Published Paper Details:

The Restoration era, witnessed an ephemeral burst of colonial expansion, notably England which expedited networking and established trading posts in Africa and America. This period has observed the ascendance of The Atlantic Slave Trade, a system ratified by exhortations to Enlightenment, Christianity, economic exigency. European sovereign states habitually depicted themselves as moral elites and cultural overlords, explicating the colonial project as a magnanimous undertaking to elevate colonial existence. Nonetheless, literature of the restored court is occasionally fraught with complexities. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) is a tapestry of contradictions of hegemonic ideology. Aphra Behn was a writer and a Royalist spy who was politically involved but in Oroonoko she expresses her condemnation of ruthless subjugation and hypocrisy. The narrative concerns the life of Oroonoko, an African prince who is branded with the iron of colonial oppression in Surinam. Behn idealizes Oroonoko's character and uses the narrative to deconstruct the veneer of European imperial righteousness. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) is a revolutionary work of anti-slavery literature. Occurring in the milieu of the Age of Imperialism, the novel chronicles the tragic story of a man of noble lineage subjected to enslavement. While Behn's characterization of Oroonoko elicits compassion and reverence, the text also serves as a vehicle for social commentary. The writer unveils the insidious hypocrisy of European colonists who claimed to expand in the name of a civilized society. This research paper situates Oroonoko within its sociohistorical and intertextual landscape to examine Behn's deconstruction of European double standards through narrative irony, character contrast and structural reversal. This action, therefore, augments scholarly engagement with pre-modern critiques of imperial expansion and role of literature in deconstructing and reconstructing imperial narratives.