Narrating Africa: George Henty and the Fiction of Empire offers a critique of colonialist discourse and focuses on George Henty's novels as a prototype of the literature that emerged with the rise of British imperialism, in an attempt to assess the role of nineteenth-century literature both in the perpetuation of stereotypes vis--vis Africa and in the socialization of young adults. Its approach is postcolonial inasmuch as it breaks traditional disciplinary boundaries by analyzing and critiquing literature within historical, political, economic, and cultural contexts that enable the production, reception, and import of literary texts. Indeed today's cultural, economic, and political hegemony of Europe and the United States over Africa has a legacy deeply rooted in nineteenth-century ideologies of imperialism, colonialism, and race, as well as in repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Thus the image of Africa as the Dark continent, resulting from the activities of the Atlantic Slave Trade and early Victorian explorers and missionaries, won further popularity among Victorians from all walks of life through adventure stories which became one of the vehicles for the dissemination of imperialist ideologies and concept. Narrating Africa: George Henty and the Fiction of Empire unveils the legacy, endurance, and impact of colonial stereotyping with these factors in perspective.

The current environmental crises demand that we revisit dominant approaches for understanding nature-society relations. Narrating Nature brings together various ways of knowing nature from differently situated Maasai and conservation practitioners and scientists into lively debate. It speaks to the growing movement within the academy and beyond on decolonizing knowledge about and relationships with nature, and debates within the social sciences on how to work across epistemologies and ontologies. It also speaks to a growing need within conservation studies to find ways to manage nature with people. This book employs different storytelling practices, including a traditional Maasai oral meeting—the enkiguena—to decenter conventional scientific ways of communicating about, knowing, and managing nature. Author Mara J. Goldman draws on more than two decades of deep ethnographic and ecological engagements in the semi-arid rangelands of East Africa—in landscapes inhabited by pastoral and agropastoral Maasai people and heavily utilized by wildlife. These iconic landscapes have continuously been subjected to boundary drawing practices by outsiders, separating out places for people (villages) from places for nature (protected areas). Narrating Nature follows the resulting boundary crossings that regularly occur—of people, wildlife, and knowledge—to expose them not as transgressions but as opportunities to complicate the categories themselves and create ontological openings for knowing and being with nature otherwise. Narrating Nature opens up dialogue that counters traditional conservation narratives by providing space for local Maasai inhabitants to share their ways of knowing and being with nature. It moves beyond standard community conservation narratives that see local people as beneficiaries or contributors to conservation, to demonstrate how they are essential knowledgeable members of the conservation landscape itself.

Narrating Political Reconciliation advances a distinctive discourse analysis of South Africa's reconciliation process by enquiring into the politics of the following: writing national history, confessional, and testimonial styles of truth, and reconciliation as theology and therapy. Moon argues that the TRC was the catalyst for, and shaped the parameters of, what is now powerful 'reconciliation industry, ' and her insights provide a theoretical framework through which to think and problematise the politics of transitional justice in post-conflict and democratizing states more generally

The coastal belts and hinterlands of East Africa and South Asia have historically shared a number of cultural traits, commodities and cosmologies circulated on the wings of the monsoon winds. The forced and voluntary migrations of Asians and Africans across the Indian Ocean littoral over several centuries have reverberated in the memories, literatures, travelogues and religious, architectural, and socio-political imaginations of both the regions. And, they continue to do so in various forms and platforms. This book explores nuances of various narratives on these long-term transcultural exchanges with a special focus on India. It explores the ways in which Africa and Africans have been narrated in South Asian history and culture in order to unravel the nuanced layers of reflexive, rhetorical, stereotypical, populist, racialist, racist and casteist frameworks that informed diverse narratives in vernacular texts, songs, films and newspaper reports. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary approaches of narratology, Afro-Asian studies, and Indian Ocean studies, the contributors enunciate how the African lives in South Asia have been selectively remembered or systematically forgotten. Through multi-sited ethnographies, multilingual archival researches and interdisciplinary frameworks, each chapter provides theoretical engagements on the basis of empirical research in such regions as Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Hyderabad and Mumbai as well as in Sri Lanka. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Narrating War and Peace in Africa interrogates conventional representations of Africa and African culture -- mainly in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -- with an emphasis on portrayals of conflict and peace. While Africa has experienced political and social turbulence throughout its history, more recent conflicts seem to reinforce the myth of barbarism across the continent: in Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique, Chad, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Sudan. The essays in this volume address reductive and stereotypical assumptions of postcolonial violence as "tribal" in nature, and offer instead various perspectives -- across disciplinary boundaries -- that foster a less fetishized, more contextualized understanding of African war, peace, and memory. Through their geographical, historical, and cultural scope and diversity, the chapters in Narrating War and Peace in Africa aim to challenge negative stereotypes that abound in relation to Africa in general and to its wars and conflicts in particular, encouraging a shift to more balanced and nuanced representations of the continent and its political and social climates. Contributors: Ann Albuyeh, Zermarie Deacon, Alicia C. Decker, Aména Moïnfar, Kayode Omoniyi Ogunfolabi, Sabrina Parent, Susan Rasmussen, Michael Sharp, Cheryl Sterling, Hetty ter Haar, Melissa Tully, Pamela Wadende, Metasebia Woldemariam, Jonathan Zilberg. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Hetty ter Haar is an independent researcher in England.

The swelling flows of migration from Africa towards Europe have aroused interest not only in the socio-political consequences of the migrants' insistent appeals to 'fortress Europe' but also in the artistic integration of African migrants into the cultural world of Europe. While in recent years the creative output of Africans living in Europe has received attention from the media and in academia, little critical consideration has been given to African migrants' modes of narration and the manner in which these modes give expression to, or are an expression of, their creators' transcultural realities. Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe responds to this need for reflection by examining the manner in which migrants compose and negotiate their Euro-African affiliations in their narratives. The book brings together scholars in the fields of literary and art criticism, cultural studies, and anthropology for an extensive interdisciplinary exchange on the specific modes of narration displayed in Euro-African literatures, the visual arts, and cinema, as well as offering ethnographic case studies. The result is a wide range of reflections on how African artists, writers, and ordinary people living in Europe experience and explore their transcultural and/or postcolonial environments, and how their experiences and explorations in turn contribute to the construction of modern Euro-African life-worlds.

Narrating Human Rights in Africa claims human rights from the perspective of artists from the African continent and situates the key theoretical concepts in African perspectives, undercutting the stereotypes of victimhood and voicelessness. Instead of positioning literary texts as illustrative of points already theorized elsewhere, the author foregrounds the literature itself to show the concepts it offers, the ideas and responses stemming from complex historical circumstances in Africa and expressed by African writers. The book focuses on how narrative creates new categories of thought challenging human rights dogma, whereas the sum of the literary voices evoked also stands by the values of social justice and protection of human rights. The chapters take up key challenges to the narration of human rights in which the contribution of African writers is particularly important. This includes human dignity in the resistance to apartheid, the figure of the child soldier, how humanitarianism’s images affect representational strategies of contemporary African writers, the challenge of testifying about rape in war, how to evoke the disappeared body of the torture victim, the centrality of flight in the refugee and migrant experiences, and finally the long shadow of the "heart of darkness" motif. Offering a sustained examination of the narrative treatment of key human rights concerns as expressed by African writers, this book will be of interest to scholars of African literature, postcolonial studies, African studies, and human rights.