Understanding our world through the stories of Joseph Conrad
Us versus them; you are with us or against us; black or white — as communication across lines break down, is the inability to understand each other pushing us to the brink?
Amid an existential crisis, comes this remarkable retelling of Joseph Conrad’s life and work and its resonance with the present dysfunctional world by Harvard University historian Maya Jasanoff.
In 1975, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe gave a public lecture, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The novella, he said, “projected the image of Africa as the ‘other world’, the antithesis of Europe, and therefore of civilisation...” Calling Conrad, a “bloody racist,” Achebe found the book “rife with degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans.”
Jasanoff mentions Achebe, as also Barack Obama’s retort when asked by a friend why he was reading “this racist tract.” It’s because, he said, “the book teaches me things... About White people... A particular way of looking at the world.”
Read the original book review on: The Hindu
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