The World in Time

Maya Jasanoff

Friday, December 22, 2017

Ocean Swells, by Arthur B. Davies. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of A. W. Bahr, 1958.

Ocean Swells, by Arthur B. Davies. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of A.W. Bahr, 1958.

“The book teaches me things,” Barack Obama explained to his friends when defending his decision to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “about white people…the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world.” In her introduction to The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff writes that she came to agree with what the future president wrote in Dreams from My Father, that Conrad’s perspective was valuable “not just despite its blind spots but because of them. Conrad captured something about the way power operated across continents and races, something that seemed as important to engage with today as it had when he started to write.” In this podcast episode, the Harvard history professor traces the writer’s past and explains how she followed him across the sea and to the Congo to understand better what he saw and how the imperialism he observed in the nineteenth century evolved into what we see now in the twenty-first century.

 

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.

 

Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr.

Discussed in this episode

The Dawn Watch.

More Podcasts

September 04, 2020

The World in Time:

Richard Kreitner

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union. More

July 14, 2011

The World in Time:

Trade Routes

Lewis Lapham talks with historian James Mather about a time when British foreign relations were more peaceful and diplomatic than they later became. More

November 09, 2018

The World in Time:

David Wootton

Lewis H. Lapham talks with David Wootton, author of Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison. More

November 08, 2019

The World in Time:

Andrew Delbanco

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War. More

Bedouins in Camp at Night. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

January 31, 2020

The World in Time:

Gaia Vince

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time. More

July 21, 2017

The World in Time:

Michael Kazin

Lewis Lapham talks to Michael Kazin, author of War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918. More