Chapter 19 Towards a Global South Literary Genealogy: M. G. Vassanji and Joseph Conrad as Secret Sharers in The Book of Secrets and Heart of Darkness
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Abstract
Conrad’s fiction is full of ‘secret sharers’, from the duo of the short story of the same title, and in particular Heart of Darkness, has continued to generate intertextual sharers down the twentieth century. This chapter investigates an Eastern African example of such ‘secret sharing’, Tanzanian-Canadian author M. G. Vassanji’s novel The Book of Secrets (1996). Rather than treating the novel as a derivative avatar of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, however, the chapter shifts the perspective to ask to what extent such textual genealogies themselves are productive of new literary histories from beyond the bounds of Europe. The chapter explores the idea that literary history, and perhaps history in general, is generated by its outsides. Here, the Global South is not merely the recipient of Conradian influence in a vector that reinscribes that of colonial intrusion; rather, the Global South is a productive matrix of generative textual lineages that interact creatively and generously to the prior genealogies informing Conrad’s texts.