African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination Across the Early Enlightenment

Description: "In African Impressions in British Literature, Rebecca Mitsein considers the ways that African self-representation continued to drive European impressions of the continent across the early Enlightenment, fueling desires to find the sources of West Africa's gold and the city states along the Niger, to establish a relationship with the Christian Kingdom of Prester John, and to discover the source of the Nile. Through an analysis of a range of genres, including travel narratives, geography books, maps, verse, and fiction, Rebekah Mitsein shows how African strategies of self-representation and European strategies for representing Africa grew increasingly entangled as the ideas that Africans projected about themselves and their worlds migrated from contact zones to texts and back again. The geographical narratives that arose from this reiterative cycle, which unfolded over hundreds of years, were often highly imaginary and appropriated to expansionist ends but remained tethered to the African worlds and worldviews that shaped them"--

Review Quotes:

Mitsein's learned study of the long-term exchanges between Africans and Europeans about Africa is substantial and overturns worn-out theoretical assumptions. The focus on the transmission of geographical information and the tensions among eyewitness, hearsay, and textual information is a real breath of fresh air. Mitsein's analysis of the positive content of African self-expression is bound to be interesting to the field of eighteenth-century studies generally, especially for those who are interested in theories of Enlightenment knowledge and the empirical thrust of the new sciences; to literary studies especially in regard to the role of prose fiction about Africa; and to the subfield of global eighteenth-century studies. There is no other book in its entirety that does what this one does in the discipline of English literature.