Project Documents

Lead Image Details

Lead image caption: Anonymous Kongo Artist. Container. Rattan, wood, and twine, [1700-1899]. 2003.13. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Purchased with funds provided by Jamee and Marshall Field; Pauline S. Armstrong Endowment. CC0 Public Domain Designation.

Lead image details: In Victorian Studies – one of the key fields in which One More Voice intervenes – Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness plays a central role in introducing students to nineteenth-century European colonialism, especially in the Congo under Belgian rule. However, Conrad's novella offers only vague representations of the many Congolese cultural contexts among which the characters travel. These include the Kingdom of Kongo, which was situated just south of Marlow's initial route in western Congo. This Kongolese container may date to the same period as Conrad's novella, while the Art Institute of Chicago's provenance notes indicate that the container “had been in [an unknown private] collection [in Belgium] since the colonial period.” The inclusion of this item on One More Voice, therefore, gestures towards restoring some of the global cultural contexts for English literary works of the Victorian era, while pushing back against Eurocentric modes of representing such contexts by Conrad and other writers. Inclusion also underscores that the open licenses used by repositories and museums (like the Art Institute of Chicago) can easily facilitate the introduction of such contexts into various educational settings. One More Voice itself has capitalized on such open licenses as part of its “digital recycling” site development strategy.

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