The present volume of L'Epoque Conradienne tackles the controversial question of Conrad's representation of the tropics and the way he managed to offer much more than a conventional orientalist tale and/or painting marred by the recurrent characteristics of the genre : binary thinking and underlying racism, reification under the guise of exotic aestheticisation or systematic recourse to generalisations, to quote but a few of its most salient features.
Conrad, on the contrary, used tropes and the visual so as to reintroduce uncertainty and undecidability which, far from confiscating the gaze and the voice of colonised people in the tropics, enable the reader to sense the crack-up in the Westerner's own gaze and voice. Through repeated aesthetic turns of the screw, the imperialist oriental backcloth is being torn apart and the reader cannot but catch "that glimpse of truth for which [he has] forgotten to ask" (Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus"), In this volume are gathered the papers given at the one-day conference organised jointly by the Société Conradienne Française and the CEMRA (EA 3016) at Stendhal University, Grenoble, December 4, 2009.