Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization
by Ruth Mayer
Dartmouth College Press, 2002 Paper: 978-1-58465-192-5 Library of Congress Classification E169.Z83M3694 2002 Dewey Decimal Classification 960
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
“Africa is an artificial entity,” notes Ruth Mayer, “invented and conceived by colonialism.” In this wide-ranging study, Mayer explores the ways in which Western, and especially American, popular culture has manufactured and deployed various images of “Africa,” and how those changing constructions have reflected Western social and political concerns from the era of colonialism to the age of globalization. Mayer mines an enormous array of sources to expose the diverse images and narrative strategies that have been prominent in Western representations of Africa. She ranges authoritatively from King Solomon’s Mines and Tarzan to Khartoum and Greystoke, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Nicholas Roeg’s film version, from Isak Dinesen and Ernest Hemingway to Ishmael Reed and Charles Johnson, from comic books to hip hop acts. In the process, she shows how seemingly stable cultural stereotypes have actually been transformed to reflect changing attitudes, conditions, and fears in the West, “adjusting the symbolic repertory of yesterday to the conceptual and ideological frameworks of today.” Dividing her work into “African Adventures” and “Alternative Africas,” Mayer not only restores an international context to American cultural history, but also shows the ways in which these images have functioned within both white and African American communities. With a deft command of both cultural source materials and current debates, Mayer explores the complex and powerful roles these “artificial Africas” have played in Western culture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
RUTH MAYER is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hanover, Germany. She has published numerous articles in both English and German on the subjects of race, colonialism, and popular culture.
REVIEWS
“Ruth Mayer’s erudite and insightful exploration of American culture’s imaginings about Africa makes an important contribution to transnational cultural criticism. Although the continent and its concerns are often marginalized in discussions about public policy, Mayer shows that Africa looms large in the American imaginary. From fiction to fashion, from film to futurism, American culture turns to Africa for images and ideals of romantic colonialism, natural innocence, dangerous primitivism, and postmodern despair. Mayer’s achievement requires us to rethink the role of stereotypes in our collective cultural life, to ask how and why a relatively small number of images have come to take on such generative power.”—George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction I
Part I: AFRICAN ADVENTURES
1. Special Effects: Encounters in Africa 25
1.1 Manipulating the Savage Space: Trick Translation / 27
1.2 Technologies of Culture: H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's
Mines / 30
1.3 From Kukuanaland to Disneyland: Imperial Action Adventures / 34
1.4 Fake Communication: An Alphabetical Africa / 40
2. Monkey Business: Of Ape-Men and Man-Apes 48
2.1 Tarzan and Tautology: Work Your Body, Work Your Mind / 51
2.2 "A Mimic of Uncanny Ability": Greystoke / 57
2.3 Africa without Africans: Tarzan Goes Disney / 62
2.4 Understanding Is Everything: Michael Crichton's Congo / 68
3. Being Game: The White Hunter and the Crisis of Masculinity 76
3.1 Taking It All In: Hemingway's Hunt / 79
3.2 White Hunter, Black Heart, or, Elephantasias / 84
3.3 Display Cases: Peter Beard and Renee Green Exhibit Africa / 90
3.4 Big Games: Indiana Jones, Jr., T. C. Boyle, and the
Virtual Safari / ioi
3.5 The Wild East of Africa: The Ghost and the Darkness / io6
3.6 Dream On! Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares / 112
4. Colonial Ladies, Global Girls izi
4.1 Goddess in Khaki: Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa / Iz4
4.2 Dress to Excess: The Colonial Lady and Pollack's Out of Africa / 130
4.3 Gender Blenders, or, the Bluest Eyes / 136
4.4 Model Cases: Colonial Fashion, Global Chic / 144
4.5 Another Mimic of Uncanny Ability: The Gorilla Girl / 148
4.6 Cosmopolitan Cool: Francesca Marciano's Rules of the Wild 153
Part II: ALTERNATIVE AFRICAS
5. Free Trade? Postcolonial Empires, Global Corporations I63
5.1 Subtle Bonds and Unforeseen Partnerships: Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness / 66
5.2 Uneven Exchanges: Nicolas Roeg's Heart of Darkness I 173
5.3 Looking Closely: Afropessimism and Global Fictions / 180
5.4 It's Magic! Globalization Totalized / I89
5.5 Swallow It All: Explorers and Cannibals / I95
6. In Between and Nowhere at All: The Middle Passage Revisited 07
6.1 "Spectacles of Disorder": Herman Melville's Benito Cereno / zio
6.2 True Translation: Steven Spielberg's Amistad / 215
6.3 "Truth Is What Works": Charles Johnson's Middle Passage I 22zz
6.4 Flying Africans: Rewriting the Middle Passage / 230
6.5 Waterworlds and Alien African Futures: Pop Passages / 239
7. Don't Touch! Africa Is a Virus 256
7.1 On the Air: Outbreak / 260
7.2 Infectious Whiteness: Vampirism and the Demise of the
Superhero / z65
7.3 The Voodoo-Virus: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo / 272
7.4 Elvis Zombies and Hip-Hop Hoodoo: Darius James's
Negrophobia I 279
7.5 The Massive Global Telecommunication: Hip-Hop Virology / z85
Roots and Role-Play: A Conclusion 292
Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization
by Ruth Mayer
Dartmouth College Press, 2002 Paper: 978-1-58465-192-5
“Africa is an artificial entity,” notes Ruth Mayer, “invented and conceived by colonialism.” In this wide-ranging study, Mayer explores the ways in which Western, and especially American, popular culture has manufactured and deployed various images of “Africa,” and how those changing constructions have reflected Western social and political concerns from the era of colonialism to the age of globalization. Mayer mines an enormous array of sources to expose the diverse images and narrative strategies that have been prominent in Western representations of Africa. She ranges authoritatively from King Solomon’s Mines and Tarzan to Khartoum and Greystoke, from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Nicholas Roeg’s film version, from Isak Dinesen and Ernest Hemingway to Ishmael Reed and Charles Johnson, from comic books to hip hop acts. In the process, she shows how seemingly stable cultural stereotypes have actually been transformed to reflect changing attitudes, conditions, and fears in the West, “adjusting the symbolic repertory of yesterday to the conceptual and ideological frameworks of today.” Dividing her work into “African Adventures” and “Alternative Africas,” Mayer not only restores an international context to American cultural history, but also shows the ways in which these images have functioned within both white and African American communities. With a deft command of both cultural source materials and current debates, Mayer explores the complex and powerful roles these “artificial Africas” have played in Western culture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
RUTH MAYER is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hanover, Germany. She has published numerous articles in both English and German on the subjects of race, colonialism, and popular culture.
