“Yes, you will notice that the European traders have ‘tainted’ souls, Marlow has a ‘pure’ soul, but I am to accept that mine is ‘rudimentary’?” He shakes his head. “Towards the end of the 19th century, there was a very short-lived period of ambivalence about the certainty of this colonising mission, and Heart of Darkness falls into this period. But you cannot compromise my humanity in order that you explore your own ambiguity. I cannot accept that. My humanity is not to be debated, nor is it to be used simply to illustrate European problems.”

"the real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot" (Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,'" in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Anchor, 2012)). In other words, Achebe insists that the text’s aesthetic qualities cannot and should not redeem its cultural and racial attitudes. Such a commitment to the political and social implications of literature characterizes much ethnic criticism.

Most famously, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe wrote in "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" that the novella "projects the image of Africa as 'the other world,' the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality" (Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,'" in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Anchor, 2012)).

Wheatley is an interesting example because her work speaks to the concerns of scholars interested in the African American literary tradition and scholars interested in issues of conquest and colonialism. Wheatley wrote, after all, when Massachusetts was a British colony, and she came to Massachusetts after being forcibly seized from her home in either Senegal or Gambia, in West Africa.

By associating black people with Cain, white people implied that Black people were inferior both physically and morally — marked as "other" than white people, whom they considered normal.

Then "appropriate whites had to authenticate the writer's mental and moral capacity, and then the slave's master had to agree that the slave could publish the work. Moreover, the slave's offering was carefully censored to ensure that it was in no way incendiary" (Sondra O’Neale, "A Slave's Subtle War: Phillis Wheatley's Use of Biblical Myth and Symbol," Early American Literature 21, no. 2 (1986): 144–45). In other words, Wheatley could not write a bald condemnation of slavery; her owners held absolute sway over both her writing and her person, and to be published, she had to write within the constraints imposed on her by white people invested in keeping the slave system intact.

We might even accuse Wheatley of mimicry, or attempting to imitate the language and (as you can see in the following engraving) dress of the ruling class.

These Others are sometimes portrayed as excessively bad (demonic others) and sometimes as excessively beautiful (exotic others), but neither view actually builds a true picture of non-Western societies or people. In other words, literary critics are wary of texts in which a foreign society is portrayed as ideal, just as they are when a foreign society is portrayed as depraved.

Taking a slightly different focus, the critic Edward Said coined the term Orientalism, which refers to a set of false assumptions and stereotypes that Western cultures maintain about societies other than themselves

Though minority and non-Western writers are now studied regularly, they still occupy relatively small places in most literature classrooms and curricula.

Though it has happened more slowly than many cultural critics would like, the literary canon has shifted in the past decades to reflect a wider sense of who writes literature and what we should learn from it.

these scholars have demonstrated how the literary canon excludes the voices of minority and non-Western writers, thinkers, and subjects. They have exposed attitudes of prejudice within canonical works.