“Uncouth sounds” of resistance: Conradian tropes and hybrid epistemologies in Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale

摘要

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.