White on Black

John Cullen Gruesser

"For white readers and writers, Africa was long the Dark Continent, land of Tarzan and of Kurtz. In White on Black, John Gruesser delineates shifts in the perception and portrayal of Africa over the past half-century." "By the beginning of the twentieth century, three traditions of writing about Africa had been firmly established: the political assessment, the expatriate, and the fantasy traditions. Non-black fiction and travel writing about the continent since World War II comprises three generations that descend directly from these traditions and a fourth category that deliberately avoids them. After World War II, writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Saul Bellow largely ignored the political changes occurring in the twilight of colonialism. These authors exhibited little deviation from the traditions that reached their acme as much as 60 years earlier in the works of...

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