Decolonising the Conrad Canon

Abstract

In the context of decolonisation movements across Higher Education in the UK and around the world, this book shows that decolonial, queer, feminist readings are possible in even the deepest corners of the colonial literary canon. Decolonising the Conrad Canon turns to Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known works in search of textual breathing spaces, in which female characters of colour speak, think, gaze, and yearn, and follows them off the page into their transmedia afterlives. Through this intervention, the book challenges the ubiquitous recirculation of white male voices as uniquely endowed to speak the history of Empire and turns instead to the many powerful indigenous women that live forgotten in the Conrad archive and the myriad adaptations housed within it. Presenting Immada and Edith’s queer desires in The Rescue and its periodical illustrations, Aïssa’s anti-colonial resistance in An Outcast of the Islands and her characterisation on its pulp book covers, the feminist relationships of Almayer’s Folly and Nina Almayer’s embodiment in Chantal Akerman’s adaptation La Folie Almayer, this book argues that Conrad’s female characters of colour deserve to be read as viable, meaning-making protagonists who matter. Decolonising the Conrad Canon interrogates race, gender, and character status in literary scholarship to propose alternative methods for teaching, reading, and studying not just Joseph Conrad but all those seemingly immovable author-Gods like him.