Uncouth sounds of resistance : Conradian tropes and hybrid epistemologies in Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale
(2008) Journal of Postcolonial Writing — Vol. 44, n° 4, p. 415-425 (2008)
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- Published a century after Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) raises the question of how interpretations of alterity and hybridity have developed. Reading Melville’s provocative text as a creative response to Conrad’s portrayal of the “uncouth sounds” of babbling Africans, I investigate how Melville both complicates Conrad’s tale of imperial incursions and reverses the Conradian journey into mysterious darkness, revealing a visionary approach reminiscent of Wilson Harris’s cross‐cultural imagination. Finally, I argue that Melville challenges both Conrad’s vision of the site of darkness as well as recent critical interpretations of hybridity.
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Bragard, V. (2008). Uncouth sounds of resistance : Conradian tropes and hybrid epistemologies in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 44(4), 415-425. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449850802410556 (Original work published 2008)