Caryl Phillips's "Heartland" and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: Revisiting Fear - An Intertextual Approach

This article aims at an intertextual reading that brings together Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Caryl Phillips's "Heartland," the opening section of Higher Ground. It analyzes major aspects that the texts obviously share such as the terror that binds the colonizer and the colonized under the banner of colonialism in Africa. Yet, one of the focal issues of this article is to show that Caryl Phillips goes beyond the recuperation of Conradian types and situations to explore features and attitudes that have been ignored in Heart of Darkness in particular and in colonial writing in general. His work gestures towards a wider and sometimes a corrective understanding of colonial reality and colonial writing.