Joseph Conrad

Conrad criticism so often seems to be "at the end of the tether" as the controversy over his colonial fiction and their ideological stance is all grist to the critical mills of academic debates. However, re-reading Conrad's colonial narratives is always relevant to the contemporary historical moment. This is particularly so, for we do not live in a "post-colonial" era as the widely current term might chronologically imply. This study does not concern itself with passing judgments on Conrad as imperialist or anti-imperialist. Rather, it negotiates the interlocution of Conrad's contradictory narrative discourses that question the ideology of Western imperialism while simultaneously reproducing its supremacist assumptions and attempting to redeem it by invoking an idealist ethos at the heart of its exploitative and racist project. Utilizing Edward Said's strategy of "contrapuntal reading," this study emphasizes an essential historical lesson at the heart of Conrad's vision imperialism is not a one-way process of domination that goes unchallenged. This fact is invariably glossed over in such readings of Conrad that favor a Eurocentric universalism.