Idea Of Africa Research Articles

Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa

Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa

J.M. Coetzee and the Idea of Africa

Summary The debate over representations of Africa in J.M. Coetzee's fiction tends to collapse into two irreconcilable positions: (a) he is either uninterested in the African subject or represents it as diminished, or (b) this accusation is naïve and oblivious to the autotelic qualities of Coetzee's fiction. This article seeks to move beyond these positions by looking at moments in Coetzee's writing when he actually does deploy Africa as sign. Analysis of these moments reveals that the sign of Africa in Coetzee is frequently rendered potent, mysterious and obscure – occulted – in order to achieve certain aesthetic effects. These effects are consistent with his efforts to enable fiction to reprise prevailing historical discourses.

The Idea of Africa in European High Fashion: Global Dialogues

African form and design have stimulated the creativity of European fashion designers for centuries. They have been used as inspiration for clothing designs, fashion accessories, and jewelry. By looking at the lure of the exotic in a historical perspective, and the importance of Africa in scientific, sociopolitical, and artistic arenas; this article will analyze the dynamic presence of African aesthetic expressions and styles in European fashion arenas in the twentieth century. This phenomenon was prominent between the years 1991 and 2000, with 1997 displaying a sustained African presence throughout the year. The work of John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier reveals African motifs and ideas have inspired their designs, and are also employed to communicate social and political messages. Conversely, African fashion designers such as Xuly Bët and Seidnaly Alphadi, who work in Europe and in Africa, use their own aesthetic to design their collections, to spur their home economies, and to place Africa in the global fashion circuit. In the twenty-first century, the era of globalization and instantaneous communication par excellence, such issues disclose the interrelationship between African and European fashions. Inspiration and creativity, fueled by the allure of exoticism may become a global dialogue, which goes both ways.

Toni Morrison and the idea of Africa

1. Introduction: finding the elusive but identifiable blackness within the culture out of which Toni Morrison writes 2. Kongo's Yowa and Dahomey's Vodun: the survival of West African traditional cosmologies in African America 3. Bandoki: witches, ambivalent power, and the fusion of good and evil 4. Kanda: living elders, the ancestral presence, and the ancestor as foundation 5. Banganga: the specialists-medicine (wo)men and priest(esse)s 6. Identifiable blackness: Toni Morrison's literary canon at the Western crossroads Works cited Index.

African Americans, American Africans, and the Idea of an African Homeland

The American image of Africa is at best vague, under-formed, simplified, and more often than not patronizing. White Americans in particular have perpetuated the mythology of Africa as the Dark Continent, a place apart where wildness and chaos and danger lurk. Africa has allowed the racist American mindset to conjure its wildest images and to depict its deepest fantasies of repulsion and fascination. The African American image of Africa has historically been no less warped but has been characterized by romanticism, fetishism, and nostalgia. Black Americans have often perpetuated an uncomplicated view of Africa as a vestigial homeland awaiting the of its lost souls. While this view has tended to be more charitable toward Africa than the more generalized American view, it is not necessarily less problematic. The two books under review address not only African American views of Africa, but also the physical act of black Americans traveling to the continent, often in hopes of seeing their romantic image up close, usually in conjunction with an attempt to escape the racial problems of the United States. Thus the African American quest to return to Africa has, over the course of more than two centuries, represented not only an escape to an Africa of their imagining, but also an escape from the very real racial problems in the United States. The idea of Africa thus came to embody hopes and dreams and opportunity that America had failed in fulfilling. If, then, for most white Americans Africa represented an exotic and savage other, for black Americans Africa represented an idealized other and increasingly for many the real land of opportunity.

Women’s Rights Get a Dressing Down: Mini Skirt Attacks in South Africa

(The Star 2008: 2). She was the fourth woman to be assaulted in this way at the rank on that evening. Three other women were stripped and sexually assaulted at the same taxi rank on the previous day. In each of these cases the fact that the women were wearing mini skirts was cited as the reason for the attack. Sexual harassment of women in mini skirts at Johannesburg taxi ranks has a long history. Police records suggest that the practice has been documented for the last eight to ten years and first-hand accounts suggest a much longer history to sexual harassment of women in South Africa's taxis. But Ngcukana was the first victim to report such an incident to police. Ngcukana's public account of her attack was followed by an outpouring of stories from other South African women about their experiences of having been groped and humiliated by men at taxi ranks and in crowded taxis. Controversy over the clothing choices of African women is not new. In the immediate postcolonial period African leaders across the continent took a personal interest in what women wore and berated them for 'unsuitable' choices. From the late 1960s news reports record widespread incidents of women being 'jeered at, physically assaulted and striped of their clothes in public by youth wingers and college students' (Wipper, 1972: 330). These attacks were not confined to a single country but occurred in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia among others. The justificatory narratives that were invoked had several threads. In some cases the targets of mob violence were the more obviously racialised ones of wigs, hair straightening and skin lighteners which were seen as an indication of blackness being denigrated and regarded as inferior and ugly. But a second thread targeted fashionable clothing in general – bell bottoms, tight pants, jeans and mini skirts were all regarded as 'unAfrican' and those who wore these items branded as having had their minds occupied by western cultural imperialism at precisely the moment when African nations were seeking to throw off the colonial yoke. African leaders like Julius Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta saw themselves literally as 'fathers' to the nation – indeed they were dubbed the founding fathers of their respective countries. Consciously engaged in a project of nation-building, often involving the unification of different classes and ethnic groups in the service of pressing national developmental needs, these leaders took a personal interest in all aspects of national life which was styled as an extension of family life. As is typical of such projects, nationalist leaders both drew on a local repository of imagery (African culture, heritage, tradition) and sought to present their new nations as able to advance, flourish and succeed on a world stage. The balance was a delicate one between mining Africanness for legitimacy and popular approval while at the same time combating the idea of Africa as a dark and backward place. Mini skirts in particular became, for many African leaders, emblematic of both the

The Usages of the past: African historiographies since independence

“I did history at school, but that wasevents, not the realthingsin Mantsoba's prophesies”.[David Coplan 2002]During the recent past poststructuralist and postmodernist era it has become fashionable to think of continents, communities, identities, belonging, tradition, heritage and home as imagined, invented or created entities. The idea of Africa has been tantalising to the West ever since Aristotle in hisHistoria Animaliumreported to the effect that ‘a certain proverb[paroimia]is current that Libya always produces something new -aei Libye pherei ti kaino.’

Postcolonial archives V.Y. Mudimbe's The Rift

This essay presents an analysis of V. Y. Mudimbe's novel, The Rift (1979/1993). I read this novel as an engagement with both the colonial archives of discourse about Africa, and also as an engagement with psychoanalytic attempts to create an archive of a discourse about identity and sexuality. I argue that desire and sexuality are often silenced topics in the critical responses to this novel, and that they should be made central to a reading of this diaristic text. This essay shows how The Rift problematises both psychoanalysis and ethnography as sciences of self and culture which must necessarily be seen as infinitely open to interpretation. To comprehend the archaeological organisation of this very idea of Africa and its resonances, it seems to me, it is impossible not to consider Western literature and, particularly, its culmination in the ‘colonial library’ (V.Y. Mudimbe, 1994, p. 213) The visionary experience arises from the black and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens with a flight of forgotten words; fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed library, with its columns of books, with its titles aligned on shelves to form a tight enclosure, but within confines that also liberate impossible worlds. (M. Foucault, 1977, p. 90)

