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We live in one global environment with a huge number of ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its only dimly perceived, basically uninterpreted and uncomprehended fabric. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests-patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds-can in fact lead to mass destructiveness.
-Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism 19-20
We live in an age in which film has replaced literature as the main channel through which cultural values are transmitted, [and the signs of this] process of cultural transmission [...] deserve attention from those concerned with what happens to Conrad's message as it undergoes transformation into other media.
-Gene M. Moore, Conrad on Film 1
Introduction
"And so," writes Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, "in the late twentieth century the imperial cycle of the last century in some way replicates itself (19). One of Said's general arguments in Culture and Imperialism is that if we are to have any hope of stopping this cycle, of achieving "a harmonious world order" (20), we must understand our relationship to the past. To do this, we need to study cultural documents that reveal the "network of interdependent histories" of Europe and the postcolonial world (19). I argue that one way to do this is to look at the way classic colonial texts themselves "replicate" over the years. The text, as Derrida writes, is no longer "a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces" (84). Readings change because readers change, are influenced by other texts, by history, by experience. Heart of Darkness today is in some ways not the same text as Heart of Darkness twenty or fifty or one-hundred years ago. By studying changing interpretations of Heart of Darkness we can begin to chart our developing cultural understanding of the imperial process. Studying literal re-tellings, re-imaginings, and re-visionings of the novel-whether in other novels or in films-can enhance that understanding even further. In this paper, I am looking at one such replication: Francis Ford Coppola's re-telling and transportation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness from a story...