Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad ed. by Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad ed. by Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli
• Richard Ruppel (bio)

Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad.
Edited by Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli.
London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 239 pp.
ISBN: 9781350168923.

To help celebrate the 2022 New Year, Yael Levin hosted a virtual meeting of Conrad scholars from Japan, Israel, the UK, and the United States to discuss two questions: Why should we teach the work of Joseph Conrad, and how should we teach it? Participants shared their earliest, bewildered encounters with Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and The Secret Agent, their vague understanding that these stories were disturbing and strange, difficult but imaginatively stimulating: worth, we ultimately agreed, spending a significant portion of our professional lives figuring out.

Teaching Conrad, on the other hand, has become problematic for several reasons, reflecting a general crisis in the humanities. Briefly, the group concluded, it is increasingly difficult to teach Conrad because he may be considered just another privileged white male and, though he opposed colonialism and, to a degree, racism, in Heart of Darkness and other works his treatment of race is sometimes offensive. Though some academics may scoff at our students’ sensitivities and mock those who feel “triggered,” we agreed that student distress may be justified: African American students might well have had experiences that make reading “The Nigger of the Narcissus” painful, or enraging, or both.

Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli’s twelve-essay collection, Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad, provides several different answers to these questions about why we should continue to teach Conrad and how, as writers and teachers, we can accommodate our evolving understanding of and sensitivity to ethnicity, nationality, and race in Conrad’s work.

In their Introduction, Salmons and Zulli point out that while transnationalism is currently a popular term associated with the flow of capital, goods, cultural and political beliefs and behaviors, and people across national borders, [End Page 181] “in its literary declination and in its intellectual and narrative forms, as an expression of global relations articulating the interaction of cultures and ideas through scholarly thought and fictional representations, transnationalism is a much earlier concept. Joseph Conrad described the world as ‘in a state of transition’ (Conrad 1926, 130), a perception that was not confined to geographical movement, but instead encompassed the philosophical, psychological and political changes that populate his fiction” (2). Conrad has long been identified as an international figure, a European whose work is seldom confined to Great Britain. But this collection is useful in the way it focuses on how Conrad’s fiction is often concerned with borders, crossings, initiations, and fractured or multiple identities.

The first chapter, Robert Hampson’s “Conrad’s Rites of Entry and Return,” connects Conrad’s many experiences of entry and return to Chance, “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, “Amy Foster,” and The Rover. For me, the passages devoted to “Narcissus” and Heart of Darkness did the most to advance the critical conversation. Hampson notes how the seamen come into focus, become fully realized, as they are mustered aboard the Narcissus, and how they lose that realization when they dissolve in the English port and become individuals, prey to “prostitutes, publicans, and boardinghouse-keepers” (21). The men are defined, quite literally, by their work; they lose that definition ashore. Hampson also usefully draws our attention to the way Marlow’s meetings at the close of Heart of Darkness with the Company and journalist reveal historical Belgium’s attempt to hide the Company’s cruel and lethal trade practices. Hampson notes how Marlow seeks but never finds community throughout the story: in Brussels, on his voyage to Africa, at the Central Station, back in London, or even while he tells his tale to the (sometimes resistant, even contemptuous) men aboard the Nellie.

William Atkinson’s fine “Back in Ukraine: Rites of Passage and Rites of Entry” explores Conrad’s fundamentally indefinite, insecure background. The word “Ukraina” in Polish means “margin” or “edge.” A Pole born on the margins, a French and then a British mariner, trained to captain sailing...