African impressions : how African worldviews shaped the British geographical imagination across the early Enlightenment

Author / Creator

Mitsein, Rebekah, 1983- author

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Summary

"In African Impressions in British Literature, Rebecca Mitsein considers the ways that African self-representation continued to drive European impressions of the continent across the early Enlighte...

"In African Impressions in British Literature, Rebecca 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, Rebekah Mitsein shows how African strategies of self-representation and European strategies for representing Africa grew increasingly entangled as the ideas that Africans projected about themselves and their worlds migrated from contact zones to texts and back again. The geographical narratives that arose from this reiterative cycle, which unfolded over hundreds of years, were often highly imaginary and appropriated to expansionist ends but remained tethered to the African worlds and worldviews that shaped them"--

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