The Africa paradox: Locating Africa in eighteenth-century studies

Abstract

This article is about why Africa is overlooked in eighteenth-century literary studies. Africa’s neglect is not merely a problem of attention. Neither the parameters of the field nor the tools of the discipline appear particularly suited for engaging Africa as anything other than an invention of the European imagination. In what follows, I seek to bring more clarity to the origins of this paradox and to contextualize some of its governing assumptions not in order to solve it but to show that having already solved it can’t and doesn’t need to be a prerequisite for scholars of eighteenth-century literature to face it head-on. The first section offers a brief account of how this paradox arose from the political and intellectual matrix of the mid-twentieth century when African Studies was first institutionalized in the West. The subsequent sections highlight the way this history has shaped—both directly and indirectly—the way scholars and teachers of eighteenth-century literature have understood Africa and their obligations to it and suggests some ways we might begin to rethink Africa’s place in the field