Representations of West Africa as Exotic in British Colonial Travel Writing

The book offers a detailed and analytic account of the representations of the exotic in West African travel writing at the time of the empire, and of the perceptive ripostes to those representations from West African themselves. The study develops a paradigm of the exotic based on the unequal interaction of cultures and observes how it borrowed from orientalist, Romantic, and European traditions of perception. With attention to the gradations of "difference", this work offers a distinction between wonder-directed-to-appropriation as against wonder-oriented-to-knowledge. Informed by a range of theorists and cultural critics, the book also examine texts by women travel writers and West African writers.