Incorporation of difference as an African response to Cartesian epistemology: An examination of the self and other in Conrad, Paz, Laye, and Couto

Examining the manner in which African and Western writers define their societal identity by articulating the self's relationship to a societal other reveals that the radically different context in which their societies experienced that other manifests itself in the distinctly different paradigms of societal identification. While Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness reveals an interest in the self's approach of other, his inability to step out of an individualist epistemology restricts him to charting his own blindness of the other (a self awareness that has been insufficiently noted), and in response to this perspective, Octavio Paz struggles to articulate the contact between self and other which this blindness struggles to efface. African writers Camara Laye and Mia Couto articulate a fundamentally different paradigm of identity in which individual difference is not manifested through separation from society but by the individual's incorporation into it.