Heart of Darkness has been criticized as racist basically for it title where the word ‘darkness’ connotes the dark complexion and barbarity of Africans.
Explanation:
Heart of Darkness was critically acclaimed by all white scholars and critics as a great psychological novel marking the triumph of a white man to the interior darkness of his heart. But all tables were turned when African novelist Chinua Achebe portrayed an entirely different meaning to the novel by the application of Jacques Derrida’s theory of Deconstruction.
The same theory holds true for a re-reading of E.M Forster’s novel ‘A Passage to India’. Achebe pointed out that the word darkness in the title signified the darkness in the complexion of Africans and how the continent was named the ‘dark continent’ by its white discoverer David Livingstone.
Not that it was discovered late that Africa was called dark but to the white man it was the land of barbarians. The light of civilization hadn’t dawned on it so it was dark. This explanation confirms the novel as racist.