颠覆“黑暗的中心”:《瓦解》对非洲风景的重构

Subverting“Heart of Darkness”:Reconstruction of the African Landscape in Things Fall Apart

对于地点和风景的建构是殖民话语强加并维持殖民统治的重要策略,地点和风景描写是殖民再现的手段,在殖民话语中非洲被建构为“黑暗的中心”,其象征意义甚至取代了其真实存在。重新描绘风景并赋予其新的想象空间是后殖民作家的反抗策略之一。阿契贝的《瓦解》描绘了伊博族田园生活美景,颠覆了康拉德及其欧洲文学传统所建构的“黑暗的中心”,促使人们反思景物描写中蕴含的种族主义和殖民主义意识形态。

The construction of places and landscapes in colonial discourse is an important strategy to impose and maintain the colonial control.The portrayal of places and landscapes is employed as a technique of colonial representation.In colonial discourses,Africa is constructed as“the heart of darkness”,whose symbolic meaning even overshadows its physical existence.Redrawing the landscape and giving it a new space for imagination is a strategy of resistance adopted by post-colonial writers.Achebe’s Things Fall Apart depicts the idyllic life of the Igbo people,which deconstructs“the heart of darkness”constructed by Conrad and the European literary tradition of which he is a part and provokes readers into thinking about the racial and colonial ideology reflected in landscape portrayal.