Joseph Conrad is now considered one of the most canonical of twentieth-century writers, whose influence extends around the globe, and this panel, which fosters the fresh work of younger scholars and graduate students, considers his influence on world literature and media. The papers here consider Conrad’s legacy as transmitted by an avant-garde European feminist film director, by one of China’s most celebrated twentieth-century novelists, and through Conrad being one of the progenitors of the larger, global cultural capital concept known as artistic prestige. The proposed speakers address how Conrad’s mixed-race female protagonists speak to urgent contemporary issues of identity and diaspora; his work as both inspiration for and obstacle to decolonial emancipation; and the question of how literary reputations are born and made. Conrad arguably remains influential because of his artistic merits as much as the ways in which his texts challenge conventional wisdom under imperial capitalism in their search for emancipatory narratives. The papers here consider how Conrad the man and the work continue to offer fertile arenas for exploring questions of cross-cultural literary transmission, decolonial ethics, and the relationship between art and rhetoric.

Iman Gareeboo’s “Subjectivity and Identity in Almayer’s Folly across Text and Screen” examines the exploration of the lives of the poor Dutch colonialist Kaspar Almayer, his much-vilified Malay wife, and his beloved mixed daughter, Nina, in Almayer’s Folly (1895). Although the text lingers on Almayer’s loneliness, Nina may be the character whose physical and emotional being is least understood because her identity confuses racial and social boundaries. The slipperiness of her identity is made the central ethical dilemma of the plot the 2011 film adaptation by Chantel Akerman, in which the Dutch-Malay Nina is portrayed by the Belgian/Rwandan/Greek actress Aurora Marion. Analyzing Almayer’s Folly alongside Akerman’s adaptation, this paper proposes that both examine how the characters’ awareness of how they function in and are perceived by their wider society affect their identity and choices. Moreover, Nina is the character most relatable to mixed and diasporic audiences today, as they debate their identity through their subjective experiences in Western hierarchies conditioned by socio-economic, racial, and religious norms.

Yuchen Yan’s “Decolonizing Modernity in China: Lao She as a Conrad Reader” examines Chinese writer Lao She’s reading of Conrad as a decolonial act of both identification and critique. Expressing admiration for Conrad’s narrative strategies and atmospheric power, he simultaneously registers dissatisfaction with the Eurocentrism of Conrad's South China Seas novels. Drawing on Lao She’s essays and novellas Little Po’s Birthday (1931) and Cat Country (1932), this paper argues that Conrad’s fiction functioned for him not as a model to emulate but a problem to solve: how does a writer from the colonial margin inhabit the conventions of a genre shaped by imperial expansion without reproducing its violence? Little Po’s Birthday offers a narrative of the South China Seas that centers Asian communities, constituting one of the earliest decolonial discourses in world literature. Yet his novellas’ formal experimentation and narrative instability reflect his recognition that even the critical act of representing the Other risks perpetuating the same epistemological violence. Reading Lao She as a global reader of Conrad illuminates both the cross-cultural transmission of literary form and the ethical challenges that transmission poses for writers at the colonial margins.

Roanne Kantor’s “Reading Conrad’s Prestige” observes that nowadays it is intuitive to most English speakers and critics that “prestige” is a quality that belongs to the arts and a synonym for what Bourdieu called “cultural capital,” as James English makes explicit in The Economy of Prestige. But this idea was not well established in Conrad’s era. Instead, the primary use of the term from 1850–1950 referred to the extent to which colonial subjects were prepared to believe in British power without that power having to be demonstrated or exercised. Modernist authors enabled this philological transition, self-consciously appropriating “prestige” into the literary sphere even as they continued to use the imperial formulation in their fiction. This paper reads together the key role of impression management—prestige—and its opposite, defamation, in Lord Jim, alongside Conrad’s own discourses on “prestige,” and the way “Conrad” as an author was recruited by other modernist writers to speak about a coalescing literary concept called “prestige.”