The Postwar Conservation Boom in British Colonial Africa

As World War II came to a close, there was neither any national park legislation nor any national department in British East and Central Africa (comprising Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland). Not all of colonial territories in region even had a game department. The existing departments were minute in relation to size of their territories and none possessed any sort of research agenda or scientifically trained staff member. Fifteen years later, situation had shifted 18o degrees. Colonial development funds poured into improvement of new national across region, airplanes crisscrossed skies overhead to count wildlife herds, and scores of biologists and ecologists moved over landscape to analyze habits and histories of parks faunal residents. The shift represented a veritable conservation boom and dozens of new appeared as bright green patches on previously monochrome maps. What had happened in immediate postwar years to change status of national and wildlife conservation so dramatically? Some historians have traced origins of twentieth-century wildlife conservation to psychological and emotional importance of African environment for European colonizers. Accordingly roots of British colonial national park and wildlife laws have been traced to culturally constructed ideas of nature in Africa. Historians have offered concepts such as the Eden complex or the cult of Hunt' to explain European, particularly British, fascination with African wildlife and anxieties over its disappearance. The core of their argument is that idea of Africa as symbolic Eden has stimulated western interests in African conservation through colonial period and into present. Without dismissing their importance in shaping British attitudes toward nature in Africa, elite European cultural values do not fully explain explosion in conservation initiatives in final years of colonialism. There had been many proposals for national in first half of century and an international wildlife treaty as early as 1900, but territorial governments in Africa largely ignored these until 1940s.

The Problem with English Literature: Canonicity, Citizenship, and the Idea of Africa

The Problem with English Literature: Canonicity, Citizenship, and the Idea of Africa

African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures by Kadiatu Kanneh (review)

TES,3I, 200o TES,3I, 200o 331 331 see it as this, as illustratedwhere Yelin characterizes the conclusion of TheGolden Notebook in terms of Anna Wulf's final representation as 'a citizen of the welfare state, a middle-class, heterosexual female Britishsubject'(p. 87). However, Yelin's work really comes into its own in the discussion of Nadine Gordimer, and it concludes with three fine discussions of Burger's Daughter, A SportofNature,and My Son'sStory.These chapters are richly informed and offer a much more complex account of the relationshipbetween issuesof gender, national identity, and political affiliation. This book offersa thoughtful contribution to the criticalliteratureon Gordimer and Lessing,but unfortunatelyfails to do the samejustice to the work of Christina Stead. UNIVERSITY OF KENT STEPHEN COWDEN AfricanIdentities.Race,Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures. By KADIATUKANNEH. London and New York: Routledge. I998. xii + 204pp. ?13.99. Kadiatu Kanneh's book is a testamentto the powerfulway in which culturalstudies can illuminate the practice of 'close reading' in literary scholarship. With African Identities Kanneh has given students of African and African-Americanliteraturesa useful tool to navigate successfully the difficult terrain of reading not only the literature of Africa and its Diaspora but also 'the meanings of African identities' (p. I). Kanneh's study begins with an examination of the ethnographic and cultural production of knowledge vis-a-visAfrica. The 'idea of Africa', he asserts, is constituted in ethnographic cliches: 'the mystery, the violence, the impenetrability of the African forest and African native' (p. 3). And these cliches, however much they are recognized as cliches, conceal African 'modernity' behind a colonial rhetoricof an unchanging Africa.What Kanneh setsout to do is to bring into relief the visibility of African modernity. Through careful and close attention to a wide variety of recent writings by writers of Africa and its Diaspora, Kanneh offers a panoramic view of the politics of resistance and redefinition of meaning(s)within the contoursof the modern notion of race. What distinguishesAfrican Identities is the judicious balance between its efforts to locate African and its diasporic literature within the frameworkof culturalcriticismand its aim to offerfresh readingsof the literaryworksunder scrutiny.The resultof these readingsis reiterationof the need to explore the role of authenticity, history, space, and time in the imaginative relations between Africa and its 'Other': whether that 'Other' is the continent's European colonizers or its diasporic children. For example, in a chapter dealing with African-Americanwritersincluding Toni Morrison,Alice Walker,and Ralph Ellison, Kanneh explores the complicated issue of 'racial memory and mourning' (p. 109)as it shapesthe narrativesof these novelists. Kanneh's reading of Alice Walker'sPossessing theSecret ofJoy adroitlyilluminates 'the conceptual problematics involved in African-American identifications with Africa, and in particular, as an interrogation of the political difficultiesof black feminist organisation across boundaries of nation and continent' (p. Io). Walker's use of 'racialmemory and mourning' in figurativelyrepresentingAfricanwomen's subjectivity 'does not take account of the dividing and transforming effects of diasporicmovement on a people, the new allegiancesthatareformedand cherished, alongsidethe old and priorloyaltiesthat remainto be dreamed'(p. I 6). With each of the authors he treats, Kanneh offers a cogent reminder that the meaning of see it as this, as illustratedwhere Yelin characterizes the conclusion of TheGolden Notebook in terms of Anna Wulf's final representation as 'a citizen of the welfare state, a middle-class, heterosexual female Britishsubject'(p. 87). However, Yelin's work really comes into its own in the discussion of Nadine Gordimer, and it concludes with three fine discussions of Burger's Daughter, A SportofNature,and My Son'sStory.These chapters are richly informed and offer a much more complex account of the relationshipbetween issuesof gender, national identity, and political affiliation. This book offersa thoughtful contribution to the criticalliteratureon Gordimer and Lessing,but unfortunatelyfails to do the samejustice to the work of Christina Stead. UNIVERSITY OF KENT STEPHEN COWDEN AfricanIdentities.Race,Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures. By KADIATUKANNEH. London and New York: Routledge. I998. xii + 204pp. ?13.99. Kadiatu Kanneh's book is a testamentto the powerfulway in which culturalstudies can illuminate the practice of 'close reading' in literary scholarship. With African Identities Kanneh...

The Problem with English Literature: Canonicity, Citizenship, and the Idea of Africa

The Problem with English Literature: Canonicity, Citizenship, and the Idea of Africa

The Postcolony as Trope: Searching for a Lost Continent in a Borderless World

If the hubris of postcolonial studies derives from the inflation of a local condition into a cosmic paradigm, the very idea of Africa as a massive, monolithic postcolony must be one of the comforting illusions of con? temporary theories of African cultural, economic, and political production. Achille Mbembe has stressed the need to recognize the multiplicities of identities in the postcolony (5). Yet in his own epistemology, this pluralization of identities remains at the level of a particularly geocolonial space, with the Cameroonian experience providing the background and details for the postcolony. It is indeed a very sobering historic irony that very close to the southeastern border of modern Cameroon, the imposition of three different types of colonial rationalizations on the people of the old cultur? ally contiguous Kongo kingdom would have altered the postcolonial reali? ties of modern day Angola, Congo Brazzaville, and the former Zaire. Yet as a trope, the postcolony is profoundly illustrative of the African condition in the epoch after the cessation of actual colonization. Wliether the post in postcolonial is taken to mean after, because of, and inclusive of, or as a prefix of opposition and resistance to the colonial, the con? clusion is inescapable that it suffers from a diminution or attenuation ofthe real thing (see Hutcheon).Thus, whether it is a protocolony or a paracolony, the postcolony wears the marker of inferiorization orjuniorization in bold, troubling relief. It has the disadvantages of the colony without its advantages. At least in the colony, the colonizing metropole takes some responsibility; whereas under the guise of independence the postcolony is formally on its own. The postcolony, then, is a Kafkaesque penal colony where inhabitants perfect the masochistic pastime described by a celebrated Nigerian musical gadfly as shuffering and shmiling. But if the notion ofthe postcolony is a tormenting if illusive reality, the quest for a lost continent in a world often described as borderless, a global space where everything is ground into conformity by the homogenizing leviathan of globalization, is at best quixotic and at worst a Sisyphean venture. (see Jameson and Miyoshi) Yet despite the onslaught of globaliza? tion, despite the relendess attempt to subsume the entire world within the capitalist logic of development, the invention, re-invention and de-invention of Africa with all their cultural, intellectual, and ideological accretions have continued apace. Indeed, in sharp contradistinction to Bhabha's controversial postmodernist and post-nation notion of the and his? torical hybridity of the postcolonial world [. . .] as the paradigmatic place of departure (21), others have insisted that the nation-state remains the most vibrant site for contemporary cultural and political contestations (see Chabal; Ahmad).

