Images of Africa in British Imperial Culture

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Images of Africain British Imperial Culture
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Africa as Otherness

• JONATHAN SWIFT (1733)
• So geographers in Afric maps
• With savage pictures fill the gaps
• And ouninhabitable downs
• Place elephants instead of towns

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Africa as

• Wilderness
• Strangeness
• Emptiness
• Darkness
• Savagery

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Explorations and Military Conquest

• XVI-XVII-XVIII cent. Slave Trade
• XVIII-XIX cent. Merchants, Missionaries
• 1850s- Explorations
• Scramble for Africa
• 1884 Berlin Conference
• Soldiers, Officers, Settlers

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BRITISH EMPIRE

• Historical Map 1897

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BRITISH EMPIRE

• About 1905

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Colonial Africa
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Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904)

• Through the Dark Continent (1878)
• Forests/rivers/lakes as Otherness
• Natives as Landscape
• White man ? Savage Nature
• Eccentricities of Creation

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Stanleys Journeys
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EMPIRE AND TEXTUALITYTropes of Representation

• MARY LOUISE PRATT
• IMPERIAL GAZE ? EYE/I
• MONARCH-OF-ALL-I-SURVEY
• Transculturation
• Contact zone(s)

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Empire and GenderWomen Travellers

• MARY KINGSLEY,
• Travels in West Africa, 1897
• As it is with the forest, so it is with the
  minds of the natives. Unless you live alone among
  them you never get to know them if you do this
  you gradually get a light into the true state of
  their mind-forest. At first you see nothing but
  when you get to see well! As in the other
  forest you see things worth seeing.

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IMPERIAL ROMANCE

• Adventure stories (HERO/ES)
• Search for treasure (QUEST)
• Land as an object of wonder and exploitation
• Attraction/desire and repulsion/disgust

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HENRY RIDER HAGGARD(1856-1925)

• KING SOLOMONS MINES (1885)
• ALLAN QUATERMAIN (1887)
• SHE (1887)

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The Spectacle of the Other

• ADVERTISING
• Bovril, Tea, Cocoa, Tobacco, Biscuits, Soap, etc.

• MUSEUMS
• EXHIBITIONS
• African Exhibition London, 1890
• (H.M. Stanley)

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Soap Advertising
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Cocoa Advertising
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(No Transcript)
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Un Impero per il popoloIndice

• LImpero britannico e le sue narrazioni
• Introduzione generale
• Un intrico di foreste, fiumi, laghi il fascino
  dellaltrove
• Introduzione ai testi
• Testi
• I. A Glimpse of Lake Nyassa, Blackwoods
  Edinburgh Magazine, January 1890
• II. Nyasaland and its Inhabitants, The
  Graphic, 11 October 1890
• III. Englishmen in Africa, The Contemporary
  Review, January 1891
• IV. Ten Days on an Oil-River, Blackwoods
  Edinburgh Magazine, March 1893
• V. Life and Death in the Niger Delta,
  Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, April 1898
• VI. The Tanganika Railway, The Fortnightly
  Review, January 1899
• VII. Shall I Go out to the Colonies? A Chat
  with the Agent-General for Natal, Young England,
  January 1899

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Un Impero per il popoloMain Issues

• Empire and British periodicals at the end of the
  XIX century
• AFRICAN GEOGRAPHY/IES
• NARRATIVE STRATEGIES
• Uses of the LANGUAGE
• STRANGENESS
• DOMESTICATION
• Personal and Collective Issues
• Political and Historical Interests

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Heart of Darkness by J. Conrad

• The Heart of Darkness published in Blackwoods
  Magazine in serial form (February, March, April
  1899)
• Heart of Darkness published in a separate
  volume (1902) with two other stories by Conrad