Joseph Conrad may have unreflectingly absorbed the common racism of his time—as did virtually everyone in his time to one degree or another. And yet his novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), was a damning indictment of colonial human rights abuses in Africa and remains a disturbing testament to humanity’s capacity for evil.
Peter Kuper previously adapted Franz Kafka stories in the form of a graphic novel and is no stranger to the medium’s potential for conveying—in ink as well as words—the darker currents of the imagination. Kuper is sensitive to what can be shown and what needs to be written to maintain the narrative. For his version of Heart of Darkness, Kuper embeds the original plot, narrator and setting into a web of 21st-century understanding. Kuper’s Heart of Darkness is acutely aware of the misconceptions of 19th-century science and society with its cranial measurements and assumptions of racial hierarchy.
The introduction to Kuper’s book is written by Harvard’s Maya Jasanoff, author of the insightfully critical The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. She can do no better than to quote Barack Obama on Heart of Darkness’ problematical aspects. “See, the book is not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about… a particular way of looking at the world.”