REVIEWS
“Ruth Mayer’s erudite and insightful exploration of American culture’s imaginings about Africa makes an important contribution to transnational cultural criticism. Although the continent and its concerns are often marginalized in discussions about public policy, Mayer shows that Africa looms large in the American imaginary. From fiction to fashion, from film to futurism, American culture turns to Africa for images and ideals of romantic colonialism, natural innocence, dangerous primitivism, and postmodern despair. Mayer’s achievement requires us to rethink the role of stereotypes in our collective cultural life, to ask how and why a relatively small number of images have come to take on such generative power.”—George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction I
Part I: AFRICAN ADVENTURES
1. Special Effects: Encounters in Africa 25
1.1 Manipulating the Savage Space: Trick Translation / 27
1.2 Technologies of Culture: H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's
Mines / 30
1.3 From Kukuanaland to Disneyland: Imperial Action Adventures / 34
1.4 Fake Communication: An Alphabetical Africa / 40
2. Monkey Business: Of Ape-Men and Man-Apes 48
2.1 Tarzan and Tautology: Work Your Body, Work Your Mind / 51
2.2 "A Mimic of Uncanny Ability": Greystoke / 57
2.3 Africa without Africans: Tarzan Goes Disney / 62
2.4 Understanding Is Everything: Michael Crichton's Congo / 68
3. Being Game: The White Hunter and the Crisis of Masculinity 76
3.1 Taking It All In: Hemingway's Hunt / 79
3.2 White Hunter, Black Heart, or, Elephantasias / 84
3.3 Display Cases: Peter Beard and Renee Green Exhibit Africa / 90
3.4 Big Games: Indiana Jones, Jr., T. C. Boyle, and the
Virtual Safari / ioi
3.5 The Wild East of Africa: The Ghost and the Darkness / io6
3.6 Dream On! Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares / 112
4. Colonial Ladies, Global Girls izi
4.1 Goddess in Khaki: Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa / Iz4
4.2 Dress to Excess: The Colonial Lady and Pollack's Out of Africa / 130
4.3 Gender Blenders, or, the Bluest Eyes / 136
4.4 Model Cases: Colonial Fashion, Global Chic / 144
4.5 Another Mimic of Uncanny Ability: The Gorilla Girl / 148
4.6 Cosmopolitan Cool: Francesca Marciano's Rules of the Wild 153
Part II: ALTERNATIVE AFRICAS
5. Free Trade? Postcolonial Empires, Global Corporations I63
5.1 Subtle Bonds and Unforeseen Partnerships: Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness / 66
5.2 Uneven Exchanges: Nicolas Roeg's Heart of Darkness I 173
5.3 Looking Closely: Afropessimism and Global Fictions / 180
5.4 It's Magic! Globalization Totalized / I89
5.5 Swallow It All: Explorers and Cannibals / I95
6. In Between and Nowhere at All: The Middle Passage Revisited 07
6.1 "Spectacles of Disorder": Herman Melville's Benito Cereno / zio
6.2 True Translation: Steven Spielberg's Amistad / 215
6.3 "Truth Is What Works": Charles Johnson's Middle Passage I 22zz
6.4 Flying Africans: Rewriting the Middle Passage / 230
6.5 Waterworlds and Alien African Futures: Pop Passages / 239
7. Don't Touch! Africa Is a Virus 256
7.1 On the Air: Outbreak / 260
7.2 Infectious Whiteness: Vampirism and the Demise of the
Superhero / z65
7.3 The Voodoo-Virus: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo / 272
7.4 Elvis Zombies and Hip-Hop Hoodoo: Darius James's
Negrophobia I 279
7.5 The Massive Global Telecommunication: Hip-Hop Virology / z85
Roots and Role-Play: A Conclusion 292
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC