Planetary Conrad: William Connolly and Nidesh Lawtoo in Dialogue Nidesh Lawtoo KU Leuven The gale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though the entire world were one black gully. Facing it – always facing it – that’s the way to get through. Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, 89 OSEPH CONRAD has long been recognised as an author who occupies a privileged place not only in European modernism, but in world or global literature more generally. As a Polish émigré qua seaman who, during the first part of his career sailed from France to the Caribbean, and later to India and Indonesia, reaching as far down as Australia, and back, via Mauritius, rounding Cape Horn, and adding a decisive limit experience by sailing up the river Congo (then under Belgian colonial power), before settling for a life at a writing-desk in Kent, Conrad is generally considered as one of the most well-travelled authors in modern literature and, perhaps, global literature tout court. No wonder that, as ideology critique took off in literary studies during the 1970s and 1980s, on the cusp of the rise of critical race theory, feminism, and postcolonial studies, Conrad continued to occupy a privileged, often contested, but always productive place within political preoccupations with “global” problems concerning the history of colonization, racist exploitations, imperialist expansions, international terrorism, and the all-too-human horrors that, to these days, routinely ensue as “civilizing missions” are put into historical practice. 1 And yet, it is only relatively recently that Conrad’s lived experience as a seaman who had been directly exposed to the agentic and often catastrophic forces that far exceed human control – from terrific storms to devastating fires, cataclysmic typhoons to contagious epidemics – has 1 For collections on the political implications of the global Conrad, see Kaplan, Mallios, White eds. (2005), and Lawtoo ed. (2012). J