Synopses & Reviews
Saying that the image of Africa in the West is negative states the obvious but explains nothing. This book contributes to the understanding about how the image has evolved in the encounters between Africa and Europe over time, focussing on the two basic European themes of romanticizing "the primitive" and looking down on "the backward."
Cross-cultural images have a much more complex relationship to reality than that implied in the common analogy with snapshots. This book shows the importance of historical setting and changes, the different power relationships, and the ideological heritage. The colonial images remain much longer than the colonial administration. Nor is there an ideology-free version where Africans construct images of Africans.
Contributions to this book have been produced within the research project "Cultural Images in and of Africa" conducted at the Nordic Africa Institute, and deal with history, music, missionary writing, development aid discourse, commercial handicraft, popular literature, and travel writing. This multi-dimentional approach has combined to produce a work that has contributed significantly to the explanation and understanding of encounter images in the meetings between Africa and Europe. Included are special interviews with two renowned scholars who have made an important impact on the debate, Terence Ranger and Valentin Y. Mudimbe, and the text of an address on Africa Images in European literature given by the Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera.