Constructing the Dark Continent: Metaphor as Geographic Representation of Africa

Abstract

My purpose is to reveal the historical persistence and the ideological power of the metaphor of Africa as the Dark Continent. This metaphor identifies and incorporates an entire continent as Other in a way that reaffirms Western dominance and reveals hostile and racist valuations of Africa and Africans in travel accounts, news reports, and academic writing. I examine the separate, but overlapping. Western discourses of explorers, missionaries, and literary authors of nineteenth century Britain, mass media accounts of the 1950s and '60s which detail the construction of the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, and academic writing about AIDS in Africa. I argue that the metaphor of Africa as the Dark Continent continually (re)makes and represents the continent as Other. A place which is simultaneously incorporated and excluded as negative reflection of the West.

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