The Dark Continent?: Images of Africa in European Narratives about the Congo

by Frits Andersen

Overview

Africa: a forgotten continent that evades all attempts at control and transcends reason. Or does it? This book describes Europe's image of Africa and relates how the conception of the Dark Continent has been fabricated in European culture—with the Congo as an analytical focal point. It also demonstrates that the myth was more than a creation of colonial propaganda; the Congo reform movement—the first international human rights movement—spread horror stories that still have repercussions today. The book cross-examines a number of witness testimonies, reports and novels, from Stanley's travelogues and Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Herge's Tintin and Burroughs' Tarzan, as well as recent Danish and international Congo literature. The Dark Continent? proposes that the West's attitudes to Africa regarding free trade, emergency aid and intervention are founded on the literary historical assumptions of stories and narrative forms that have evolved since 1870.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788771248531
Publisher:	Aarhus University Press
Publication date:	12/31/2015
Pages:	692
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.80(h) x 2.30(d)

Table of Contents

I The Congo in Prose - Introduction 25

1 Life and Works: Reading Stanley 25

2 Traveller on Global Terms 39

Bula Matari, Breaker of Rocks 40

Mr Stanley, I Presume?: New Journalism 49

World Literature 62

3 Prose: A Framework and Reading Perspective 71

Prosaic Model Examples 76

Travel Literature 86

Wonder 98

4 Literary Topography OF the Congo 109

The River, "That Swallows All Rivers" 110

The Discovery 121

5 Anthropoetic Narrative and Method 133

II H.M. Stanley - Magic and Market 143

1 Moving Perspective: Through the Dark Continent (1878) 147

"Monarch-of-all J-survey" 150

Elastic Composition 153

Rhetoric and Violence 156

Stanley's Real and Invented Discoveries 161

Shibboleth 168

"An African Museum" 175

Stanley's "singular fascination with white paper" 184

2 Conflicting Testimonies: In Darkest Africa (1890) 190

A Province in the Back of Beyond 192

Dubious Motives 195

The March 199

Mt. Stanley 208

"Mystery" and "Misery" 213

Testimonies under Pressure 218

Realism and Loyalty: Mounteney Jephson 225

Sentimental Aesthete, Cannibalistic Voyeur: James Jameson 233

Double Perspective 247

The Forest 254

The Marketplace 267

Aftermath 278

3 The Space of Prose: Magic and Pragmatism 285

The Book as Fetish: Stanley's Magic 288

Open and Closed Spaces: Stanley's Oblivion 317

III Red Rubber - Tales of Terror 329

1 Heart of Darkness in Travel Literature 337

Modernist Form and Embodied Experience 342

Heart of Darkness as Adventure Fiction 347

Heart of Darkness as Gothic Romance 350

"The Congo Diary" and "The Up-river Book" 354

2 Atrocity Accounts 371

The Congo Reform Association: Morel, Casement, Twain 379

The Reform Association's Construction of Conrad as Eyewitness 393

3 "The Espionage System": Red Rubber in Prose 399

"The Transfer" 403

"An Outpost of Progress" 406

The Danish Congo Novels of Jürgen Jürgensen 407

Two Danish Travellers to the Congo 419

Transnational Colonial Criticism in Mirbeau's "'Red Caoutchouc" 426

The Album and World Art 433

"Red Caoutchouc" 437

4 The Field: Red Rubber and Heart of Darkness between Nationalism and World Literature 444

IV The Twentieth Century 453

1 The Congo in Travel Literature: History and Oblivion 457

The Whip and the Pointer 462

Indignation and Pathos: Feminisation and Non-disclosure 478

Reports: The Collapse of the Travel Account 484

Tragic Tourism and Gothic Science 497

The Congo in Oblivion 508

2 The Congo in Novels: Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul and Urs Widmer 523

Graham Greene, A Burnt-out Case 523

V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River 532

Urs Widmer, Im Kongo 542

3 The Congo in Popular Literature: Bizarre Truths in Bizarre Stories 553

Apes 555

Leopard Men, Tintin, Tarzan and Trader Horn 560

Tintin au Congo 564

Tarzan and the Leopard Men 573

Trader Horn 583

4 The Congo, I Presume; Anthropoetic Narrative 588

V The Congo in Prose 599

1 Congo Literature: A Cross-sectional View 610

2 Place 618

3 Testimony 624

4 Atrocity Accounts and Human Rights 629

5 Oblivion and Historical Narrative 637

6 World Literature and Globalisation 641

Notes 653

Bibliography 669

Index 684

Rights 689