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African Impressions - How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment (Hardcover)
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African Impressions - How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment (Hardcover)
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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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