Key Concepts in Cultural Theory. London:
Routledge, 1999.
Hartley, John. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies. The Key Concepts. Third
edition. London: Routledge, 2002.
Li, David Leiwei. “On Ascriptive and Acquisitional Americanness. The Accidental Asian
and the Illogic of Assimilation”. Contemporary Literature 45 (2004): 106-134.
“race”. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Fourth Edition
(2000).
“race”. Collins English Dictionary (1979).