vendredi 4 mars 2011

Colonization

Interesting article on "The lasting power of Heart of Darkness": http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/robert-butler/going-green-heart-darkness

" Our awareness of the shadowy stories of supply and demand also goes back to one man, a contemporary of Dunlop's. Between June and December 1890, a 32-year-old unmarried Polish sailor called Konrad Korzeniowski made a 1,000-mile trip up the Congo for an ivory-trading company on a paddleboat steamer called Roi des Belges. It took him nine years to find a way to write about what he saw."

(...)

"As "Heart of Darkness" has moved from one medium to another, it has made a good claim to be the single most influential hundred pages of the 20th century. If you consider its central theme-how one half of the world consumes resources at the expense of the other half-it's easy to see its relevance becoming even greater. Only the resources will no longer be ivory for piano keys, or rubber for bicycle tyres.

Conrad's artistic challenge was to make the world he saw visible to others. It's a political challenge too. Sometimes writers reveal a hidden situation, sometimes campaigners do, and sometimes it's just an accident. Few of us had much idea about the conditions in which copper is mined-everyday copper for plumbing, electrics, saucepans and coins-before 33 Chilean miners found themselves trapped 2,000 feet underground."

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