The dark side of the moon: Postcolonial reflections on writing Africa

Moore, Sally Falk. Anthropology and Africa: Changing Perspectives on a Changing Scene. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994. vii + 165pp. including references cited and author index. $29.50 cloth, $9.95 paper. Vansina, Jan. Living with Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. xv + 312pp. including notes and index. $40.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, London: James Currey, 1994. xvii + 234pp. including bibliography and index. $29.95 cloth, $11.95 paper.

The “idea of Africa” and the business of blackness: South Africa's transatlantic connections*

Summary This article explores some of the ideological assumptions at work behind African‐Americans’ imaged and imagined presence in postapartheid South Africa. The enduring ideological and material connections between black South Africans and African‐Americans are part of a long history of interaction. That history is clearly represented in ongoing African‐American reclamations of cultural connectedness with Africa, in which various sites on the continent act as a potential source for African‐American cultural salvation. In the wake of South Africa's nominal triumph over apartheid, African‐American involvement has shifted away from activist political involvement toward corporate presence, and South Africa is viewed as a site for African‐American economic salvation through the provision of new markets for the consumption of American goods. This shift suggests an increasing disjuncture between the interests of African‐American corporate elites and the ongoing political struggles of the majority of blacks within and beyond South Africa.

L'Afrique réinventée ou la construction de la tradition dans les cultes afro-brésiliens

Afro-American cults are characterised these days by a movement towards re-Africanisation, which seeks its legitimacy in mythical Africa. But this idea of Africa is the object of a continuous reinterpretation. Ethnologists which studied these cults, in particular the Afro-Brazilian ones, played a central role in the invention of a tradition which seems to have become the main pivot in these religious phenomena today. Membership in these cults by most of the researchers makes the mechanisms for the construction of a dominant model of tradition even more complex.

The Idea of Africa

The Idea of Africa

The Idea of Africa.

The Idea of Africa.

THE POWER OF CULTURE: A Review of the Idea of Africa's Influence on Family Structure in Antebellum America

American Indian, African, and European culture distinguish American histo ry from 1619 to 1870. Yet, African and American Indian cultures are given secondary importance in understanding the American population. This paper argues that culture is critical for a proper understanding of African American family patterns. The African Ameri can family is not simply a functional adaptation to new social conditions, but a product of history and culture that has been conducive to the survival of the African American family. The effect of racism and economic exploitation on the African population in America during slavery was tempered by its African past.

Which Idea of Africa? Herskovits's Cultural Relativism

Knowledge about Africa is now ordering itself in accordance with a new model. Despite the resiliency of primitivist and evolutionist myths, a new discourse, more exactly, a new type of relation to the African object is taking place. Anthropology, the most compromised of disciplines in the exploitation of Africa, began to rejuvenate itself first through functionalism (during the colonial period) and then, toward the end of the colonial era, in France, through structuralism. In so doing, anthropology, at least theoretically, revised its connection with its own object of study. In any case, in the mid-1950s it merged with other disciplines (economics, geography, history, literature, etc.) to constitute a new but rather vague body of knowledge about Africa or Africanism. Bound together in the same epistemological space but radically divided in their aims and methods, these disciplines were caught between very concrete demands for the political liberation of Africa and the institutional demands to define their own scientificity, their own philosophical foundation. The figure of the African was taken both as an empirical fact and as the sign of absolute otherness. Michel Foucault remarks this point quite well in the following passage from The Order of Things: