The Anti-conquest of Space/Time in Graham Greene’s Africa

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore via a postcolonial lens Graham Greene’s peculiar handling of space-time in Journey without Maps, a travel account of his trek through Liberia, and his African novel The Heart of the Matter, set during WWII in Sierra Leone. The attempt to cut across generic borders to examine the meanders of discourse draws upon David Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire, where various tropes are held up for critical scrutiny as focal mediators of colonial perspectives on other cultures. However, the overriding argument is informed by Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the anti-conquest which suggests that even empathetic attitudes toward Africa can be underwritten by European, white, male privilege. Of particular interest is Greene’s honest vision coupled with the tenacity of Africanist discourse that resurfaces as a transposition of physical movement across foreign lands into a journey through the library to encode a Western existentialist angst à la Conrad. A further displacement involves the incorporation of an idealized African space-time into a psychic drama of the individual and collective Western self. The ultimate effect of these double gestures is that Graham Greene assumes the paradoxical posture of the liberal colonizer.