Remembering Africa

The meeting of Africa and the West had a lasting impact on both worlds. Since the first encounter, travelers, missionaries, tourists, writers, traders, and explorers have recorded their experiences of the African continent. Conversely, Africans have been transplanted to the West, bringing with them recollections of their homeland. This collection of essays is concerned less with the representation of Africa than with the memory of the continent, focusing on how Africa is remembered through life experiences and various textual expressions functioning as sites of memory. Insightful essays introduce the legacies of cultural contact, and voices often blurred by traditional divisions between the West and Africa - and between colonizer and colonized - are clarified through dialogue.

Remembering Africa differs from other works dealing with perceptions of Africa and African identity by establishing new connections among a broad range of topics such as zoology, museum exhibitions, historical methodology, colonial and literary texts, and personal recollections. This approach helps to identify the ways in which memories, or non-memories, of Africa are inscribed. These perspectives will be valuable to the general reader, and to those with a diversity of interests in African studies, literary studies, cultural studies, the social sciences, museum studies, and the performing arts.