Reimagining the colonial wilderness: ‘Africa’, imperialism and the geographical legerdemain of the Vorrh

Abstract

Novelists and other cultural producers have long employed the African continent as a palimpsest to construct fantastical tales. From Sir John Mandeville to Joseph Conrad, Africa’s blank spaces on the map have been filled with monstrous creatures that fuel the western imagination. As a consequence, this constant othering of the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ has had a deleterious impact for African states and their citizenries, as spectacularly evidenced in U.S. President Donald Trump’s now-infamous labelling of the entire continent as a host of ‘shithole countries’. This article wrestles with the continuation of this trend in popular culture via an empirical examination of the speculative fiction of the British novelist and performance artist, B. Catling. Publishing in 2015, The Vorrh is the first of the three novels set in a parallel Africa, specifically a former German colony that is home to remnants of the Garden of Eden. Focusing on the enchanted forest known as the Vorrh and the colony’s (fictional) capital, Essenwald, this article employs methods drawn from geocriticism and popular geopolitics to interrogate Catling’s built-world. This is done with the aim of connecting structures of iteration in the representation of fictional ‘Africas’ to the West’s imperially inflected geopolitical codes towards the actual physical and human geographies that constitute the world’s second largest and most populous continent.