Colonial Dissonance and the ‘Subaltern Voice’: A Postcolonial Re-reading of Heart of Darkness through Spivak and Festinger

This paper offers a postcolonial re-examination of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness through the intersecting critical lenses of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. It interrogates the colonial epistemology that governs Marlow’s narrative and highlights the deep psychological and ideological contradictions embedded in his perception of imperial violence. While Marlow witnesses the horrors of colonialism, he remains epistemically confined within the ideological boundaries of empire, rendering him incapable of truly understanding—or representing—the colonized subject. The novella thus becomes a text of silences, where indigenous voices are consistently muted, distorted, or erased. Drawing on Spivak’s notion of the subaltern and Festinger’s theory of internal conflict, the paper argues that Conrad’s narrative not only marginalizes the African other but also exemplifies the structural and psychological silencing of colonized peoples in Western literature. By situating Heart of Darkness within the discourse of epistemic violence and postcolonial dissonance, this study reframes the novella as a site of both complicity and critical tension—where the limits of colonial understanding reveal the urgency of speaking, and listening to, the subaltern voice. Key Words: Postcolonialism; Cognitive Dissonance; Subaltern; Epistemic Violence; Colonial Discourse; Marlow