Creating otherness and the conquer of land

a comparison between Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha, and Heart of darkness, by Joseph Conrad

Abstract

Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha, and Heart of darkness, by Joseph Conrad, were both books published in the same year, in a political and intellectual context marked by the European imperialism and the scientific racism. This paper aims to make a comparison between the two literary works, based on a decolonial point of view. Three main topics are approached: first, how in both narratives an image of a strange world inhabited by totally different people is projected to the land; second, how the two authors describe a geographical journey in terms of a time travel, creating the idea of prehistorical groups of people whose habits needed to be supplanted; third, how both writers elaborate their narratives from very different perspectives: while in Conrad there is a fictive character who narrates the story, in Euclides da Cunha there is the image of an invisible scribe who supposedly transmits history from a neutral and scientific point of view.