film
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The Heart of the Matter (1953) Graham Greene’s works never fail to stage moral crises within colonial settings, where personal decisions reflect broader tensions about imperial decline. In The Heart of the Matter (1953, dir. George More O’Ferrall) and the first half of The Quiet American (1955), the messy entanglement of private lives with political…
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A Dry White Season (1989) Doris Lessing’s The Old Chief Mshlanga (1951) and Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season (1989) are separated by both form and medium, but they do share a main concern of how white protagonists end up confronting their implication in systems of racial domination. Both works successfully expose the hard-headed structures…
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Apocalypse Now (1979) Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) both undoubtedly chart the descent of European men into imperial spaces where conquest is framed as both inevitable and just as morally ambiguous. While Conrad embeds Marlow’s Congo journey in the rhetoric of civilization and trade, Coppola decides to…
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Out of Africa (1985) Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s short story “My Mother Lived on a Farm in Africa” (2006) provide two different and polarizing portrayals of Africa under the umbrella shadow of colonialism. While Pollack’s film transforms Karen Blixen’s memoir into a lush, nostalgic romance of white settlers in Kenya, Gurnah’s…
Static Pages, Moving Meaning 