October 16 - 18, 2007 

A journey into the heart of violence

Defne Turker Demir

Department of American Culture and Literature

Halic University, Istanbul, Turkey

Sven Lindqvist’s ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’, is a travel narrative that could also be read as a history of the nineteenth century colonial enterprise. The author’s travel into the heart of Sahara serves as a frame to his historical research that traces the roots of imperialism and racism in Western thought and practice. Hence, Lindqvist’s geographical and linear movements in space are subtexts to a journey backwards in time, a journey that is further enhanced by brief introspective memories of childhood and hallucinatory, nightmarish visions. 

Lindqvist’s text further focuses on primarily Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and other (travel) narratives and by weaving these texts into his own, reveals the imperialist and racist discourses of the nineteenth century, which reach their culmination in the holocaust. This paper proposes to discuss the ways in which Lindqvist’s text is informed by a number of nineteenth and twentieth century texts that reveal the imperialistic discourse and the post-colonial stance.

About Defne Turker Demir

Defne Turker Demir received her BA in Western Languages and Literatures from Bogazici University, Istanbul in 1995. After teaching English as a second language at various universities, she completed her MA in English Language and Literature from Dogus University, Istanbul in 2006. Her MA thesis is entitled “A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke and the Eighteenth Century English Society”. In her thesis, her particular focus was on issues of gender and class. Her current project attempts to delienate disclosures and absences in the self-writings of both Turkish and British female authors. At present she is working as a Research Assistant at Halic University.

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