Overview

Nineteenth-century European representations of Africa are notorious for depicting the continent with a blank interior. But there was a time when British writers filled Africa with landed empires and contiguous trade routes linked together by a network of rivers. This geographical narrative proliferated in fictional and nonfictional texts alike, and it was born not from fanciful speculation but from British interpretations of what Africans said and showed about themselves and their worlds. Investigations of the representation of Africa in British texts have typically concluded that the continent operated in the British imagination as a completely invented space with no meaningful connection to actual African worlds, or as an inert realm onto which writers projected their expansionist fantasies. With African Impressions, Rebekah Mitsein revises that narrative, demonstrating that African elites successfully projected expressions of their sovereignty, wealth, right to power, geopolitical clout, and religious exceptionalism into Europe long before Europeans entered sub-Saharan Africa. Mitsein considers the ways that African self-representation continued to drive European impressions of the continent across the early Enlightenment, fueling desires to find the sources of West Africa’s gold and the city states along the Niger, to establish a relationship with the Christian kingdom of Prester John, and to discover the source of the Nile. Through an analysis of a range of genres, including travel narratives, geography books, maps, verse, and fiction, Mitsein shows how African strategies of self-representation and European strategies for representing Africa grew increasingly inextricable, as the ideas that Africans presented about themselves and their worlds migrated from contact zones to texts and back again. The geographical narratives that arose from this cycle, which unfolded over hundreds of years, were made to fit expansionist agendas, but they remained rooted in the African worlds and worldviews that shaped them.

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9780813947891

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Reviews

In this terrific and engaging book, Dr. Mitsein argues against the common assumption that African thought was so weak that it played little role in shaping early modern European thought. Attending to an impressive array of texts, genres, periods, and disciplines, she demonstrates that West and East Africans injected African thought into the heart of Enlightenment discourse, co-constituting the 'African impressions' the British created. This deepening of our understanding of the dynamic between the colonial metropole and its colonies is a remarkable achievement, as she takes us on a lively journey through geographical representations of Africa, from the legendary gold and city states of West Africa to the Christian kingdom of Prester John in East Africa and beyond. --Wendy Laura Belcher, Princeton University, author of Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author Mitsein's learned study of the long-term exchanges between Africans and Europeans about Africa is substantial and overturns worn-out theoretical assumptions. The focus on the transmission of geographical information and the tensions among eyewitness, hearsay, and textual information is a real breath of fresh air. Mitsein's analysis of the positive content of African self-expression is bound to be interesting to the field of eighteenth-century studies generally, especially for those who are interested in theories of Enlightenment knowledge and the empirical thrust of the new sciences; to literary studies especially in regard to the role of prose fiction about Africa; and to the subfield of global eighteenth-century studies. There is no other book in its entirety that does what this one does in the discipline of English literature. --Roxann Wheeler, The Ohio State University, author of The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

Author Information

Rebekah Mitsein is Assistant Professor of English at Boston College.

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