This essay examines the theme of dehumanization across several landmark works of colonial and postcolonial literature and film. Drawing on Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the paper argues that European imperialism functioned as a cultural disease — stripping indigenous peoples of their humanity at both the individual and communal levels. The essay traces how Western powers dismantled tribal cohesion, imposed alien values, and ultimately transformed the way colonized peoples perceived themselves, illustrating the psychological and sociological dimensions of colonial dehumanization alongside its more visible material consequences.
Historical literature is filled with examples of pre- and post-colonialist paradigms. Within each of these models, however, there is a part of a larger story that can only be understood in the broader view of the historical process. One of the grand themes that helps us navigate that process is the dehumanization of the individual. For reasons that seem deeply ingrained in human psychology, people have repeatedly reduced others to something less than human in order to subjugate them economically, intellectually, or culturally. We might even think of the imperialism practiced by European powers as a dehumanization of culture and society — one that began at the micro level and evolved into the macro.
This dehumanization was particularly exemplified by the manner in which indigenous cultures were decimated, how families were torn apart and scattered across empires, and the degree to which colonizers expected their values to be adopted by everyone they encountered.
Chinua Achebe is one author who deals directly with this subject. The title of Things Fall Apart is not only appropriate for a study examining the juxtaposition of historical forces on culture — it is precisely accurate in describing how, like a domino effect, things collapse when European culture meets a traditional African one. In Things Fall Apart, dehumanization occurs almost like a disease — a virus passed from the colonizers to the indigenous people. Not only did the English regard Africans as something less than human, degrading their culture and religion; over time, Western ideals changed the way Africans viewed themselves and their tribal communities.
The central character, Okonkwo, finds that the interference of missionaries and English "entrepreneurs" has disrupted the tribe beyond repair. The novel captures this collapse in a single devastating passage: "The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart" (Achebe, Chapter 20).
In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written at the end of the nineteenth century when Britain stood as the world's greatest power, Africa is portrayed as a continent filled with disease and contagion. Yet the theme of contagion extends beyond the biological — it is psychological and sociological as well. A parallel symbolic register appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," in which the Puritan belief in humanity's inherent depravity is rendered through similar imagery of darkness and wilderness: "The road grew wilder and drearier… leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil" (Hawthorne, 23).
In Heart of Darkness, it is clear from the outset that Marlow's journey into the "bowels" of Africa is neither positive nor optimistic. "Mad terror scattered them [the natives], men, women, and children, through the bush, and they had never returned" (Conrad, 21). It is in the description of Marlow's world as the boat turns back toward civilization that Conrad most powerfully conveys what the continent — or rather, what empire itself — has done:
"The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtz's life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time" (Conrad, 188).
"Film extends Conrad's colonial critique to Vietnam War"
Across these works, dehumanization emerges not as an incidental byproduct of colonialism but as its defining mechanism — a process that corrupted colonizer and colonized alike. From Okonkwo's shattered clan in Achebe's Nigeria, to Kurtz's moral dissolution in Conrad's Congo, to the sensory brutality of Coppola's Vietnam, each work traces the same arc: empire does not merely conquer territory, it dismantles the human beings it encounters, leaving fragmentation and darkness in its wake.
You’re 77% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 1 section.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.