{"id":29,"date":"2005-08-26T20:42:09","date_gmt":"2005-08-27T01:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=29"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:42:19","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:42:19","slug":"viewing-africa-from-asia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2005\/08\/viewing-africa-from-asia\/","title":{"rendered":"Viewing Africa from Asia"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This is a comment on Tim Burke\u2019s syllabus on Images of Africa cross-posted from his blog<\/a>. I am putting it up here to see if anyone has any suggestions on images of Africa in East Asia)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure what literature there would be on Indian views of Africa, (Bend in the River<\/a> comes to mind) because they were never articulated as part of a larger imperial project. You need an imperial state for archives and to encourage people to think of what they are doing as \u201cchanging Africa.\u201d I\u2019m pretty sure there were a lot of Indians in East Africa, and that they had at least an economic impact.<\/p>\n

As for East Asia (the place I know best) there is some stuff that probably would not matter. Kenzaburo Oe\u2019s A Personal Matter<\/a> has a character who obsesses about Africa, but that is just using Africa as a conveniently blank Other. There is a lot of that. I can\u2019t see why it would matter much to African history. I assume you know Phillip Snow\u2019s The Star Raft<\/a>, which has some stuff on Chinese attitudes towards Africa in the context of development aid, where it would actually matter. I would have to think that some of the Africans who studied in China or Russia must have written memoirs or something by now.<\/p>\n

Another topic you might want to consider is the relationship between the imperial and popular and post \u201945 aid-organization discourses and the academic discourse you are asking them to join. Donald Lopez did a very interesting book called Prisoners of Shangri-la<\/a> on basically that topic but dealing with Tibet. I liked the book a lot because he traced the development of the popular discourse very well (Tibet has a much more unitary image than Africa) but also because he was pretty clear that this popular discourse and the academic one were closely related. Of course there is a lot of stuff on how modern Asian studies is connected to the imperial projects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This is a comment on Tim Burke\u2019s syllabus on Images of Africa cross-posted from his blog. I am putting it up here to see if anyone has any suggestions on images of Africa in East Asia) I\u2019m not sure what literature there would be on Indian views of Africa, (Bend in the River comes to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,114,126,132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-diaspora","category-general","category-identity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-t","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5141,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/5141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}