“The Earth Seemed Unearthly”: Capital, World-Ecology, and Enchanted Nature in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

This essay reads Heart of Darkness as a world-ecological text, examining themes of socioecological violence, waste, and exhaustion as theorized by the world-ecology paradigm. Specifically, it argues that the novella’s “unearthly” landscape speaks to the transformative interactions of capital and nature at the commodity frontier, linking the novella’s language of enchantment to the subjective, irrational, and racialized devaluations necessary to world-ecological accumulation. Offering a historical reading of the gothic and antirealist elements of the text’s landscape descriptions, the essay finds theoretical relevance in its refusal to separate nature from the historical categories of colonialism, capital, and the commodity form.