[lbo-talk] Lincoln Gordon, he dead

[James Heartfield]

I am just re-reading Heart of Darkness now, and find it difficult to think of Conrad as a racist. The book is plainly one facet of that upsurge of humanitarian feeling in England that exposed the atrocities in the Belgian Congo. He was a friend of Roger Casement, I think. Conrad comes to it though as an artist, not a political pamphleteer, and so he occupies the minds of people who characters who are racists. But representation of white cruelty is no more white cruelty than the representation of Christ on the cross is collusion with the torture of Christ. Where you can fault him is that there are no black characters who are agents, no black characters at all, really, whereas there was at least one black American prominent in the Congo movement. But I wouldn't call that racist, just the limitations of his writing.