Images of Africa: Stereotypes and Realities
| Images of Africa: Stereotypes and Realities |
Images of Africa: Stereotypes & Realities is not just any other book on Africa. It is a book that offers rare and exceptional insights into the historical and cultural processes through which the various perceptions of Africa since ancient times came to crystallize themselves in the form of negative images and stereotypes so pervasive and profound that the continent, to date, has had a hard time shaking them off. Working from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this volume, including Martin Bernal, world-renowned author of the revolutionary Black Athena, add substantially to the pool of new Africanist/Afrocentrist knowledge and revisionism that, in the past four decades or so, has helped to uncover huge chunks of purposefully hidden and deformed African history. This book therefore sets the record straight by deconstructing the multifarious images and stereotypes that, century after century, came to deform, invalidate and misconstruct the African universe, burying it under layers of historical fallacies that explorers, missionaries and 18th- and 19th-century scholars and thinkers consecrated as historical truths in their attempts to denigrate the non-west in general, and Africa in particular. Contributors to this impressive volume include not only Molefi Asante, who wrote the preface, but also Martin Bernal, renowned author of Black Athena.
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Acknowledgement xi Preface by Molefi K. Asante, Temple University xiii Introduction: White Eyes, Dark Reflections PART I: Ancient European Perceptions of Africa 21 Martin Bernal, Cornell University, “European Images of Africa – Tale of Two Names: Ethiop and N—” 23 Miriam Dow, The George Washington University, “Menelaos, the Cyclopes, and Eurybates: a Post-Colonial Reading of Homer” 47 Buluda Itandala, University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), “European Images of Africa from Early Times to the Eighteenth Century” 61 PART II – Western Imperial Ideology in Theory and Practice 83 Janet S. McIntosh, University of Michigan, “Strategic Amnesia: Versions of Vasco da Gama on the Kenya Coast” 85 Mahamadou Diallo, Université de Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), “Literature of Empire and the African Environment” 105 Kristof Haavik, University of Botswana, “From Crusades to Colonies: Africa in French Literature” 127 PART III – Africa, Orientalism and the West 137 Mongi Bahloul, Université de Sfax (Tunisia), “The North-African Motif in Early American Fiction” 139 Jonathan Gosnell, Smith College, “Mediterranean Waterways, Extended Borders and Colonial Mappings: French Images of North Africa” 159 Valerie Orlando, Illinois Wesleyan University, “Transposing the Political & the Aesthetical: Eugene Fromentin’s Contributions to Oriental Stereotypes” 175 PART IV – Africa in the Americas 193 Jeannette Eileen Jones, State University of New York at Buffalo, “In Brightest Africa’: Naturalistic Constructions of Africa in the American Museum of Natural History, 1910-1936” 195 John Gruesser, Kean University, “From Race to Class: the African American Literary Response to the Italo-Ethiopian War” Victoria Ramirez, Weber State University, “The Herero in the Hartz: Pynchon’s Re-Presentation of Race Relations in Gravity’s Rainbow” 219 PART V – Media-ting Africa 235 Martha Grise, Eastern Kentucky University, “‘Scarred for Life?’ Representations of Africa and Female Genital Cutting on American Television News Magazines” 249 Jean Muteba Rahier, Florida International University, “(US-Centered Afrocentric Imaginations of Africa: L.H. Clegg’s When Black Men Ruled the World, and Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America” 261 PART VI – Feminism and Women in Africa 279 Bill Gaudelli, University of Central Florida, “African Women: Educational Opportunities and the Dynamics of Change” 307 PART VII – African Literatures: Text and Pre-Text 325 Augustine Okereke, Universität Bielefeld (Germany), “Once Upon A Time… Representations, Misrepresentations and Rehabilitations in African Literatures” 327 David Pattison, University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, United Kingdom, “‘Oxford, Black Oxford’: Dambudzo Marechera and the Last Colony in Africa” 343 Sharmilla Sen, Harvard University, “Playing Africa: The Fictions of Ferdinand Oyono” 375 Index 393 |
