Reisen durch Raum und Zeit : Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness und die Vernetzung der Welt um 1900

Abstract

It is a truism among historians, sociologists, and anthropologists that, in the West, the advent of modern technologies of travel and communication led to an overcoming of distance and even a gradual annihilation of space and time . Whereas turn-of-the-century geographers like George R. Parkin and H. J. Mackinder suggest that this is also true for much of the non-Western world, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness dramatizes the Congo region as an other space that, although no longer white on the map, resists European attempts at empire-building and economic-technological expansion. Conrad's work shows that the perception of distance depends not only on the actual advances in travel and communication technologies, but also and perhaps more importantly on the construction of imaginative geographies . Around 1900, Central Africa was both spatially and temporarily distanced; it represented a different state of cultural development a chronotope not (yet) part of the global network.