- Title
- “But darkness was here yesterday”: an examination of travel writing and colonial narrative constructions of Africa within its sub-genres across three centuries
- Creator
- Halgreen, Wesley John
- Subject
- Postcolonialism in literature
- Subject
- Modernism (Literature) -- Africa Literature and society -- Africa English literature African literature
- Date Issued
- 2018
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/22156
- Identifier
- vital:29864
- Description
- This study analyses the modern twenty-first century travel writing of Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari (2003) to reveal its sustained impetus towards colonial discursive constructions of Africa. In doing so, it will examine the continuation of colonial methods and techniques of literary representation in travel texts by illustrating the early ‘images’ of Africa and Africans as they appear in Henry M. Stanley’s non-fictional travel text Through the Dark Continent (1878) and Joseph Conrad’s fictional travel novella Heart of Darkness (1899). With the purpose of producing a critical literary analysis, this study will employ discourse analysis to interrogate the implications of the continued employment of colonial rhetoric and language by Theroux in his representations and portrayals of Africa and African citizens. It has been found that there is an unproblematised acceptance – even reverie – of colonial sentiment and nostalgia evident in representations of Africa in modern travel literature. Literary representations of this nature continue to portray Africa as the ‘savage’, ‘backward’, ‘violent’ and ‘inferior’ continent that it had signified to travel writers during the colonial epoch. Africans, as they are portrayed in this narrative tradition, are ascribed the same denotations where their subjectivities, individualities, cultures, beliefs, ideologies and personhood are encapsulated under the conceptualisation of ‘darkness’ that signifies ‘African’ as inferior to the West, Europe and North America, and therefore subject to derogation. By demonstrating the violent and damaging nature of these representations, as they remain in twenty-first century travel literature, this dissertation hopes to initiate a dialogue around the genre’s preservation of preconceptions and prejudices that continue to plague Africa and its people. This is possible through literary critique that exposes dated colonial racism and prejudice that appears in the travel literature of the post-independent age in which we now find ourselves.
- Format
- v, 141 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Arts
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela University
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