Author(s): Md. Jakir Hossain, Sabrina Afroz Chowdhury

Abstract: A close reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, highlighting the motif of the "forsaken garden" at the Central Station, reveals the novella as a dynamic archive of plantation logic and racial capitalism. While many ecocritical interpretations depict the Congo as an untamed wilderness, this study foregrounds cultivated spaces that are rendered sterile and deadly. Drawing on Cedric Robinson, Katherine McKittrick, and Jason W. Moore, this article argues that colonial cultivation was not just a historical phenomenon but an enduring socio-ecological logic of expendability—one that renders both land and labor disposable. Conrad’s horticultural imagery—especially the withered garden and the adjacent grove of the dead, vividly illustrates what Rob Nixon calls slow violence: harm that builds up time and space. The novella’s silence on rubber harvesting, contrasted with the Casement Report, positions ivory as an ideological stand-in for rubber. Conrad’s use of fog, impressionistic description, and atmospheric uncertainty generates an aesthetics of whiteness—affective strategies that obscure the brutality of racial and environmental violence. By bringing the abandoned garden to the forefront, Heart of Darkness stands out as a literary record of plantation dynamics—a structure that continues to shape the contemporary climate crisis and racial injustice.

Keywords: Racial capitalism, plantation logic, slow violence, ecocriticism, Congo Free State, environmental humanities, affect theory, postcolonial ecology.

Article Info: Received: 20 Mar 2026; Received in revised form: 18 Apr 2026; Accepted: 22 Apr 2026; Available online: 27 Apr 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.112.84