Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899) is taught and read allover the world. Everywhere novelists and travel writers respond to it intheir own creative work. I discuss 30 responses or rewritings from AfricaIndia the Caribbean Australia Europe and the US. Their perspectivesinclude those of groups who identify with Conrad's Europeans and groups whofeel close to his Africans and increasingly those of groups who situatethemselves between these two extremes in various ways. I identify world-widedevelopments as well as themes strategies and paradigm shifts thatcorrelate with different geopolitical situations. Rewriters address thecontribution Conrad has made to the identities of his very differentreaders and the patterns he has suggested for encounters. In ever moreintense dialogues people from all backgrounds work through images ofthemselves and of each other. However like Conrad's narrator they alsobecome aware of limits of language and communication.Rewriters act as rereaders of the many layers of meaning in Heart ofDarkness and thus imply that the reader's experience is as important asthe author's. This approach is increasingly developing into a use ofdiscourse-analytical methods in non-theoretical texts. Rewritings can bringHeart of Darkness close to the readers' lives. Rewriters championprocesses of highly personal learning and unlearning as well as politicaland social approaches and can thus help readers rework their own culturalbackgrounds. Accordingly I both use close-reading methods and take intoaccount political and didactic intentions. In conclusion I recommendreading Heart of Darkness together with one or more of its rewritings andoutline some ideas for teaching such combinations.After comprehensive introductions to Heart of Darkness and to the theoryof rewritings I discuss works by the following authors in a convenienthandbook format: Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer) Leonard Woolf W. SomersetMaugham Andre Gide Louis-Ferdinand Celine Graham Greene Charlotte JayPatrick White Chinua Achebe Wilson Harris Ngugi wa Thiong'o Tayeb SalihArun Joshi J.M. Coetzee V.S. Naipaul Robert Silverberg Caryl PhillipsDavid Dabydeen Marlene NourbeSe Philip David Malouf Mineke SchipperAbdulrazak Gurnah Urs Widmer Redmond O'Hanlon Arundhati Roy BarbaraKingsolver and Jeffrey Tayler.