Abstract
Abstract : The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver, 1998), Amaryllis in Blueberry (Christina Meldrum, 2011), The Garden of Burning Sand (Corban Addison, 2013) and The Constant Gardener (dir. Fernando Mereilles, 2005) can be characterised as critical of the West’s political and humanitarian interventions in Africa. They are also, however, instances of that pervasive but much-maligned genre of literature and film: texts ostensibly about Africa but written by Westerners and reflective of Western lives and norms. Recognising the problems of representations of Africa and Africans, this study, nevertheless, also attempts to take the sincerity of these texts seriously. Though three of the texts offer criticisms of colonialism, imperialism and neo-imperialism, such criticisms are not their true impetus. In fact, the absence of such criticisms in Addison’s novel throws into relief the fact that the central concern in all four texts is the division between Africa and the West in so far as it represents human disunity. In other words, a crisis of human community underpins each of these texts. Their solution to this disunity is deceptively simple: human unity based on and legitimised by an essential human sameness. Africa plays a special role in making what is a grey, abstract universalist humanism expressible: it provides ‘colour’ and ‘texture’ but also, as the origin of the species, it provides a singular, stable origin which, in turn, offers the transcendence of difference. The threat that Africa’s contradictory position—provider of difference, guarantor of human sameness—poses to these texts’ projections of a universally inclusive human community are sublimated by their idealisation of Africa. The crucial difference that Africa provides is that of a heightened and essential humanity, not a denigrated one. I argue that these texts’ idealisations of Africa betray an ontological anxiety within Western subjecthood, that there is a crisis of humanism rather than only a tiresome reiteration of problematic tropes. By taking the sincerity of these texts seriously, therefore, I attempt to move beyond the Us/Them paradigm that has dominated literary analyses of texts about Africa but written by Westerners, without ignoring or dismissing the representational inequities that persist.
Ph.D. (English)