In response to the 2026 MLA’s Presidential theme concerning “family resemblances,” this proposed in-person special session panel contemplates Conrad's depiction of non-Western human entanglements and kinships in what has been called the “global south.” It considers how the relational networks described in that author’s fictions offer a pointed critique of the divisive imperial logics of individualism and appropriation. Taken together, the proposed papers interrogate Conrad's intercultural “backstories” – hidden familial or intercommunal convergences – seeking to understand how these understudied aspects of the author's oeuvre subvert expected Western or colonial narratives and thereby perform an anti-imperialist ethic. The panel fills a significant gap in the scholarship of literary modernisms and anglophone fiction by evaluating the limits and possibilities of literary representations of and resistances to divisive geographic, political, and cultural frameworks -- including the contested concept of "the global south" itself. In seeking to recover the generative networks linking Conrad’s characters (and readers) at the fringes of the colonial “South,” the panel sees the human and cultural resemblances animated by this author not only as a pointed evaluation of geopolitical schisms, but as evidence of that author’s awareness of human connectivities across cultural and familial lines.

Since Carl Ogelsby coined the term “Global South” in 1969 in response to the three-world model that condescended to “a third world,” the term has been used both academically and colloquially to refer to a bipolar model of geopolitics and economics — its meta-categories helpful, yet potentially fraught with problematic and polarizing stereotypes. Conrad’s story, “The Duel,” at first appears to indulge in these very stereotypes. In ‘North, South, and “the terrific enmity of nature” in Conrad’s “The Duel,”’ Debra Romanick Baldwin will explore and interrogate the assumptions of the Ogelsby’s north/south paradigm itself by examining the north/south binary that defines Conrad’s story; the self-perpetuation of its power struggle; it’s uneasy relation to inward realities, and the extreme environmental conditions shown to be its ultimate context. Conrad, ever the ironist, implicates both protagonists in the obsessive and self-defining opposition for which they each come to hunger; their inward realities turn out to be at odds with their public displays.

In “Race and Revolution in Conrad’s Nostromo,” Susan K. Andrade will argue that although the novel depicts an imagined South American country (Costaguana) emerging from the imperial yoke, it is at best ambivalent towards the Global South as such, given the undoubted racial hierarchy in the preference for governance between the Blancos and what Andrade calls “the mestizos” (the Montero brothers).Everything in the novel’s tone suggests that the revolution the Monteros bring to Sulaco’s gates will be far more violent (more uncivilized?) even if Indians and blacks outside Sulaco support it. Andrade thus offers an alternative approach – through the failures of Decoud, Nostromo, and most of all Don Carlos who contacts Holroyd, the American millionaire claims that the world’s enterprises, including the silver mine, will be run by people like him -- a prescient representation of the global capitalism that will make increasingly irrelevant the governing struggles of Sulacans.

Pei-Wen Clio Kao’s ‘“Postcolonizing” Conrad: Reading Joseph Conrad’s Singapore Writing from the Perspective of the Global South,’ undertakes an alternative reading of Conrad’s Singapore writings (The Shadow-Line and “The End of the Tether”) to reconstruct the potentialities for agency and subjectivity among the people of the “Eastern Port.” Borrowing Shu-Mei Shih’s theory of “relational comparisons” between world history and literature, the paper uncovers the agency, hybridity and transculturality in Singapore, a subject rather than a mere object reduced to the backdrop of the white writer’s Eastern tales.

In "From Almayer’s Folly to Almayer’s Daughter: Chantal Akerman’s Autofictional Adaptation of Conrad" Anwita Gosh will argue that La Folie Almayer, Chantal Akerman’s film adaptation of Conrad’s first novel, critiques colonial narratives of assimilation while expanding the possibilities of adaptation as an act of autofictional, feminist intervention. Akerman dismantles viewers' identification with Conrad’s protagonist Almayer, forcing us to confront Almayer’s mixed-race daughter Nina’s fractured subjectivity as, in Bhabba’s terms, “not quite/not white.” Although educated in a French colonial boarding school, Nina remains an outsider – a detail Ackerman makes explicit; similarly, Akerman’s indigenous voice-over narrator disrupts colonial hierarchies. This shift in perspective is not only fictional but autofictional: the film offers a decolonial revision of Conrad’s novel while mirroring the director’s own experiences as a Jewish child in a Belgian Catholic school.