Imagining Disaster in the African Postcolony

Abstract

This essay discusses the theoretical implications and consequences of the topical use of ‘disaster’ in public discourse on, and in literary and cinematic representations of, Africa. The author introduces the “genre of contemporary disaster writing” as a site where ‘disaster’ is often treated as a ‘natural’ condition of modernity. The images and motifs that are mediated by such disaster writings, it is further argued, easily become the object of touristic curiosity.